Study says musicians' brains are different
By Joann Loviglio, Associated Press, 05/08/01
PHILADELPHIA -- If years of childhood piano lessons left you with the ability to play little more than "Chopsticks," the reason might be deep inside your brain.
Professional musicians who started playing at a young age show marked differences in the structure of their brains from non-musicians, according to a study presented Tuesday at the American Academy of Neurology's meeting.
Scientists aren't sure, however, whether the "musician's brain" exists at birth and draws the person toward their innate musical gifts -- or if those endless hours in childhood of practicing scales and performing finger exercises make the brain develop that way.
In a study conducted at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, neurologists Gottfried Schlaug and Gaser Christian took highly detailed magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, brain scans of 15 professional musicians and 15 non-musicians. They found that the musicians had significantly more gray matter in parts of the brain that correlate to motor and auditory skills.
"The question is whether the continuous motor activity and the continuous musical immersion the musician undergoes is inducing these structural differences or whether the musician is born with these differences," Schlaug said.
"There are some indications from prior studies that those who started at an earlier age and practiced a lot show more pronounced differences than those who start later and do not practice enough," he said.
For example, earlier research has shown that rats put through repetitive tasks like running through a maze had different brain structures than rats that were not put through such exercises.
The musicians studied were male, mostly Boston-area keyboard players between the ages of 19 and 35 who started playing before the age of 8. The musician and non-musician groups were matched by age, size, verbal skills and right- or left-handedness.
Among the brain regions where the study's musicians had more gray matter were the motor cortex and the cerebellum, which control coordination and muscle movement.
"It would be natural to presume if this is true for music, it would apply in some way or another of any number of abilities, from the ability to be a successful artist, or journalist, or any number of other disciplines," said Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
The human brain is roughly made of 40 percent gray matter and 60 percent white matter. Both make up the complex structure of nerve cells which comprises the brain.
The gray matter, on the brain's outer layer, is the "thinking part" of the brain -- the area where the processing of information occurs. The more gray matter, the more cognitive and motor facility a person has.
The non-musicians showed "very few and very small" spots in the brain where they had more gray matter than their musician counterparts, but the musicians had slightly more gray matter overall, Schlaug said. Both of those observations are being studied, but researchers cannot explain those differences, he said.
"We don't know if a person is good at music, and those parts will become phenomenally developed, that other parts will then remain more primitive," Pascual-Leone said.
"Think of Mozart: In terms of many aspects of his life that were not about music, he was quite a disaster," he said.
The American Academy of Neurology, an association of more than 17,500 neurologists and neuroscientists, is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia.
