Plenty of adults took piano or violin lessons as kids. Many quit as teenagers and never played again. If that sounds like you, you may wonder if any of it stuck. Not “did I get good at music” — most people lose that without practice. The real question is: did those lessons change your brain in a way that is still there today, decades later?
This is a real, active area of research. The honest answer is yes, in a few specific and measurable ways. But the evidence is narrower than the popular “music makes you smarter forever” story. Below is what controlled studies have actually found when they compared adults who trained in music as children to adults who did not.
Why this question is hard to study
No one can run the ideal experiment here. You cannot randomly assign half of all five-year-olds to ten years of violin lessons and the other half to none, then scan their brains at age 40. That study is not ethical, and it is not practical. So researchers instead compare adults who happened to take music lessons as kids to adults who did not. They try to match the two groups on age, general intelligence, and other background factors.
That design has a real limit. It shows a link, not proof of a cause. Kids who start music young and stick with it may differ in other ways too. Family income, access to other activities, or traits that made both music and certain brain patterns more likely could be at play. Good studies try to account for this. But no single study rules it out completely. Keep that in mind as you read the findings below.
The brain still processes sound differently, years after lessons stop
One of the clearest studies here comes from Erika Skoe and Nina Kraus. It ran in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2012. They recruited healthy young adults with different histories of childhood music lessons. Some had trained for one to five years. Others had trained for six to eleven years. Some had never taken lessons at all. None were still training at the time of the study.
The researchers measured something called the auditory brainstem response. This is an electrical signal that shows how precisely the brainstem encodes fine details in sound, like pitch and timing. Adults who had taken music lessons as kids showed a sharper, more precise response to sound than adults who never had. This held true even though their lessons had ended years earlier.
One detail here is worth noting, because it pushes back on the simple “more music is always better” idea. The strength of this effect was linked to how recently the training had ended. That link was statistically significant. But the effect was not significantly linked to the total number of years someone had trained. In plain terms: in this data, having taken lessons at all mattered more than whether someone trained for two years or eleven. That is a smaller, more precise claim than “the more you played, the bigger your permanent boost.” But it is the claim the data actually backs up.
Starting age matters — maybe more than total practice time
A separate line of research comes from Virginia Penhune’s lab at Concordia University. It looks at a different factor: not how long someone trained, but how old they were when they started. Several of these studies compare adult musicians who began before age seven to adult musicians who began after age seven. Both groups are matched for total years of experience. That way, any differences cannot simply be explained by the early starters having practiced more overall.
Three findings from this body of work stand out:
- Motor timing. A 2007 study by Watanabe, Savion-Lemieux, and Penhune, in Experimental Brain Research, found that adult musicians who started before age seven did better on a rhythmic tapping task than musicians who started after age seven. This held even though both groups had put in the same number of years of practice.
- Gray matter structure. A 2014 study by Bailey, Zatorre, and Penhune, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, found measurable gray matter differences between early- and late-starting musicians. The difference showed up in the right ventral premotor cortex, a brain region tied to planning movement. This structural difference tracked with how well people performed on a rhythm task.
- White matter connectivity. A 2013 study by Steele, Bailey, Zatorre, and Penhune, in the Journal of Neuroscience, found differences in white-matter connectivity in the corpus callosum. This is the band of fibers that lets the brain’s two halves talk to each other. Again, the difference tracked with age of onset, not total years trained.
Together, these studies point to what researchers call a “sensitive period” for music training. It falls roughly before age seven to nine. During this window, the developing brain may respond more strongly to the demands of learning an instrument. Training that starts in that window seems to leave a mark on brain structure and function. That mark is still detectable in adulthood, long after the lessons end.
What the evidence does not show
It is worth being just as clear about the limits here as about the findings.
These studies measure specific things: auditory brainstem encoding, rhythmic motor timing, and structure in a couple of brain regions tied to those two skills. They do not show that childhood music lessons give a general, all-purpose boost to intelligence, memory, or school performance that lasts into adulthood. We looked for solid studies that directly test whether childhood music training predicts broader adult outcomes, like verbal memory or planning skills, decades after lessons end. We did not find a strong, direct study that tested this. If you see a broad claim like “childhood piano lessons make you smarter for life,” treat it with some doubt. The rigorous evidence supports something narrower and more specific than that.
