A research team led by Dr. DU Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Claude Alain from the Baycrest Academy for Research and Education in Canada has found that long-term musical training can help counteract age-related declines in speech perception by enhancing cognitive reserve.

The study entitled "Long-term musical training can protect against age-related upregulation of neural activity in speech-in-noise perception"was published online in PLoS Biology on July 15.

As individuals age, they commonly experience declines in cognitive function. Prior studies have identified a phenomenon known as functional compensation, in which older adults recruit additional high-level brain regions to maintain task performance. However, some individuals exhibit a stronger resistance to cognitive aging—attributed to cognitive reserve, a buffer developed through lifelong learning, experience, and neural efficiency. How this reserve interacts with compensatory brain mechanisms during aging, however, has remained unclear.

To investigate this, the study recruited three groups: older musicians with over 30 years of instrumental training (high cognitive reserve), older adults with no musical training (low cognitive reserve), and a younger control group. Participants performed a syllable identification task in noisy environments while undergoing functional MRI scanning. The researchers focused on neural responses within the auditory dorsal stream, a pathway involved in sound-to-action mapping and sensorimotor integration during speech processing.

As hypothesized, older musicians demonstrated less age-related decline in speech-in-noise performance compared to their non-musician peers. Older non-musicians showed a typical age-related compensatory increase in functional connectivity within bilateral auditory dorsal streams. In contrast, older musicians displayed a connectivity pattern more similar to younger adults. Notably, stronger right-hemisphere dorsal stream connectivity correlated with better speech-in-noise performance. Moreover, older musicians exhibited spatial patterns of functional connectivity more youth-like than those of older non-musicians, who consistently showed greater divergence from the younger profile.

These findings support the “Hold-Back Upregulation” hypothesis: rather than boosting brain activity through compensation, cognitive reserve may delay the need for such upregulation by preserving youthful neural efficiency and architecture. In other words, cognitive reserve may protect against cognitive aging not by doing more, but by maintaining optimal function with less.

“Just like a well-tuned instrument doesn’t need to be played louder to be heard, the brains of older musicians stay finely tuned thanks to years of training. Our study shows that this musical experience builds cognitive reserve, helping their brains avoid the usual age-related overexertion when trying to understand speech in noisy places.” said Dr. DU, corresponding author of the study.

The research highlights long-term musical training as a natural model of cognitive reserve, offering both scientific evidence and practical guidance for non-pharmacological strategies—such as community choirs or instrument learning programs—to support healthy cognitive aging.

This study was supported by the STI 2030—Major Projects, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.