Why music training slows cognitive aging

A team of Chinese collaborators has reported experiments in the Oxford academic journal Cerebral Cortex titled "Functional gradients in prefrontal regions and somatomotor networks reflect the effect of music training experience on cognitive aging" which are stated to show that music training enhances the functional separation between regions across prefrontal and somatomotor networks, delaying deterioration in working memory performance and prefrontal suppression of prominant but irrelevant information. I'm passing on the abstract and a clip from the paper's conclusion, and can send interested readers the whole article. I think it is an important article but I find it is rendered almost unintelligble by Chinese to English translation issues. I'm surprised the journal let this article appear without further editing.

Studies showed that the top-down control of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on sensory/motor cortices changes during cognitive aging. Although music training has demonstrated efficacy on cognitive aging, its brain mechanism is still far from clear. Current music intervention studies have paid insufficient attention to the relationship between PFC and sensory regions. Functional gradient provides a new perspective that allows researchers to understand network spatial relationships, which helps study the mechanism of music training that affects cognitive aging. In this work, we estimated the functional gradients in four groups, young musicians, young control, older musicians, and older control. We found that cognitive aging leads to gradient compression. Compared with young subjects, older subjects presented lower and higher principal gradient scores in the right dorsal and medial prefrontal and the bilateral somatomotor regions, respectively. Meanwhile, by comparing older control and musicians, we found a mitigating effect of music training on gradient compression. Furthermore, we revealed that the connectivity transitions between prefrontal and somatomotor regions at short functional distances are a potential mechanism for music to intervene in cognitive aging. This work contributes to understanding the neuroplasticity of music training on cognitive aging.

From the conclusion paragraph:

In a nutshell, we demonstrate the top-down control of prefrontal regions to the somatomotor network, which is associated with inhibitory function and represents a potential marker of cognitive aging, and reveal that music training may work by affecting the connectivity between the two regions. Although this work has investigated the neuroplasticity of music on cognitive aging by recruiting subjects of different age spans, the present study did not include the study of longitudinal changes of the same group. Further studies should include longitudinal follow-up of the same groups over time to more accurately evaluate the effect of music intervention on the process of cognitive aging.