NPR’s health blog, Shots, recently posted an interesting article entitled “How Music May Help Ward Off Hearing Loss As We Age.” It recounts the results of a study conducted by Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. To quote the article:
"If you spend a lot of your life interacting with sound in an active manner, then your nervous system has made lots of sound-to-meaning connection that can strengthen your auditory system,” says Dr. Kraus. Musicians focus extraordinary attention on deciphering low notes from high notes and detecting different tonal qualities. Kraus has studied younger musicians and found that their hearing is far superior to that of their non-musician counterparts. She wondered if that musical training also help fend off age-related hearing loss.
To find out, she assembled a small group of middle-aged musicians and non musicians, aged 45-65. She put both groups through a series of tests measuring their ability to make out and repeat a variety of sentences spoken in noisy background environments. Turns out, the musicians were 40 percent better than non-musicians at tuning out background noise and hearing the sentences, as Kraus reported in PloS ONE. The musicians were also better able to remember the sentences than the non-musicians — and that made it easier for them to follow a line of conversation.
To read the entire blog post, click here.