For the study, the research team led by neuroscientist Lutz Jäncke from the University of Zurich used imaging methods to analyze the neural networks in the brain of 50 non-musicians and 103 professional musicians, music students and well-trained amateur musicians. According to this, the auditory areas of the right and left brain hemispheres of the musicians worked much more synchronously and were more closely connected via nerve tracts than in laypeople. They also had a much more pronounced “cable system” between the hearing centers and various lobes of the brain that process complex information.
“We suspect that years of training have synchronized the brain regions of professional musicians,” said Jäncke in an interview with Keystone-SDA. The learned coordination between hearing and motor activities – such as running the fingers over the piano keys in a targeted manner – leaves welcome traces in the brain. According to Jäncke, musicians also do well in memory exercises and, according to earlier observational studies, are less likely to develop dementia.
It was also shown that musicians who started their training at a young age had better connections than the late bloomers. “The study shows that talent and aptitude can be teased out through early training,” said Jäncke. Especially outstanding classical musicians would have started making music almost without exception in childhood.
Perfect pitch remains a secret
Mozart, Bach and Michael Jackson are said to have had it: perfect hearing, which only a tiny fraction of people have. It allows each tone to be determined straight away without a reference tone. How this special ability is reflected in the neural networks of the human brain, however, remains a mystery that the researchers were unable to crack in the current study.
In their experiment, they divided the musicians into two groups: 52 had perfect pitch, 51 not. But the brains of both groups of musicians showed strikingly similar structures. “That surprised us very much,” said Jäncke.
One reason could be that the group of musicians with perfect pitch was too large and effects only show up when they are divided into subgroups. The researchers are currently developing tests to better distinguish absolute musicians from one another. So they hope to coax their secret from the rare gift.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1985-20.2020
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