Music Making Delays Hearing Loss?

This article talks about how music training appears to delay some aspects of hearing and memory loss. My sense of it is that if you train your brain to get more out of it with music, then when there's less there, you can still do well on various tests.

In the study, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage. This was determined by measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds.

“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist and co-author Nina Kraus, Ph.D.

“This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”