Playing a rhythm-based game for eight weeks helps non-musicians become better at remembering recently seen faces. This suggests that learning to play an instrument could improve short-term memory for non-musical tasks.
There have been several studies showing that musicians tend to have better short-term memory than non-musicians when it comes to music-related tasks, such as remembering musical sequences. It is less clear whether these benefits carry over to non-musical tasks or to non-musicians who are learning to play an instrument, and how these changes might actually be seen in the brain.
Brainwave data recorded before and after the training showed an increase of activity in the right superior parietal lobe, a brain region associated with encoding visual information and attention. This suggests, says Zanto, that the rhythm training is improving the brain’s ability to focus attention on a task to get it ready for converting what you are doing into