Playing a rhythm-based game for eight weeks helps non-musicians become better at remembering recently seen faces. This suggests that learning to play an instrument could improve short-term memory for non-musical tasks.

There have been several studies showing that musicians tend to have better short-term memory than non-musicians when it comes to music-related tasks, such as remembering musical sequences. It is less clear whether these benefits carry over to non-musical tasks or to non-musicians who are learning to play an instrument, and how these changes might actually be seen in the brain.

Theodore Zanto at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues, randomly assigned a group of 47 non-musicians, aged between 60 and 79, to play either a tablet-based musical rhythm training game, which emulates (模仿) learning to hit a drum in time with a teacher, or a word game for eight weeks.

At the start and end of the eight weeks, participants took a short-term memory test to measure their ability to remember a face they saw seconds before. Only the group who played the rhythm training game showed an improvement on their initial scores of around 4 percent. This suggests, says Zanto, that the rhythm training is improving the brain’s ability to focus attention on a task to get it ready for transforming what you are doing into memory.

The ability to remember and recognise faces tends to decline as we age, so any possible mechanism to turn that the opposite way is important, says Josh Davis at the University of Greenwich, UK. However, the effect demonstrated in this study needs to be shown in real-world facial recognition scenarios as well as in lab-based tests to be completely convincing, says Davis. Theodore Zanto hopes that extending training period beyond eight weeks may lead to a stronger effect on memory recall.

Music Therapy

Music therapy (疗法) is a form of therapy which utilizes music.【小题1】

Humans have been making music for thousands of years, and many doctors throughout history have proved the idea that music is beneficial to the mind and body, in addition to being enjoyable.【小题2】Listening to music and making music appear to reduce heart rate and blood pressure, and provide people with a sense of calmness, safety, or security.

【小题3】Most practitioners have studied psychology or psychiatry along with music. Music therapists work in hospitals, clinics, residential facilities, private practices, and homes.

Some specific applications for music therapy include: pain management, stress management, behavioral therapy, treatment for substance abuse, and work with people who have developmental disabilities.【小题4】And they can include a variety of things, from listening to a piece of music and talking about the feelings it evokes (激发) to playing an instrument or writing songs as a method of personal expression.

Like other expressive therapies such as art therapy and dance therapy, the focus of music therapy is not on the end product, such as a musical composition, and people do not need to have prior experience with music to benefit from this type of therapy.【小题5】

A group of middle-aged dads formed a dance team to perform at their kids’ school but unexpectedly gained popularity on social media, having over 300, 000 followers—one of them is famous actor Hugh Jackman. The “Outta” Puff Daddys first came together in 2012 in Brighton for a surprise performance at their children’s annual dance show.

Having never danced as a job before and ranging in age from 42 to 60, the dads were taught by their kids’ street dance teacher for the surprise performance. They received a good reception, so they decided to carry on permanently.

Paul Jukes, 48, said dancing together has enabled the members to get through unemployment and anxiety. “Even though I’m the leader and artistic director of the team, I’m not normally the most confident guy,” said Jukes, whose team name is Jukebox. “If we’re in a party situation, we’re off at the side, but when we’re together those inhibitions (拘束感) are lost, and we just accept life to the fullest.”

The dance team members remember the moment when they surprised their kids at the dance show. “We performed at the Brighton Dome which seats 2, 000 people, so for our first live dance performance, it was quite something. We took the roof off,” Jukes said. “The noise was crazy and of course, the kids in the audience were blown away. They were shouting, ‘Hang on a second; that’s your dad.’ Most people might think our kids would be embarrassed by us but none of them had that feeling. All our families and kids were really supportive and really loved it. And it has been considered cool by them to have such a large following on Instagram.” The team has to adapt to its members’ changing bodies as they get older, but that has not stopped them from continuing to dream big, which sets a good example to their kids.