Want to keep your mind healthy and sharp throughout your life? Pick
up an instrument. A new study found that musicians might have brains
that function better than their peers well into old age. Bet you wish
you stuck with those piano lessons after all.
Researchers tested the mental abilities of senior citizens and
discovered that musicians performed better at a number of tests. In
particular, musicians excelled at visual memory tasks. While musicians
had similar verbal capabilities to non-musicians, the musicians’ ability
to memorize new words was markedly better, too. Perhaps most
importantly, the musicians’ IQ scores were higher overall than those who
spent their lives listening to music rather than performing it. More