How learning to play an instrument can boost short term memory

Hey, anything for productive procrastination, right?

Hero image in post
Hero image in post

Hey, anything for productive procrastination, right?

By Rhys Thomas05 Oct 2022
4 mins read time
4 mins read time

Psst, are you procrastinating right now? Reading this leisurely while you should be… don’t even think about it, it’s okay. We’ve some valuable information for you. Yup, as the title suggests, it turns out you can improve your short term memory by learning and playing instruments. The discovery comes via Dr Theodore Zanto and his colleagues in the neuroscience department at the University of California, in San Francisco.

Zanto’s team figured this out by asking 47 “random” non-musicians aged between 60 and 79 (memory declines with age and there’s a lot of research aiming to prevent that) to complete a short-term memory test, and to then play either a tablet-based musical rhythm training game, or a word search game in sessions taking place over eight weeks. After those eight weeks, participants re-did the memory test. The findings were that those tasked with getting their rhythm on showed an improvement on their initial scores (by about 4% on average). Those given the word-search task didn’t improve, sadly.

Short term memory is useful for quite a lot of things. Technically it “encompasses cognitive functions for the storage, maintenance, and mental manipulation of information that is no longer present in the sensory environment,” as written in the Handbook of Behavioral Neuroscience back in 2018. What this means is, it’s useful for stuff like when someone gives you a mobile number, or a Deliveroo number, or a name, or anything else to remember for a short period of time and we don’t have a pen or a place to write it down. During those nervy moments, the information is sitting in short term memory. Generally, memories we keep for 15-30 seconds are short-term, and anything we keep for longer is a long-term memory.

If you haven’t wondered about your short term memory, chances are you have thought about your attention span. We all have! Gen Z’s attention span is actually shorter than older generations' spans, clocking in (or should that be off) at eight seconds, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab). Millennials’ attention spans last 12 seconds on average, which means those of us in our mid twenties and younger have a 25% less attention span (blame fast internet and TikTok for short-circuiting our mental load). Fortunately, Zanto’s research also suggested that the rhythm training improved “the brain’s ability to focus attention on a task”.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, that study where they found playing tablet-based musical rhythm training games helps with memory. Now, we know what you’re thinking: A tablet-based musical rhythm training game is a bit of a weird thing to download (and why bother when you can use Guitar Hero?). But we all want to look at screens less anyway, so how about this as a revolutionary alternative: Playing real-life musical instruments.

An academic article from St John Fisher University in 2016 says that playing and learning an instrument results in “positive effects on learning, memory, fine motor skills, verbal and non-verbal reasoning, resulting in an overall more capable brain to apply in a multitude of settings.” These additional features are the result of things like learning musical notation, keeping rhythm, multitasking, and more. Which is all-in-all a pretty impressive plus for learning the four chords from Old Town Road, don’t you think?

And it doesn’t mean you have to set up a TikTok account and aim to become the Ukulele megastar of the earth either. No, let’s not monetise yet another hobby. Just having a little sit and a play now and then is all you need to do. It’s a nice challenge and a welcome break from the world around u,s too. Pure hobbies, past-times, remember them? They’re probably in your long-term memory bank somewhere. But not any more: Dust off that recorder, grab that glockenspiel, let’s get playing!