Learning to play a musical instrument could help the elderly react faster and stay alert. That's according to a study by Université de Montréal’s School of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, part of UdeM’s medical faculty. The study shows that musicians have faster reaction times to sensory stimuli than non-musicians.

And that has implications for preventing some effects of aging, says lead researcher Simon Landry, whose study is part of his doctoral thesis in biomedical science.

Musicians have faster reaction times than non-musicians, and that could have implications for the elderly.According to Landry, the more we know about the impact of music on really basic sensory processes, the more we can apply musical training to individuals who might have slower reaction times.

Landry compared the reaction times of 16 musicians and 19 non-musicians. They were sat in a quiet, well-lit room with one hand on a computer mouse and the index finger of the other on a vibro-tactile device, a box that vibrated intermittently.

They were told to click on the mouse when they heard a sound (a burst of white noise) from the speakers in front of them, or when the box vibrated, or when both happened. Each of the three stimulations—audio, tactile and audio-tactile—was done 180 times. The subjects wore earplugs to mask any buzzing “audio clue” when the box vibrated.

Researchers found faster reaction times with musicians for auditory, tactile and audio-tactile stimulations. The results suggest that long-term musical training reduces simple non-musical auditory, tactile and multisensory reaction times.

The musicians, who were recruited from UdeM’s music faculty, started playing between ages 3 and 10 and had at least seven years of training. There were eight pianists, three violinists, two percussionists, one double bassist, one harpist and one viola player. All but one (a violinist) also mastered a second instrument, or more. The non-musicians were students at the School of Speech Language Pathology. As with the musicians, roughly half were undergraduates and half graduates.