The musicians whom we listen

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[Image: Nick White/The Image Bank/Getty]

Music can be a transformative experience, especially for your brain. Musicians brains respond more symmetrically to the music they listen to. And the size of the effect depends on which instrument they play.

People who learn to play musical instruments can expect their brains to change in structure and function. When people are taught to play a piece of piano music, for example, the part of their brains that represents their finger movements gets bigger. Musicians are also better at identifying pitch and speech sounds brain imaging studies suggest that this is because their brains respond more quickly and strongly to sound.

Other research has found that the corpus callosum the strip of tissue that connects the left and right hemisphere of the brain is also larger in musicians. Might this mean that the two halves of a musicians brain are better at communicating with each other compared with non-musicians?

Not your forte?

To find out, Iballa Burunat at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and her colleagues used an fMRI scanner to look at the brains of 18 musicians and 18 people who have never played professionally. The professional musicians all of whom had a degree in music included cellists, violinists, keyboardists and bassoon and trombone players.

While they were in the scanner, all of the participants were played three different pieces of music prog rock, an Argentinian tango and some Stravinsky. Burunat recorded how their brains responded to the music, and used software to compare the activity of the left and right hemispheres of each persons brain.

Part of the corpus callosum connecting the two brain hemispheres was indeed larger in musicians. The team also found that musicians brains seemed to fire more symmetrically when they listened to music the activity in the left and right hemispheres was a much closer match than that of the non-musicians.

The brains of keyboard players seemed to respond more symmetrically than those of musicians who played string instruments. Burunat thinks that this is because the playing the keyboard requires a more symmetrical use of your hands.

How clef-er

Keyboard players have a more mirrored use of both hands and fingers when playing, says Burunat. Although playing a string instrument also requires fine motor skills and hand coordination, it enforces a strict asynchrony between left-hand and right-hand finger movements.

It is surprising that the effect is instrument-specific, says Marcus Pearce at Queen Mary, University of London. Its one thing to see differences in brain activity when theyre playing their instruments, but theyre just listening, he says. The perception of music is changed with musical training.

The team think the two halves of a musicians brain may be better at communicating than those of a non-musician. But they dont know if this enhanced connection will give musicians an upper hand when it comes to other skills that involve using two hands, such as typing. Or even whether other people who use both hands almost equally would show similar brain patterns.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138238