Can learning piano change a child's brain?

Learning the piano is often described as “good for the brain.” But is there actually scientific evidence behind that claim?

The answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

Research using brain imaging has found that extensive musical training is associated with measurable differences in the brain, including changes in the organisation of white-matter pathways and the structure of grey matter. Other controlled studies have found that learning piano can improve particular cognitive abilities.

But there is an important distinction: piano lessons are not a magic way to make a child more intelligent.

What the research does suggest is that learning an instrument provides the developing brain with an unusually demanding combination of activities—reading symbols, coordinating both hands, listening carefully, remembering information, controlling movement, correcting mistakes and constantly adapting to feedback.

And there is evidence that the brain responds to this training.

The brain is not simply something we inherit

One of the most fascinating properties of the human brain is its ability to change in response to experience.

This ability is known as neuroplasticity.

When a child repeatedly performs a complex skill, the nervous system adapts. Connections between brain regions can become more efficient, and the organisation of neural pathways can change as skills are learned and practised.

Playing piano is an excellent example of a highly complex learned skill.

A pianist doesn't simply press keys.

A child reading a piece of music has to translate visual symbols into movements, coordinate the fingers of both hands, monitor the sound being produced, remember what comes next and adjust performance when something goes wrong.

That makes piano playing a remarkably rich form of brain training.

But what does brain imaging actually show?

Piano practice and the developing brain

One of the most relevant studies for children was published by Sara Bengtsson and colleagues in Nature Neuroscience in 2005.

The researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a type of MRI that can provide information about the organisation of white-matter pathways in the brain. They examined people who had practised piano during childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

The researchers found positive relationships between the amount of piano practice and the organisation of white-matter fibre tracts, with different patterns associated with different periods of life.

The findings were particularly interesting for childhood. Greater childhood piano practice was associated with differences in several white-matter regions, including the pyramidal tract, an important pathway involved in voluntary movement. The authors concluded that long-term piano training during developmental periods may be associated with regionally specific plasticity in myelinating pathways.

This is significant because it provides evidence that musical training is associated not merely with improved musical ability, but with measurable differences in the physical organisation of the brain.

However, we should be careful about what the study proves.

It was not a randomised experiment in which children were assigned to piano lessons versus no piano lessons from the beginning. Therefore, we cannot conclude that every difference observed was caused by piano practice. Children who practise extensively may differ from other children in other ways as well.

Nevertheless, the relationship between extensive childhood practice and white-matter organisation is consistent with the broader concept of experience-dependent neuroplasticity.

What about the brain's grey matter?

Another influential study came from Christian Gaser and Gottfried Schlaug, published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2003.

The researchers used voxel-based morphometry to compare the brains of professional musicians, amateur musicians and non-musicians.

They found differences in grey-matter volume in several regions involved in motor, auditory and visuospatial processing. The professional keyboard players showed particularly pronounced differences compared with the other groups.

Why might this happen?

Consider what a pianist repeatedly asks the brain to do.

The brain must:

• interpret visual information from musical notation;
• translate that information into precise finger movements;
• coordinate the two hands;
• process the resulting sounds;
• remember musical patterns;
• anticipate what comes next;
• detect mistakes;
• and make corrections, often within fractions of a second.

It is therefore unsurprising that long-term musical training is associated with differences in brain regions involved in movement, hearing and visual-spatial processing.

But again, there is an important scientific caveat.

The Gaser and Schlaug study was observational. The researchers themselves noted that some differences could potentially reflect innate predispositions rather than musical training alone.

In other words, we cannot simply say:

“These musicians have bigger or different brain regions, therefore piano lessons caused them.”

The evidence is suggestive, but causation requires stronger experimental designs.

Can piano training actually improve cognitive abilities?

This is where controlled experiments become particularly valuable.

A 2022 randomised controlled trial by Jennifer Bugos and Yan Wang examined piano training in older adults.

The study involved a 16-week training programme, with participants receiving two 90-minute piano-training sessions per week. The researchers compared piano training with computer-assisted cognitive training and a no-treatment control group.

The results were interesting.

Both the piano-training and computer-training groups showed improvements in working memory and processing speed compared with the no-treatment controls.

But piano training produced an additional effect: participants improved in verbal fluency, particularly category switching, compared with both the computer-training and no-treatment groups. The researchers interpreted this as a potential advantage of piano training for a component of executive functioning.

The participants also showed improvements in general and musical self-efficacy.

This is useful evidence because it was a randomised controlled trial rather than simply a comparison between people who already happened to play piano and people who did not.

But it also illustrates why we need to be precise.

These were older adults, not children.

So the study cannot be used to claim that piano lessons make children better at working memory or verbal fluency.

What it does demonstrate is that learning piano can produce measurable changes in cognitive performance under controlled conditions—even later in life.

A larger, longer piano study

More recent research has examined the effects of piano training over an entire year.

In a randomised controlled trial involving 153 healthy older adults, Melanie Mack, Damien Marie, Matthias Kliegel and colleagues compared a piano-practice group with an active music-listening control group.

Participants received weekly 60-minute lessons and daily practice over 12 months. Their cognitive flexibility was tested at several points during the study.

The researchers found clear improvements in pianistic performance in the piano group. Both groups also showed improvements in several measures of cognitive flexibility, with the piano group showing somewhat greater improvements for some measures, particularly aspects related to mixing costs and sustained cognitive control.

This is an important finding—but again, it should not be turned into an exaggerated claim about children.

