Music and the Effects on the Brain

            

According to several studies, it is believed that studying music is beneficial for brain development. News articles, one after another, are being published stating the benefits musical training has on brains, especially for children. This fact has been proven decades ago, but the fact that only a short period of musical training in the early stages of life can have ever-lasting effects on the brain is a new development.

          Music has a universal and persistent effect on the brain and nervous system. Several experiments have proven that lifelong exposure and experience with music increases encoding of speech and music. It also increases audiovisual interaction. With this, it can be concluded that musicians possess a focused neural system, dedicated to transfiguring audio and visuals in the brainstem. Sight and sound are the neural gateway to the brain. Recent studies have shown that music affects automatic processing that takes place early in the processing stream. Music also affects subcortical sensory circuitry.

A few weeks ago, Nina Kraus, a professor at Northwestern University, attended a seminar class at Loyola University, and spoke about her research. She has been working for years researching the neural encoding of speech and music and its plasticity. Her lab at the university has published countless papers proving that musical training changes how the brain interprets and processes sound. One of the methods employed in the research is figuring out how the auditory system functions by looking at the electrical responses of the brainstem after it has heard sounds. These sounds could be music, speech, etc. However, a particular sound found in speech that is difficult to treat is the alteration between vowels and consonants. Kraus’ research has shown that musicians’ brains’ can quickly respond to these alterations, especially compared to non-musicians’ brains’. A quick response to these transitions shows that the auditory input is efficient and well-processed. Eventually, this leads to the enhancement of language abilities.

In a new study, Kraus has compared the responses of the brainstem to consonant-vowel transitions within three groups: adults with no musical training or experience, adults with very little training, or adults with a sufficient amount of training. To make the experiment more specific, these adults must have had their musical training during their childhood years. On average, it has been around 50 years, for most of these adults, since they ended their musical training.

          

Although it has been quite a while, around 50 years, since these adults have ended their music training, their responses to consonant-vowel transitions varied compared to those without any musical training, as well as within the groups of those with musical experience. The adults with the most musical training had the fastest reactions to consonant-vowel transitions. The adults with no musical training had the slowest reactions.

This graph represents the data of the group average brain responses to consonants. The grey line represents the group of people with no musical training, the orange line represents those with little musical training, and the blue lines represent those with some musical training.

The data from this experiment has proven that the effects of musical training are so strong that they continue even after the training has ended. One may be curious as to how this occurs. Usually, we envision our brains as being able to learn and apply something, but once we stop practicing it, we lose it. This is evident in the use of languages, playing an instrument, and even playing sports. However, this is not the case with musical training. What happens during musical training is that the brain processes for sound have been changed, and because we use our auditory system and sound processing every day, the strong neural responses to audio continues even long after musical training.

Another recent study displayed that people with musical training in the early stages of life (age seven and under) have thicker gray matter in the brain than those that started later. This conclusion was found in a study conducted by Yuxin Wang at the Beijing Normal University. What was different with this study, however, was the fact that not all of the participants were musicians at the time. A lot of them started their musical training before the age of seven, but unfortunately, discontinued. Although this occurred, it can be seen that the musical training that was carried out early in their childhood resulted in long lasting effects in the nervous system.

References

Kraus N. (2013) Facing the Music: Musicianship's effect on the Brain. Canadian Hearing Report (official publication of Canadian Academy of Audiology), All Things Central, 18: 21-22.

Volume 18 of the Canadian Hearing Report

Wang, Y., Xei, L., Zhu, B., Liu, Q., and Dong, Q. (2013). It matters when you start: The age of onset of music training predicts brain anatomy.  Program No. 765.07, Neuroscience 2013 Abstracts, San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, Online.

White-Schwoch, T., Carr, K.W., Anderson, S., Strait, D.L., and Kraus, N. (2013). Older adults benefit from music training early in life: biological evidence for long-term training-driven plasticity. J. Neurosci. 33, 17667–17674.