To play an instrument, you must engage several brain systems at once. The musician looks, listens, touches and interprets. Because music activates so many areas of the brain, it is psychologically beneficial. Someone who has exercised her mind by playing music for many years will improve her ability to think both critically and creatively.
Music stimulates the brain and can help strengthen memory. Listening to it before a test may help a student's performance, according to Psychology Today. Because music can help individuals recall memories, psychologists use it to help patients with Alzheimer's disease. Even Alzheimer's patients who have lost much of their learned knowledge can sometimes remember how to play an instrument.
Music therapy is a branch of psychology that uses music to treat mental disorders and physical afflictions. As music is shared among cultures, it is universally familiar and therefore a non-threatening mode of therapy. Many genres of music are used in music therapy, and patients are often able to select the music that will be used in their sessions. Music therapists incorporate music listening, interpretation, improvisation and performance into their sessions in an attempt to help patients cope with crises, anxiety, and many other physical and emotional issues.
Music stimulates the unconscious and can bring to consciousness otherwise dormant images and thoughts. Music therapy patients sometimes enter into dream-like states where they experience symbolic, non-verbal thoughts. Psychiatrist Dunja Degmecic explains that "the forms of both dream work and musical thinking are largely similar ways of approaching and understanding the human unconscious, which is largely dominated by symbolic processes."