How music warps our brains

Like a fragrance to the nose, music to the ears is something fleeting, an instantaneous experience with emotional spikes, but nothing solid for eternity. You'd think. However, heard and made music stimulates our brain so much that it leaves behind changes recognizable by the eye.

Since the turn of the millennium, a field of science has been establishing itself that has neat explosive potential in this matter: Musical neuroscience is concerned with what happens in the brain when someone listens to music or plays music themselves. The so-called "plasticity of the brain" is of particular interest here. Our brains are anything but glib, but therefore still rigid organs. On the contrary, in response to our daily challenges, they are in a state of constant remodeling and, to a certain extent, deform in the areas that are under particular strain. The deformations occur because heaps of new gray and white matter are produced here, which takes up space (and increases the performance of these brain regions). Plasticity comes about especially when the brain convolutions are properly kneaded (intensive practice) and when this happens in a favorable phase (especially between the ages of 5 and 7 - but beyond that, the general social context is also important). Plasticity is by no means ruled out for adults, as musical training can produce significant differences: in tests comparing three groups, individuals with little practice did not differ from those who did not play an instrument at all, while those with a lot of practice obtained significantly different scores.

Understandably, neurological processes are the focus of studies in the relevant research, but we at Instrumentor are interested in another aspect: interestingly, brain plasticity is not only measurable in those regions directly related to music, but it also appears in all sorts of other convolutions and was detectable in tests after the relatively short period of about 14 months. The effects on daily life are amazing: In an older study, just 10 minutes of Mozart was enough to let test subjects finish 10 points higher in an IQ test on spatial reasoning and math problems than the comparison groups (who in each case listened to other music or no music at all before the test) - whereupon thought was given to giving newborns a classical music CD in each case.

But even more exciting are findings that are related not to listening to music, but to music making : Research has found improvements that affect verbal expression, foreign language learning, verbal memory and spatial awareness, as well as mathematical problem-solving skills and social skills in general. Spending years intensively playing an instrument improves fine motor skills, coordination skills, and general alertness. Singing in a choir, playing in an orchestra or band trains social skills and honed sense of nonverbal communication as well as nuances of expression - it has even been suggested that making music together was an essential part of that evolutionary process that resulted in our civilization. And performing in front of an audience even teaches you en passant how to deal with pressure, stress and exposure.

So practicing an instrument gives you a bouquet of benefits and is by far more than just a time sink and something you do to get an extra nudge from your grandparents at Christmas. It helps one to deal with problems in a creative solution-oriented way, promotes multitasking, rapid switching between different tasks, and precision, both in sequences of movements and in expressions.

An eternal cross of much such research remains that it can hardly reliably separate cause and effect. So one is still unsure whether everything might not be the other way around, and people with all these great attributes might not simply have a stronger tendency toward musicality. But whichever way you look at it, the prospects are flattering: anyone who learns an instrument can either look forward to leading a vastly improved life in the future - or boast that they belong to that fantastic group of people whose wonderful nature draws them irresistibly to music.

More on how music makes the brain fit, here.

Sources:

Hyde, Krista L.; Lerch, Jason; Norton, Andrea; Forgeard, Marie; Winner, Ellen; Evans, Alan C.; Schlaug, Gottfried (2009): The Effects of Musical Training on Structural Brain Development. A Longitudinal Study. In The Neurosciences and Music III: Disorders and Plasticity, Annual New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, pp. 182-186.

Miendlarzewska, Ewa A.; Trost, Wiebke J. (2014): How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables. In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7: 279.

Moore, Emma; Schaefer, Rebecca S.; Bastin, Mark E.; Roberts, Neil; Overy, Katie (2014) : Can musical training influence brain connectivity? In Brain Sciences, 4, 405-427. doi:10.3390/brainsci4020405

Rauscher, Frances E.; Shaw, Gordon L.; Ky, Katherine N. (1993): Music and spatial task performance. In Nature, 365, p. 611.