The brains of musicians have more powerful structural and functional connections in contrast to the brains of non-musicians, irrespective of innate pitch ability, based on research from JNeurosci.
Years of musical practice contour the brain in spectacular ways. A minority of musicians — together with Mozart and Michael Jackson in their careers — also possess absolute pitch, the capacity to identify a tone without a frame of reference. However, it remains unclear how this capacity impacts the brain. More research will be required to get a better understanding of the process.
From the largest sample to date, Leipold et al. compared the brains of professional musicians, a few with absolute pitch and some without absolute pitch, to non-musicians. To the team’s surprise, there were not any strong differences between the brains of those musicians with and those without absolute pitch capability; instead absolute pitch may form the brain in much more subtle ways. In comparison to non-musicians, both had stronger operational connectivity — the dispersed activity of brain areas — in the auditory regions of both brain hemispheres. Musicians had stronger white matter connections between auditory areas and lobes involved in a variety of sorts of high-level processing. Musicians that started their training at a younger age had more powerful structural connections compared to those whose training started later in their life. These results reveal how experience shapes the brain, especially early in life, and how improved musical abilities are reflected within our mind.
Paper title: Musical Expertise Shapes Functional and Structural Brains Networks Independent of Absolute Pitch Ability
About The Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world’s largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 37,000 members in more than 90 countries and over 130 chapters worldwide.