The participants were approximately 70 years old.

What the study tells us is that the brain remains capable of adapting to musical training even much later in life. It does not directly establish the same effect in childhood.

And the benefits may not be purely cognitive

The same research programme has produced another interesting result.

In 2025, Florian Worschech and colleagues published a randomised controlled trial involving 156 healthy older adults who were assigned either to piano practice or music listening for 12 months.

The piano group showed improvements in several dimensions of quality of life, including psychological, physical and environmental quality of life. The researchers also found associations between changes in quality of life and changes in grey-matter volume in parts of the brain's reward circuitry, including the amygdala and pallidum.

Once again, these participants were older adults, so this isn't evidence that piano lessons improve a child's quality of life.

But it adds to a broader picture: active music-making appears to engage much more than the ability to produce music.

So, what does this mean for a child?

The strongest evidence specifically relevant to childhood comes from the research on brain structure and white-matter organisation.

Bengtsson and colleagues found that the amount of childhood piano practice was associated with the organisation of white-matter pathways, including the pyramidal tract.

That does not mean that a child who takes piano lessons will automatically become smarter.

Nor does it mean that more hours of practice necessarily produce proportionally greater intelligence.

What it does suggest is something more subtle—and arguably more interesting:

The developing brain adapts to the skills that a child repeatedly practises.

And piano happens to require a remarkable combination of skills.

Reading

The child learns to decode a visual symbolic system and convert it into action.

Hearing

The child has to listen critically to pitch, rhythm, timing, dynamics and tone.

Movement

The fingers must perform highly precise movements, often independently between the two hands.

Memory

Musical patterns, sequences and movements have to be retained and recalled.

Attention

The child has to maintain attention while simultaneously monitoring several streams of information.

Error correction

A wrong note isn't simply an error—it becomes information. The child hears it, identifies the problem and attempts to correct it.

Planning

Music requires anticipating what comes next rather than simply reacting to what has already happened.

This combination makes instrumental learning a particularly demanding cognitive-motor activity.

Does piano make children smarter?

This is where we should resist the temptation to overstate the science.

There is not enough evidence to promise parents that piano lessons will increase their child's general intelligence.

The studies discussed here do not establish that.

The evidence is much stronger for saying that musical training can be associated with, and in some circumstances contribute to, changes in specific neural structures, motor abilities and cognitive processes.

That distinction matters.

A child doesn't need to become a musical prodigy for piano lessons to be worthwhile.

The goal doesn't have to be turning the child into the next Mozart.

The value may lie partly in the process itself: repeatedly challenging the brain to coordinate perception, movement, memory, attention and feedback.

There is another important lesson in the research

Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of these studies is that the effects of musical training aren't limited to professional musicians.

The research on brain structure certainly includes highly trained musicians, and therefore shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that a few casual piano lessons will produce the same anatomical differences.

But the controlled intervention studies show something important: people can learn new musical skills and show measurable changes in performance and, in some domains, cognition even when they begin training much later in life.

If the brain remains adaptable in older adults, it is reasonable to be interested in what structured musical learning can do during childhood, when the brain is undergoing substantial development.

But “reasonable to be interested” is not the same as “scientifically proven.”

That distinction is worth preserving.

So, should your child learn piano?

If your child enjoys it, the scientific evidence gives us good reason to take the activity seriously.

Not because piano is a secret shortcut to higher IQ.

Not because every child who learns scales will develop a dramatically different brain.

And not because playing Mozart automatically improves mathematics.

Rather, piano is an unusually rich form of learning that repeatedly exercises several systems of the brain at once—and research has found measurable relationships between musical training and brain structure, as well as experimentally observed improvements in certain cognitive abilities.

Perhaps the best conclusion is therefore a modest one:

Learning piano may not “supercharge” a child's brain. But it gives the developing brain something extremely valuable: a complex skill to practise, refine, remember, coordinate and continually improve.

And neuroscience increasingly suggests that the brain changes in response to exactly these kinds of sustained experiences.

The evidence at a glance

The bottom line

The scientific evidence does not justify telling parents:

“Piano will make your child smarter.”

It does justify saying something more scientifically defensible:

Learning and practising piano is associated with measurable changes in brain structure and function, and childhood appears to be an important period in which musical training can interact with developing neural pathways.

The fascinating question isn't whether piano turns children into geniuses.

It is whether the act of learning a demanding musical skill helps shape the developing brain in useful ways.

The evidence increasingly suggests that it can.

Sources

• Bengtsson, S. L., Nagy, Z., Skare, S., Forsman, L., Forssberg, H., & Ullén, F. (2005). Extensive piano practicing has regionally specific effects on white matter development. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1148–1150. DOI: 10.1038/nn1516.
• Gaser, C., & Schlaug, G. (2003). Brain structures differ between musicians and non-musicians. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 9240–9245. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.23-27-09240.2003.
• Bugos, J. A., & Wang, Y. (2022). Piano Training Enhances Executive Functions and Psychosocial Outcomes in Aging: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 77, 1625–1636. DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbac021.
• Mack, M., Marie, D., Worschech, F., et al. (2025). Effects of a 1-year piano intervention on cognitive flexibility in older adults. Psychology and Aging, 40, 218–235. DOI: 10.1037/pag0000871.
• Worschech, F., Marie, D., Sinke, C., et al. (2025). Quality of life in older adults is enhanced by piano practice: Results from a randomized controlled trial. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1550, 239–254. DOI: 10.1111/nyas.15397.

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