"Musical Training Shapes Brain Development" reports medical study

Commentary from Lutz Jäncke (Thanks to Dr. Ellen Taliaferro for sharing this study with me)

This study supports my own interpretation of the brain's capability for experience-dependent influences on brain anatomy and function. In concrete, this study demonstrates that 6-year-old children receiving instrumental musical training for 15 months not only learned to play their musical instrument but also 

showed changed anatomical features in brain areas known to be involved in the control of playing a musical instrument. This is the first longitudinal study demonstrating brain plasticity in children in the context of learning to play a musical instrument. 

One of the major questions in cognitive neuroscience is whether the human brain can be shaped by experience. 

In order to examine use-dependent plasticity of the human brain, mostly cross-sectional studies are undertaken comparing subjects with specific skills with appropriate control groups. A classical approach is to compare highly 

skilled musicians, sportsmen, or subjects with other exceptional skills (e.g. synesthesia) with control subjects using neuroanatomical and neurophysiological measures (please see refs [1] and [2], on which I am an author, and refs [3,4]). Using this approach, several anatomical differences have been identified which can be attributed to the specific training influences these particular subjects have experienced. However, although these cross- sectional studies have uncovered several important findings, cross-sectional approaches are not valid enough to 

attribute the discovered between-group differences entirely to different learning influences. The only experimental approach which is suitable to more validly identify experience-dependent influences in humans is the longitudinal experimental approach. Using this approach, the authors of this paper have examined 31 children (with a mean age of 6 years) during the course of a 15-month period. Fifteen of these kids received musical instrument training (a weekly half-hour training outside the school system) while the 16 remaining kids did not attend these classes. However, all kids received the regular music lessons in their school, including playing with drums and bells. Thus, the 15 kids receiving keyboard lessons only differed in this particular feature. It turned out that these kids showed increased brain volumes in several brain areas after 15 months. Most of these brain areas are part of the cortical motor system. There were also structural changes in the auditory system.

Taken together, this study is the first longitudinal study in children demonstrating structural changes in children receiving instrumental musical training. Thus, this study sheds new light on the plasticity of the human brain. Faculty of 1000 Medicine: Evaluations, Dissents and Author responses for: [Hyde KL et al. Musical training shapes structural brain development.

J Neurosci 2009 Mar 11 29 (10) :3019-25] 2009 Apr 1. 

www.f1000medicine.com/article/id/1157746/evaluation

RELATED ARTICLES 

Articles 

A Computerized Test Battery Sensitive to Mild and 

Severe Brain Injury Implantation of a Responsive Neurostimulator Device 

In Patients with Refractory Epilepsy 

Your Brain on Bach

Thanks to my friend Glenda Neely, a Vanderbilt alum for sending me this excellent article:

Musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and use both the left and right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.  

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking—the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

Vanderbilt researchers Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course.

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box,’” says Folley, MA’02, PhD’06, a postdoctoral fellow. “We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

The two groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores. The musicians each had at least eight years of training and played a variety of instruments, including piano, woodwind, string and percussion. Overall, researchers found that the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

Research subjects were shown a variety of household objects and asked to make up new functions for them, and were also given a written word association test. Musicians provided more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test—something the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. Musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In a second experiment the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects, but this time they also were asked to perform a basic control task while activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain-scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS.

“When we measured subjects’ prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate-uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes,” Folley says. “Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the fact that the musicians invented more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information.”

One possible explanation for the musicians’ elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley says. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

Folley and Park are investigators in the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Park is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and a member of the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience. Gibson, BA’04, was an undergraduate student and research assistant in the psychology department at the time of the study. Their research, which was partially supported by a Vanderbilt University Discovery Grant, will appear in the journal Brain and Cognition.

Music and the Brain...in Paris!

Well, I'm always looking for connections between my life, my brain, and the music I love. My brain has really been enjoying Paris and all the sights, smells, tastes and sounds! There are certain senses that are activated in a certain way, only in Paris. These have come back to me powerfully on this trip to Paris which is my first extended visit since 1987. Before that, it was 1974! Anyway, take a look at these photos and you'll see what my 5 senses have been processing over the past 11 days! Enjoy!