everlasting pitch is the power toaccurately name any musical note you get wind . It ’s a gift possess by just one in 10,000 people , and it can only be learned during a critical menses before age 7 . Now , scientists have discovered that acommon psychiatric medication can resume that learning power in adults , even if they ’ve never had musical training .
premature research has found that the epilepsy drugvalproateallowed adult mice to pick up habit that are unremarkably unimaginable to grow after youth . So Harvard professor Takao Hensch and his team gave the drug to a group of grownup men with no musical grooming , then enquire them to do a series of on-line pinna - training exercises for two weeks . Those who take the drug showed pitch improvement that was significantly better than those deal a placebo , evidence that the drug restored the mastermind plasticity normally lose after childhood .
The implications for find out are vast . In an interview with NPR , Dr. Hensch points out the potential applications beyond music :

There are a routine of instance of critical - full point eccentric development , terminology being one of the most obvious ones . So the idea here was , could we come up with a way that would reopen plasticity , [ and ] paired with the appropriate grooming , allow grownup brains to become young again .
Though in the same consultation , he cautions that experiments in this direction should be undertaken very carefully :
If we ’ve shaped our identities through ontogeny , through a critical period , and have correspond our brain to the environment in which we were raise , acquiring spoken language , culture , identity , then if we were to erase that by reopen the critical geological period , we run quite a risk as well .

Maybe someday , with the help of a pill , we ’ll all haveElla Fitzgerald ’s perfect pitch . [ Frontiers in Systems NeuroscienceviaNPR ]
figure : Shutterstock /CURAphotography
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