Neural implementation of musical expertise and cognitive transfers: could they be promising in the framework of normal cognitive aging?
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Summary
This review article investigates the neural mechanisms underlying musical expertise and evaluates whether musical training can serve as a form of environmental enrichment to mitigate cognitive decline during normal aging. The authors address the problem of how specific skill acquisition, such as playing an instrument, induces broad structural and functional brain changes that transfer to non-musical cognitive domains. The motivation stems from the need to identify effective interventions for promoting brain and cognitive reserves, particularly in the context of increasing life expectancy and the associated risks of age-related cognitive deterioration. The paper synthesizes existing empirical evidence from neuroimaging (MRI, fMRI), electrophysiology (ERP), and behavioral studies. It categorizes findings into three main areas: structural plasticity, functional plasticity, and cognitive transfer. Structural analyses reveal that musical training induces gray matter increases in motor, auditory, and multimodal association areas, as well as white matter changes in the corpus callosum and arcuate fasciculus. Functional studies demonstrate that musicians exhibit reduced activation in primary sensory-motor areas due to automatization, allowing for the recruitment of higher-order cognitive regions (prefrontal and parietal areas) during complex tasks. The review also examines transfer effects, specifically how musical expertise enhances language processing (phonological awareness, syntactic integration) and executive functions, citing longitudinal and cross-sectional studies involving children, adults, and elderly participants. Key findings indicate that musical expertise is not confined to auditory-motor networks but involves general cognitive processes. Musicians show enhanced cortical representations of musical scales, faster neural synchronization at the brainstem level, and improved pre-attentive processing of auditory irregularities. These neural adaptations facilitate transfers to language skills, evidenced by better pitch discrimination in speech and enhanced processing of prosodic and syntactic incongruities. Furthermore, musical training is associated with improved executive functions and higher IQ scores in children, suggesting a non-specific enhancement of cognitive resources. In older adults, professional musicians demonstrate superior performance on memory and executive function tasks compared to non-musicians, and short-term piano instruction in elderly non-musicians leads to significant improvements in executive functioning. The authors conclude that musical practice acts as a potent environmental enrichment that promotes both brain reserve (anatomical) and cognitive reserve (functional efficiency). Because aging disproportionately affects executive functions, and musical training heavily engages these processes, the authors propose that musical activities could be a promising intervention to reduce the deleterious effects of aging on cognition. They argue that the multimodal, multiprocess nature of music, combined with its motivational and emotional components, makes it uniquely suited to maintain cognitive efficiency. The paper calls for further well-controlled studies to validate these effects in elderly populations and to compare musical training with other cognitive interventions.
Provenance
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| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | Crossref | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-10 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-25 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| enrich | success | openalex | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-20 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-10 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-25 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 6 | 2026-06-20 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-26 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.
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