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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 larger effect for tasks involving short-term memory. Furthermore, it concluded that musicians also tend to have higher scores on tests of working memory — the all-important ability to hold numerous pieces of information in your mind at once so you can analyze and synthesize them.
But don’t sign up for that clarinet class just yet. Lorna Jakobson, a neuroscientist at the University of Manitoba who has studied the effects of musical training on the brain, says meta-analyses often average out the results of “studies of variable quality.” So it’s still unclear just how strong the impact is.
She also notes that different kinds of information are processed and stored in different parts of the brain. This suggests the effects of music training, while real, may be limited.
“It might actually be musical aptitude, rather than musical training, that’s the key factor —…
