Ongoing History Daily: Train Your Brain by Learning a Musical Instrument

There are all kinds of products on the market that promise to make you smarter and your brain work better. But neuroscientists say the best thing anyone can do is to learn a musical instrument.

Why? First, it’s because we have a very strong emotional connection to music. That stimulates interesting areas of the brain. Second, playing a musical instrument is hard. It’s a very complex process involving the sense of sight, hearing, and touch—plus you need to learn to teach your body very fine and precise movements.

It’s all great exercise for the squishy bits between your ears. This is called “experience-dependent plasticity” and can be seen in actual physical changes in the brain.

For the record, keyboard players seem to acquire better visual and spatial abilities while violinists are amazing at processing touch.