Playing an Instrument

Playing a rhythm-based game [blank] eight weeks helps non-musicians become better at remembering recently seen faces. This suggests that learning to play an instrument could improve short-term memory for non-musical tasks. There [blank] been several studies showing that musicians tend to have better short-term memory than non-musicians when it comes to music-related tasks, such as remembering musical sequences. It is less clear whether these benefits carry [blank] to non-musical tasks or to non-musicians who are learning to play an instrument, and how these changes might actually be seen in the brain. Theodore Zanto at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, randomly assigned a group of 47 non-musicians, aged [blank] 60 and 79, to play either a tablet-based musical rhythm training game, which emulates learning to hit a drum in time with a teacher, or a word search game for eight weeks. At the start and end of the eight weeks, participants took a short-term memory test [blank] measure their ability to remember a face they saw seconds before. Only the group who played the rhythm training game showed an improvement on their initial scores - of around 4 per cent.