By Shahram Heshmat Ph.D.
Getting older often involves a series of challenges, such as cognitive decline, social isolation, and late-life depression. Memory decline, especially decline in episodic memory and working memory, is a significant characteristic of normal aging and can be an early sign of pathological aging. Various forms of exercise and activities that flex the brain are believed to help maintain memory function in older age.
One important type of cognitively stimulating activity is learning music (Xueyan, 2025). Music is a promising tool for improving cognition and promoting well-being. It’s never too late to start playing an instrument, and starting in old age may have major benefits. Here are some general rules you can follow as you master a new skill, such as music (Ericsson and Pool, 2016).
1. Purposeful practice. Practice for new skills should be thoughtful, slow, and deliberate rather than rushed. When you work slowly, things become simpler. You don’t perform better when you speed through a course.
2. Goal. Thoughtful practice is purposeful, and it knows where it is going and how to get there. Having a clear and meaningful goal is important for individual progress and motivation. Well-defined and achievable goals fuel motivation. Giving yourself something to work for is a great way to give meaning to your study. Without a clear goal, any efforts will have a limited impact.
3. Incremental progress. Purposeful practice is about putting baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal. This approach makes goals feel more achievable and increases your motivation. Nothing is more motivating than the power of small wins. These smaller goals make it easier to overcome procrastination and build momentum without feeling overwhelmed.
4. Mental representations. A mental representation shows you what you are supposed to be doing. Mental representations help a person monitor how they are doing, both in practice and in actual performance. For example, in music, mental representation (how the piece should sound) allows students to duplicate the sounds of a piece that they want to produce while they play.
5. Repetition. Fully learned skills start with mental effort, but with enough practice, they can be done without thinking. As you repeat something, it becomes ingrained in your subconscious, allowing you to act on it without conscious effort. Every repetition brings you closer to your desired outcome. Having reached a level of automaticity is empowering to performers because it frees up their cognitive resources to deal with musical matters, other than the skill itself.
6. Spaced practice. One of the most effective strategies to enhance learning is to spread out the learning process, not cramming a whole day’s work into one sitting. Time is needed for the mental representations of learning experiences to be transformed into long-term memory.
7. Motivation. Making music is fundamentally pleasurable. For many, music learning is intrinsically rewarding—the act of doing something rather than achieving some ultimate goal. However, building a skill of any kind necessarily involves effort, which can include concentrated time repeating musical exercises. One of the greatest motivating factors is progress. Improvement is the reward we get for our efforts. The joy of seeing yourself improve at something is very encouraging.
8. Growth mindset. Another motivational factor is the growth mindset, particularly in late middle-aged and older adults. A ‘growth mindset’ refers to the belief that abilities are not fixed but can improve with effort. We’re bad at everything before we’re good at it.
The takeaway lesson is that learning musical skills in later life is a promising intervention to offset the age-related cognitive decline. To maintain a sharp mind in older age, we need to engage in new challenges. Musical training contains all the components of a cognitive training program, such as concentrated attention, memory, self-discipline, and confidence. Research shows that mental exercise can turn back the clock by about 10 years (Attarha, 2025). Cognitive training increases levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter (chemical messenger) that’s closely associated with cognitive performance.
This article first appeared on the Psychology Today website
Shahram Heshmat, Ph.D., is an associate professor emeritus of health economics of addiction at the University of Illinois at Springfield.