The Victorians were right

It turns out that gaining accomplishment in playing a musical instrument really is incredibly good for you, but you have to start practicing before you are 7. Granted the test size is really small, so we should all probably take this with a grain of salt.

The researchers collected detailed magnetic resonance images of the children's brains at age 6 and again at 9. Of the original group, six children faithfully practiced at least 2.5 hours a week in the time between the scans. In these budding musicians, a region of the corpus callosum that connects movement-planning regions on the two sides of the brain grew about 25% relative to the overall size of the brain.