Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development

Hyde, Krista L.; Lerch, Jason P.; Norton, Andrea; Forgeard, Marie; Winner, Ellen; Evans, Alan C.; Schlaug, Gottfried

doi:10.1523/jneurosci.5118-08.2009

Cited by 753 publications

(650 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…It has been suggested that musicians exhibit distinct auditory (42,43), verbal (44), and broad cognitive (45) abilities and/or systems. In particular, musical training, whether singing or playing an instrument, requires developing perception-action coordination, which may promote unusually strong connections between perception and action systems in the brain (46,47).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Lee

Blake

Kim

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Predictive influences of auditory information on resolution of visual competition were investigated using music, whose visual symbolic notation is familiar only to those with musical training. Results from two experiments using different experimental paradigms revealed that melodic congruence between what is seen and what is heard impacts perceptual dynamics during binocular rivalry. This bisensory interaction was observed only when the musical score was perceptually dominant, not when it was suppressed from awareness, and it was observed only in people who could read music. Results from two ancillary experiments showed that this effect of congruence cannot be explained by differential patterns of eye movements or by differential response sluggishness associated with congruent score/melody combinations. Taken together, these results demonstrate robust audiovisual interaction based on high-level, symbolic representations and its predictive influence on perceptual dynamics during binocular rivalry.music | binocular rivalry | multisensory interaction | visual awareness | audio-visual congruence V ision can be confusing, particularly when the retinal images inaugurating vision are ambiguous or underspecified with respect to their origins (1, 2). In some situations, confusion can be resolved by reliance on contextual information (3), prior experience (4), expectations (5), and/or implicit knowledge about structural regularities in our visual environment (6). In other situations, however, confusion resists resolution, in which case one can directly experience the dynamical nature of competition as conflicting perceptual interpretations vie for dominance (7). Among the visual phenomena exhibiting this behavior, none is more compelling than binocular rivalry (8).When the two eyes view dissimilar monocular stimuli, stable binocular single vision gives way to interocular competition, characterized by unpredictable fluctuations in visual awareness of the rival stimuli (9, 10). Rivalry offers a way to study the inferential nature of perception when the brain is confronted with conflicting sensory evidence (11,12). Within this context, recent studies imply that rivalry dynamics are governed by influences related to the likelihood of competing perceptual interpretations, such as motor actions (13), affective connotation (14-16), familiarity (17), and concomitant sensory input from other modalities (18-20). Here we examined the limits of susceptibility of rivalry to predictive influences by asking whether binocular rivalry dynamics depend on multisensory congruence between abstract representations familiar to individuals with expertise in that domain of abstraction. The domain we selected was music, for three reasons: (i) musical notation is symbolic; (ii) only people versed in music can decipher that notation; and (iii) melodic structure can be experienced via sight or sound. ResultsExperiment 1: Extended Tracking of Binocular Rivalry. Experiment 1 was implemented as a conventional binocular rivalry task in which participants...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Lee

Blake

Kim

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Moreover, musicians -experts in the musical domain-exhibit functional and structural changes in the brain, what also has driven music into a device for studying brain plasticity (Hyde, Lerch, Norton, Forgeard, Winner, & Evans, 2009;Schlaug, 2006;Münte, Altenmüller, & Jäncke, 2002).…”

Section: Cognitive Neuroscience Of Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition

Burunat

Alluri

Toiviainen

et al. 2014

Cortex

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Sivumäärä -Number of pages 70Tiivistelmä -Abstract Working memory (WM) is at the core of any cognitive function as it is necessary for the integration of information over time. Despite WM's critical role in high-level cognitive functions, its implementation in the neural tissue is poorly understood. Preliminary studies on auditory WM show differences between linguistic and musical memory, leading to the speculation of specific neural networks encoding memory for music. Moreover, in neuroscience WM has not been studied in naturalistic listening conditions but rather in artificial settings (e.g., n-back and Sternberg tasks). Western tonal music provides naturally occurring motivic repetition and variation, recognizable units serving as WM trigger, thus allowing us to study the phenomenon of motif-tracking in the context of real music. Adopting a modern tango as stimulus, behavioural methods were used to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course predictor of WM neural responses. This predictor was then correlated with the participants' functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal obtained during a continuous listening condition. Neural correlates related to the sensory processing of a set of musical features were filtered out from the brain responses to music to aid in the exclusive recruitment of executive processes of music-related WM. Correlational analysis revealed a widely distributed network of cortical and subcortical areas, predominantly right-lateralized, responding to the WM condition, including ventral and dorsal areas in the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and limbic areas. Significant subcortical processing areas, active in response to the WM condition, were pruned with the removal of the acoustic content, suggesting these music-related perceptual processing areas might aid in the encoding and retrieval of WM. The pattern of dispersed neural activity indicates WM to emerge coherently from the integration of distributed neural activity spread out over different brain subsystems (motoric-, cognitive-and sensory-related areas of the brain).Asiasanat -Keywords working memory; cognitive neuroscience; music; musical motifs; functional magnetic resonance imaging ( Lashley was attempting to identify the locus of memory within the cortex, and, to do so, first trained rats to run mazes, and then removed various cortical regions. He allowed the animals to recover and tested the retention of the maze-running skills. To his surprise it was not possible to find a particular region corresponding to the ability to remember the way through a maze. Instead all the rats which had had cortex regions removed suffered some kind of impairment, and the extent of the impairment was roughly proportional to the amount of cortex taken off. Removing cortex damaged the motor and sensory capacities of the animals, and they would limp, hop, roll, or stagger, but somehow they always managed to traverse the maze. So far as memory 'as concerned, the cortex appeared to be equipotential, that is, with all regions of eq...

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“…Musicians are an ideal population to investigate the neuroanatomical underpinnings of exceptional sensorimotor skills (Schlaug 2001;Munte et al 2002;Hyde et al 2009;Herholz and Zatorre 2012;Luo et al 2012). Some researchers have shown specialized anatomical and functional features within musician groups (Elbert et al 1995;Bangert and Schlaug 2006), which have been used to support the interpretation that specialized long-term skill training of particular instruments can lead to instrumentspecific adaptations (Stewart 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Adaptation of Descending Motor Tracts in Musicians

2013

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Between-group comparisons of musicians and nonmusicians have revealed structural brain differences and also functional differences in motor performance. In this study, we aimed to examine the relation between white matter microstructure and high-level motor skills by contrasting 2 groups of musicians with different instrumentspecific motor requirements. We used diffusion tensor imaging to compare diffusivity measures of different corticospinal motor tracts of 10 keyboard players, 10 string players, and 10 nonmusicians. Additionally, the maximal tapping rates of their left and right index fingers were determined. When compared with nonmusicians, fractional anisotropy (FA) values of right-hemispheric motor tracts were significantly higher in both musician groups, whereas left-hemispheric motor tracts showed significantly higher FA values only in the keyboard players. Voxel-wise FA analysis found a group effect in white matter underlying the right motor cortex. Diffusivity measures of fibers originating in the primary motor cortex correlated with the maximal tapping rate of the contralateral index finger across all groups. The observed between-group diffusivity differences might represent an adaptation to the specific motor demands of the respective musical instrument. This is supported further by finding correlations between diffusivity measures and maximal tapping rates.

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Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development

Cited by 753 publications

References 62 publications

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Melodic sound enhances visual awareness of congruent musical notes, but only if you can read music

Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition

Differential Adaptation of Descending Motor Tracts in Musicians

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