Your Brain on Drums: The Benefits of Playing an Instrument
To a stranger, I’d probably look like an octopus having a fever dream – my twitchy appendages stomping the hi-hat pedal and whacking the snare when they should be doing something else. To my long-suffering drum teacher, I’m one of countless amateurs he has guided through a legendary pop-music groove – the intro to Paul Simon’s 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, played by the inimitable drummer Steve Gadd. To a neurologist who studies the effects of music on the brain, I’d be another thing entirely – a middle-aged man doing the equivalent of a full-body workout for his grey matter.
That’s not hyperbole. For the past two decades, doctors and scientists have been gathering evidence that not only suggests but directly shows how playing music improves your brain function. Across the board, at leading universities, the findings are as consistent as our brains are complex. The simple – or maybe not so simple – acts of playing scales on a guitar, huffing into a trumpet, and tapping out paradiddles lead to tangible rewards. Playing music can improve memory and cognitive function, help you hear and understand better in noisy environments and even help to treat patients with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Researchers have also shown that the act of playing music – which includes singing – activates the brain’s limbic centre and releases chemicals, such as dopamine, that make us experience joy. And not just while you’re playing – the benefits can stay with you into old age. What’s more, the physiological and psychological dividends are especially substantial if you’re a novice or if you’re dusting off an instrument from your youth. Translation: as long as you’re challenged in some small way, being bad at an instrument is good for you.
‘I call playing music “hitting the jackpot”,’ says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University and author Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs A Meaningful Sonic World. A self-proclaimed multi-instrumentalist ‘hack’, she plays music every day, even if she lacks expertise and only does it for a few minutes. Playing an instrument in a focused and deliberate manner, she says, ‘engages so much of your brain, like the cognitive, sensory, motor and reward systems, in ways that few other activities can’. Like Professor Kraus, I’m a hobbyist. I took lessons on and off as a young teen but lacked the work ethic, the patience and, as years of therapy and reflection have taught me, the self-esteem required to make mistakes and withhold self-judgement, particularly in front of others. So I gave it up. True to form, I spent the next three decades judging myself for that decision.
Then came a confluence of events that set me on my current path: the pandemic, the rise of Zoom, the spectre of my 50th birthday and my increasing ability to give fewer fucks about how good or bad I sound to myself or to others. So I bought a cheap drum kit for the man cave, reached out to a teacher, committed myself to lessons and a few hours a week of practice, and came up with some goals. Learning Simon’s tune was near the top of my list. It’s sort of a drummer’s rite of passage, a wildly inventive but understated hybrid of syncopated jazz and military march. Not that you’d know it by hearing me try it for the first time. Sitting at the kit, I’m slow, sloppy and seemingly hopeless. But my frustration is coupled with genuine good cheer, thanks to what I’m picking up from the likes of Professor Kraus. For starters, sounding bad doesn’t mean I’m bad; it’s just the first step towards getting better. Second, the intense concentration I’m employing and the mistakes I’m making in playing the trickiest nine notes of Gadd’s beautiful drum phrase are precisely the tools working wonders for my brain.
You Don’t Need Talent, Just Patience
Imagine a drone’s-eye view of a jungle dotted with a handful of remote villages; these are the auditory cortex, the frontal lobe, the premotor cortex, the corpus callosum and a host of other brain parts that process sounds, control body movements, correct mistakes on the fly, release dopamine and so on. And in each of those villages, imagine a small population milling about; these are the neurons – tiny cells that carry messages from lobe to lobe, cortex to cortex, hemisphere to hemisphere. But without trails or roads – in this case, a network of neural pathways – the villager neurons can’t send their signals from one location to another; each community is isolated from the next. That’s a picture of my brain trying to learn 50 Ways. I’m so slow and so focused that the sound
of the metronome trips me up, at any speed. All the neural signals are stuck in their villages, hemmed in by the jungle.
Jessica Grahn is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how these kinds of pathways are established by using neuroimaging and electrodes to watch the brain respond to the act of playing music. She runs the Music and Neuroscience Lab at Western University in Ontario, Canada, where she is an associate professor. Being stuck in my neurocerebral jungle village, she says, does not indicate talent – or lack thereof. ‘If you’re thinking, “I’m not good at it”, you have to remember, “It’s not because I suck – it’s because my brain hasn’t been given the right inputs yet.”’
By ‘inputs’, she means message-carrying neurons sending signals along that painstakingly built network of pathways. Now, taking Professor Grahn’s explanation into account, imagine if I hacked a footpath from village A to village B to village C. That’s what happens to my brain after about 25 minutes of deep focus. I’m playing the 50 Ways intro at 52bpm. But it’s as if I blazed the trail with a butter knife, because that’s roughly half the song’s tempo. In a few days, after steady practice, I’ll be comfortable at 92bpm and, eventually, at the full 102bpm. It won’t even be half-perfect, and I’ll never have Gadd’s finesse, but I know I can do it. Still, there is a caveat. If I don’t keep bushwhacking, that jungle will grow back and I’ll have to start all over. As with physical fitness, the adage ‘use it or lose it’ applies to brain health, too.
Instruments Of Change
So what exactly do we lose when our brain sits on the proverbial couch? For one thing, size. ‘Think grape, think raisin,’ jokes Ted Zanto, an associate professor at University of California, San Francisco’s Neuroscape research lab, on the subject of brain shrinkage, especially after age 40. ‘Well, maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea.’ Playing music, he says, can help maintain a brain’s size in the same way that curls keep your arms firm and toned. And getting started now helps build up what scientists call cognitive reserves, the brain’s equivalent of muscle mass, which you can take into old age. That’s why scientists are trying to spread the word among adults. Plus, interacting with others through music keeps the dopamine flowing. This is one more reason that all the scientists
I spoke to urge adults – above all older men, who have a way of isolating themselves – to grab an instrument, take some lessons and play with others.
While learning the 50 Ways groove, I decided to call Gadd to find out how he came up with such a unique and catchy pattern. It was 1975, and Gadd was in a drum booth, trying to stave off boredom while Simon and producer Phil Ramone were busy in another room. Gadd wanted to stay loose and be ready when they needed him, so he began tinkering with various hand and foot patterns. In other words, he was creating, or at least maintaining, his neural network. ‘Then Phil and Paul heard what I was practising,’ says Gadd, who at 76 runs regularly, still tours and remains as sharp as the crack of a snare drum. ‘And so Phil suggested that that groove, or something similar, might be a good approach. That’s how it started.’
Gadd doesn’t attribute his memory, his sharpness or his overall health to his life as a drummer. In fact, he isn’t even familiar with the science. For him, the neurological benefits are a pleasant by-product of something bigger. ‘It’s about sharing the groove and the music and the emotions that you’re feeling, and the fun that you’re having with people. If you can reach that level of communication and musicality, it makes it all worthwhile.’
For my part, I know I’ll never achieve musical greatness. And that’s okay. I’ve taught myself not to care – or at least to care a lot less – about how I sound. Yes, I want to improve. I want to learn every song on Gadd’s list of credits. I want to feel confident enough to form a band and play 1970s deep cuts for a handful of friends at a barbecue. But if those things don’t happen, I can still reap rewards. Even spending a few minutes beating the drum kit a handful of days a week stimulates my neurons to send signals along their pathways, fires up dormant swathes of my brain, releases a squirt of dopamine and brightens my mood. I’d be out of my mind to stop playing.
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