Keeping Your Brain in Tip-top Health with the Piano
Piano playing is a dependable method for honing the sharpness of your brain at any age. Find out how anyone, especially senior citizens, can benefit from playing the piano.
In numerous ways, music is almost like a healing medication. Rather than breathing in or ingesting it, our brains interpret and react to sound waves. These vibrations can take us on a profound excursion, making us ascend to our feet and dance or wash over us with emotion.
Regardless of whatever style of music you listen to or play, it has real, quantifiable consequences for your brain's health and wellness.
Your brain on piano
Nervous system specialists have used brain-measuring devices to see what the brain does while paying attention to music. What they found is very interesting.
Utilizing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET), we can see that our cerebrums light up like fireworks when we pay attention to music.
Playing the piano is a super-powerful brain-building exercise. It keeps the mind active with multiple simultaneous actions and foci that keep the right and left brain working in harmony all while you are enjoying the act of music-making.
Some key brain-boosting effects of playing piano include:
Increased fine-motor control
Better language abilities
Further developed memory retention
Better capacity to plan ahead
Elevated levels of mental sharpness
A noteworthy boost in the ability to focus
Research likewise suggests that people that play the piano will generally have higher IQs than non-players. They're more capable of unique reasoning, which is the capacity to successfully handle complex issues. Furthermore, playing the piano doesn't simply exercise and lift your intellectual abilities … it just plain makes you feel good!
How is playing the piano a brain booster?
Playing instruments, especially the piano, fundamentally supports your psychological health.
When you're playing piano, you're more than likely going to see brain health upgrades in the following ways:
Relief of anxiety & depression symptoms
Depression and anxiety plague so many individuals. While treating it is an intricate undertaking for medical and mental health experts, numerous specialists concur that playing piano encourages individuals with depression. Albeit the subtleties with regards to why this is the case are beyond my expertise, a lot of proof proposes a connection between relieving the side effects of despondency and playing music.
Tickling the ivories, even briefly, frees the everyday collecting of mental pressure and brings down cortisol levels, diminishing sensations of anxiety and depression.
Playing piano music can help you open up to your more imaginative side. It gives you something to anticipate and it helps many people to lighten the mental load they carry on their shoulders.
Improved self-esteem
Having a feeling of achievement is an incredible method for feeling good, and playing the piano is an incredible way to set and achieve personal goals.
Like anything that requires discipline, it feels better when you begin to see improvement. For instance, there is a feeling of joy and happiness with defining and reaching a powerful goal of playing a song that you love.
One more fun part of playing an instrument is that it tends to be motivational to learn alongside others. Learning with others in group piano lessons gives you a chance to make new companions, and sticking it out together through learning hurdles can be an especially satisfying experience.
Achieving objectives and investing energy in doing the things you love with individuals you like enormously influence how you feel, further developing your self-esteem.
Improves coordination
Playing piano can likewise extend your mind-body association and greatly improve your hand-eye-foot coordination.
As referenced earlier, a great deal is going on while playing the piano. Your cerebrum has a ton to manage between perusing printed music, paying attention to the sounds of notes you are playing, and the tactile feel of playing the piano keys.
An instrument like the piano, which requires two hands to play various notes at the same time can be interesting for the brain to process—particularly when you're simply just starting out.
Everybody has a dominant hand that we rely upon to do everyday exercises like cleaning our teeth. Accordingly, the association between your cerebrum and the predominant hand is more multifaceted than your off-hand.
With the piano, you're not simply figuring out how to utilize your non-dominant hand. You're figuring out how to utilize it while executing other engine controls at the same time. While playing melodies, your left-hand moves at an alternate speed and plays unexpected notes in comparison to your right hand.
Your mind and body find these coordination developments tricky to perform, but so satisfying when you master them.
Playing piano yields a host of brain booster benefits
Playing the piano can yield incredible benefits regardless of how old you are. You'll feel better, honing your brain’s ability to focus, overcome challenges, and reach personal goals all while playing the melodies you love and songs you grew up with.
If you’ve been wanting to play piano, but just keep putting it off, don’t miss our next free online group piano lesson.
Take the plunge today and start playing the songs you love, your brain will thank you for it in more ways than one.
