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Why Musicians Have Better Memory
Research is revealing a link between musicians and memory skills. What does that mean for the rest of us?
It’s a familiar story to fans of classical music: You take a novice to a piano concert, where you revel in the majesty of the music and the virtuosity of the performer. Afterwards, you discover your friend has also been awed — but for an entirely different reason. “Wow!” they exclaim. “How did she remember all those notes?”
It’s a legitimate question. Memorizing an evening’s worth of Mozart is “a huge memory feat,” according to Lynn Helding, a mezzo-soprano and a professor of voice at the University of Southern California. “The average vocal recital is 65 minutes of music — usually in several languages. Memorizing all that is a real brain workout.”
How do musicians do it, and can their techniques be adopted by the rest of us?
“Music has a special connection with memory,” says Dana Boebinger, a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology.
A 2017 meta-analysis that combined the results of 29 studies suggests that professional musicians might have a memory advantage. It found a “slight superiority of musicians over nonmusicians” in tasks involving long-term memory, and a…
