There's growing evidence that playing a musical instrument is good for your brain, a review of research by a Swiss psychologist has found.
And that's true not just for kids, Lutz Jancke of the University of Zurich tells London's Daily Mail: "We found that, even in people over the age of 65, after four or five months of playing for an hour a week, there were strong changes in the brain."
"When you play a musical instrument, you have to learn about tone and about scores, and your ability to store audio information becomes better," says Jancke, who reported his findings in the journal Faculty of 1000 Biology Reports. "Not only does this make it easier to pick up other languages, musicians are able to pick out exactly what others are feeling just on the tone of their voices."
