The Myth and Reality of Music Lessons Enhancing Cognitive Skills
The claim that music lessons make children cognitively sharper across the board has circulated for decades. It is one of the more thoroughly tested claims in psychology related to cognitive development. A 2017 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet examined 38 studies involving more than 3,000 participants and found that the overall effect of music training on children’s broader cognitive and academic skills was small. Moreover, this effect diminished as the quality of the studies improved. Studies with weaker designs, lacking proper control groups or randomisation, reported larger apparent benefits. However, when rigorous controls were applied, the benefits to general cognition largely disappeared. The researchers concluded that far transfer—the idea that a specific skill like music training reliably improves unrelated cognitive abilities—was not strongly supported when methodological quality was taken into account.
It is important to note that this meta-analysis does not represent the final word on every possible cognitive benefit of musical training, nor does it address every potential outcome music training might produce. Instead, it specifically concerns transfer effects on children’s broader cognitive and academic skills. Still, as a large, quality-weighted synthesis, its central finding challenges the popular narrative considerably.
Targeted Cognitive Benefits from Creative Skill Learning
A different, more rigorously designed study highlights a cognitive benefit that did hold up under scrutiny, but it is more specific than a broad category like “creativity.” In a 2014 study published in Psychological Science, Denise Park and colleagues conducted the Synapse Project, which randomly assigned adults in their sixties and seventies to different activities for an average of 16.5 hours per week over three months. Participants learned digital photography, quilting, both, or participated in socializing without learning a new skill, or engaged in low-demand cognitive tasks alone without social contact.
The results were telling. Those in the photography and quilting groups—participants who learned genuinely new, sustained, and cognitively demanding skills—showed improved episodic memory compared to those in social-only or low-demand conditions. A follow-up analysis confirmed these findings by examining consistency of performance across participants, not just average scores.
What Drives These Cognitive Gains?
The researchers of the Synapse Project emphasized that the memory improvements were not due to the artistic nature of quilting or photography per se. Instead, the key factor was sustained, effortful, and productive engagement in learning something genuinely challenging—tasks that taxed working memory, required sustained attention, and involved problem-solving over months rather than days. Socializing alone, though valuable for wellbeing, did not produce the same memory improvements, nor did solitary, low-demand mental activities.
This insight reframes what “creative skills that are good for your brain” most plausibly means. The evidence does not support the idea that creativity itself is a special cognitive ingredient distinct from other types of demanding learning. Instead, the Synapse Project tested two specific creative skills, but its authors credit the cognitive benefits to the sustained mental effort these activities required, rather than any unique property of artistic expression.
Reconciling the Findings: Different Populations and Engagement Levels
Viewed together, the meta-analysis on music training and the Synapse Project do not necessarily contradict each other; rather, they highlight different mechanisms at work. Sala and Gobet’s null result pertains to whether music lessons—often just a fixed weekly hour during childhood—transfer reliably to broad cognitive skills. In this context, confounding factors such as family background and existing academic engagement complicate interpretations.
In contrast, the Synapse Project tested adults randomly assigned to intensive, sustained, cognitively demanding learning with rigorous comparison groups. The honest reconciliation is that the dose and quality of engagement matter more than the specific creative activity. A weekly hour of music lessons alongside a typical school routine is unlikely to reliably transform a child’s general cognition. Conversely, sixteen hours a week of sustained, difficult, novel skill acquisition, as in the Synapse Project, produced measurable memory benefits compared to less demanding alternatives.
Choosing a Skill to Learn: What Really Matters?
For adults considering a new creative pursuit primarily for cognitive benefits rather than enjoyment, research suggests that the specific activity is less important than how demanding and sustained the engagement is. While photography and quilting were the skills tested in the Synapse Project, the mechanism proposed by researchers implies that other sufficiently challenging, novel, and sustained activities—such as seriously learning an instrument as an adult, taking up pottery, or learning to code—could offer similar cognitive benefits. However, these extensions have not yet been directly tested.
Limitations and What We Still Don’t Know
The Synapse Project focused on adults in their sixties and seventies over a three-month period, and it remains unclear how its findings generalize to younger adults, shorter or less intensive engagement periods, or other creative activities. The music-training meta-analysis specifically targeted children, not adults learning new skills later in life, so these findings should not be conflated as interchangeable evidence for the same demographic.
Neither study supports the broad claim that any creative hobby, regardless of the cognitive challenge it imposes, will reliably improve memory or general cognition. Instead, the combined evidence supports a narrower, more practical conclusion: sustained, effortful engagement with genuinely new and difficult skills is linked to measurable cognitive benefits. Creative skills are one well-tested way to provide such cognitive demand, but they are not unique in this regard.
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