Taking music lessons as a child can have a lasting positive effect on the brain, a new study has found.

According to US scientists, older adults who took musical instrument lessons as a child had a faster response to speech sounds, even if they had not actually played the instrument in decades.

As people age, they may experience changes in the brain that can affect how they interpret speech. For example, the brains of older people display a slower response to sounds that change fast. However, recent studies have suggested that lifelong musical training may offset these and other changes in the brain.

The scientists decided to assess whether limited musical training early on could also benefit the brain in later adulthood.

They looked at 44 healthy people aged between 55 and 76. All listened to a synthesised sound while the electrical activity in their auditory brainstem was measured. This is the part of the brain that processes sound.

The study found that those who had undertaken music lessons for four to 14 years in early life had the fastest response to the sound that they heard, despite the fact that none of them had played a musical instrument in almost 40 years.

They were a millisecond faster at recognising the sound compared to people with no musical training.

"Being a millisecond faster may not seem like much, but the brain is very sensitive to timing and a millisecond compounded over millions of neurons can make a real difference in the lives of older adults. These findings confirm that the investments that we make in our brains early in life continue to pay dividends years later," commented brain expert, Dr Michael Kilgard, of the University of Texas.

According to the scientists who were based at Northwestern University in Chicago, this study ‘suggests the importance of music education for children today and for healthy aging decades from now'.

"The fact that musical training in childhood affected the timing of the response to speech in older adults in our study is especially telling because neural timing is the first to go in the aging adult," they said.

Details of these findings are published in The Journal of Neuroscience.