Musicians Have Better Memory Than Everyone Else. Here’s Why.
Scientists are fascinated by how the brain processes music. How, for example, was Gord Downie able to eventually relearn the lyrics to 90 Tragically Hip songs for the band’s final tour even though he had a temporal lobe and his hippocampus surgically removed? Maybe it’s because musicians have better memory abilities than non-musicians. This is from Pacific Standard magazine:
It’s hard to overstate the importance of “working memory“—the ability to retain information even as you process it. For a new fact to have an impact, you need to be able to hold onto it as you consider how it confirms, contradicts, or modifies your previous beliefs.
If your ability to analyze situations and solve problems suggests your working memory is particularly sharp, you might want to thank your music teacher—or the parent who pushed you to learn an instrument.
A new meta-study concludes musicians tend to have stronger short-term and working-memory skills than their non-musical counterparts. The research, published in the online journal PLoS One, finds they also appear to have a small advantage in terms of long-term memory.
“Musicians perform better than non-musicians in memory tasks,” writes a research team led by University of Padua psychologist Francesca Talamini. The Italian scholars offer several possible explanations for this, but concede that “none of them seem able to explain all the results.”
