Why Musicians Have Better Memory

“Music has a special connection with memory,” says Dana Boebinger, a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology.

A 2017 meta-analysis that combined the results of 29 studies suggests that professional musicians might have a memory advantage. It found a “slight superiority of musicians over nonmusicians” in tasks involving long-term memory, and a larger effect for tasks involving short-term memory. Furthermore, it concluded that musicians also tend to have higher scores on tests of working memory — the all-important ability to hold numerous pieces of information in your mind at once so you can analyze and synthesize them.