Study Finds Playing Guitar Good for Brain

After reading that headline, we have little doubt that a great deal of you readers forcefully smacked your head and let out an exasperated “duhhh.” After all, it’s pretty intuitive: of course playing guitar is good for your mental health.

A study found that playing guitar is good for your brain.

Playing any instrument definitely uses different sections of one’s brain than any other activity. However, we finally have a bit of hard science to back up this claim. Conducted by the Boston Children’s Hospital, the study looked at children who played guitar at a young age and those who did not.

The study found statistically significant links between problem solving abilities and “executive functioning” abilities and one’s guitar playing skills. As it turns out, learning guitar at a young age causes people to develop more creative capacities for problem solving than not playing an instrument.

While this effect wasn’t quite as pronounced in adults, it still was evident. The researchers are hopeful that this finding could be of therapeutic use for individuals suffering executive functioning impairments, such as ADHD. Perhaps playing an instrument can help these people to experience a new degree of control over their lives.

Regardless, it’s nice to know that something all guitarists intuitively knew has actual biological and scientific evidence.