Why practice music?

November 27, 2016 Soumya Radhakrishnan

If you are looking to cultivate a hobby or take up a new project to fill up your time in a day, I urge you to learn to play any musical instrument. It is a keystone activity and its effects can spill over the rest of the areas of your life. This TED-Ed video will persuade you to practice and play music instead of only, listening and consuming. Here are some useful excerpts from the video.

Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout… Playing an instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once — especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices. And, as in any other workout, disciplined, structured practice in playing music strengthens those brain functions, allowing us to apply that strength to other activities. This may allow musicians to solve problems more efficiently and creatively, in both academic and social settings. Because making music also involves crafting and understanding its emotional content and message, musicians also have higher levels of executive function — a category of interlinked tasks that includes planning, strategizing, and attention to detail, and requires simultaneous analysis of both cognitive and emotional aspects. This ability also has an impact on how our memory systems work. And, indeed, musicians exhibit enhanced memory functions — creating, storing, and retrieving memories more quickly and efficiently. Studies have found that musicians appear to use their highly connected brains to give each memory multiple tags, such as a conceptual tag, an emotional tag, an audio tag, and a contextual tag — like a good internet search engine.