The study samples are also modest in size. Most involve a few dozen people per group, not thousands. Many of the musicians studied also kept some link to music into adulthood, even if informal. Someone who took two years of recorder lessons in third grade and never touched an instrument again is not quite the population these studies were built around. Still, the Skoe and Kraus results suggest that even a short, long-ago stretch of lessons leaves some trace.
What this actually means
If you trained in music as a child and have not played in years, the research suggests your brain likely still carries a real, measurable trace of it. This shows up in how precisely your brain encodes sound, in parts of motor timing, and in the structure of a couple of well-studied brain regions. That is not nothing. But it is also not a promise that lessons make anyone permanently smarter, more successful, or immune to anything. It is a smaller, and honestly more interesting, claim. A specific set of skills, built during a specific window of childhood, seems to leave a mark that outlasts the lessons themselves.
For parents weighing whether to start a child in music lessons now, the sensitive-period research gives a real reason to think that starting earlier may help the training take deeper root. That said, the more immediate reasons kids take lessons still hold: they enjoy it, they build a real skill, and they learn to stick with something over time.
Does it matter if my child only did a few years of lessons and then quit?
Based on the Skoe and Kraus study, some trace may remain even after a short stretch of training. The effect was stronger the more recently training had happened. But a few years of lessons is not nothing, even if your child never plays again.
Is there a “best” age to start music lessons?
The sensitive-period studies point to before roughly age seven as a window with the clearest structural effect, compared with starting later at the same total practice time. That does not mean lessons after age seven have no value. It means the earlier window shows the clearest evidence of a lasting structural difference in these specific studies.
Do these brain changes translate into real-world advantages?
The studies link brain differences to specific measured skills, like precise sound encoding and rhythmic timing. Both are directly tied to musical ability itself. Whether those changes carry over into broader real-world advantages outside of music has not been tested directly in the studies we reviewed. So we cannot make that claim.
I stopped playing decades ago and never touched an instrument since. Did the lessons still do anything?
The research suggests yes, at least in the auditory and motor-timing areas studied. Adults with lapsed childhood training still showed measurable differences from adults with none. The effect looked somewhat stronger the more recently training had ended. So it may be a smaller effect for someone decades removed from their last lesson than for someone who stopped more recently. But the studies still found a detectable difference either way.
Is this proven, or just a correlation?
It is a correlation. These are comparison studies between groups of adults with different training histories, not randomized experiments. That kind of experiment is not really possible with childhood training anyway. The findings hold up across several independent studies from different labs, which adds confidence. But they do not prove that music training alone caused the brain differences seen.
Starting lessons today
If this research has you thinking about starting or restarting music lessons, for yourself or a child, ABC Academy in Toronto offers instruction across a range of instruments and skill levels. You can browse the current class schedule, check rates and payment options, or get in touch with questions about which program fits best.
SOURCES:
Skoe E, Kraus N. “A little goes a long way: how the adult brain is shaped by musical training in childhood.” Journal of Neuroscience. 2012;32(34):11507-11510. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1949-12.2012. PMID: 22915097.
Watanabe D, Savion-Lemieux T, Penhune VB. “The effect of early musical training on adult motor performance: evidence for a sensitive period in motor learning.” Experimental Brain Research. 2007;176(2):332-340. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-006-0619-z. PMID: 16896980.
Bailey JA, Zatorre RJ, Penhune VB. “Early musical training is linked to gray matter structure in the ventral premotor cortex and auditory-motor rhythm synchronization performance.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2014;26(4):755-767. PMID: 24236696.
Steele CJ, Bailey JA, Zatorre RJ, Penhune VB. “Early musical training and white-matter plasticity in the corpus callosum: evidence for a sensitive period.” Journal of Neuroscience. 2013;33(3):1282-1290. PMID: 23325263.
Bailey J, Penhune VB. “A sensitive period for musical training: contributions of age of onset and cognitive abilities.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2012;1252:163-170. PMID: 22524355.