Musicians and music making as a model for the study of brain plasticity

Abstract

Playing a musical instrument is an intense, multisensory, and motor experience that usually commences at an early age and requires the acquisition and maintenance of a range of sensory and motor skills over the course of a musician's lifetime. Thus, musicians offer an excellent human model for studying behavioral-cognitive as well as brain effects of acquiring, practicing, and maintaining these specialized skills. Research has shown that repeatedly practicing the association of motor actions with specific sound and visual patterns (musical notation), while receiving continuous multisensory feedback will strengthen connections between auditory and motor regions (e.g., arcuate fasciculus) as well as multimodal integration regions. Plasticity in this network may explain some of the sensorimotor and cognitive enhancements that have been associated with music training. Furthermore, the plasticity of this system as a result of long term and intense interventions suggest the potential for music making activities (e.g., forms of singing) as an intervention for neurological and developmental disorders to learn and relearn associations between auditory and motor functions such as vocal motor functions.

Keywords: Auditory–Motor Mapping Training (AMMT); Melodic Intonation Therapy; auditory; brain plasticity; diffusion tensor imaging; morphometry; motor.

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Figures

FIGURE 1

Corticospinal tracts of both hemispheres (green; dark gray in the print version = left) show a child nonmusician (A), an adult nonmusician (B), and an adult musician (C). A comparison of A and B shows the maturational changes that the corticospinal tract undergoes from childhood to adulthood. A comparison of A/B to C shows the additional adaptation of this important motor tract in an adult keyboard player whose requirements are to make fast, precise, and coordinated fine finger movements.

FIGURE 2

Mapping of sounds to finger actions. Activation spots show significant brain actions when subjects listened to short melodies that they had learned to play on a keyboard subtracted from a condition that had subjects listen to short melodies that were equally familiar, but were never mapped to keyboard actions. It was concluded that the posterior inferior frontal region (Broca’s region on the left and Broca’s homologue on the right) plays a critical role in the mapping of sounds to actions. Figure is adapted from Lahav et al. (2007).

FIGURE 3

Activation pattern of an overt singing and speaking task contrasting occasional singers with professional singers. Professional singers showed additional activations in temporal, parietal, sensorimotor, and inferior frontal regions on both sides of the brain (right more than left), which was not only seen in the highly controlled singing task but also transferred to the speaking control task (for details on the fMRI task and data analysis, see Ozdemir et al., 2006).