A new Finnish research team have found that practising an instrument can make you a better communicator by altering the brain.

Sound, and by extension music, is a primal form of communication. We can express emotion, tell stories, inspire empathy, trust and compassion through the sounds we make, and perhaps because of this music is one of the most immediately visceral and communicative of all the arts. Numerous studies from around the world have shown that music can have a powerful impact on our psychology, but in recent years closer attention has been made to the effect music can have on our physiology. Some studies have shown that listening to music can have a unique effect on the brain, particularly in activating areas associated with emotion, motivation, planning and reward. Now research conducted by a team at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland suggests that not only does music have the power to produce strong emotional responses, but that it can also rewire the circuitry of our brains if practised regularly.

The study, which uses data going back as far as 2009, showed that long periods of practice increased the size of the...