On http://esthenews.org/tag/brenda-hanna-pladdy/ we can read the following:
"The Tiger Mothers were right all along: Music lessons as a kid may make you a sharper grown-up.
A new study finds that older adults with musical experience perform better on some cognitive tests than those who had never studied music. With only 70 participants, the study was small, but the results match those from other studies of challenging tasks, including findings that learning a second language protects against dementia.
"Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging," study researcher Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine, said in a statement. "Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older."
[…]
"Whether the participant continued to play music into old age didn’t matter, the researchers found. Instead, long-term study in youth seemed to confer benefits far down the road."
The entire scientific article can be found at: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/neu-25-3-378.pdf.
This is, of course, good news for those involved in the ELCA Music Festival, all of them who speak a second language (often English) and took up making music in their childhood, or, like Senad, inspired by the ELCA Festival, are currently taking up music lessons. Gradually I start looking out for the next edition…
Wouter