The received wisdom is that adults cannot learn music like children, that the window closes at 12, that the best you can do at 32 is play a few chords passably. This is broadly wrong, and specifically wrong in a way that says more about how children are taught than about neuroscience.
Children learn slowly because they cannot yet articulate what they need to learn, and because their teachers cannot ask them questions. Adults can. In two years I have progressed further than most childhood-lessons adults I know, and the reason is I can tell my teacher exactly what I do not understand and she can address it directly. There is no ego-management, no gold-star hunting, no parental disappointment in the picture. Just weekly practice and slow, real improvement.
What surprises me is not the improvement. It is the feeling. Adult beginners are frequently promised that learning music “grows your brain,” which is true and boring. What nobody told me is that at 32 you can experience the specific joy of being genuinely bad at something, which is a feeling you lose access to somewhere in your twenties. Being a beginner is a state I had not visited in a long time, and it turns out I missed it more than I knew.