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Practice that piano for a collosal callosum

 

One of my favourite pieces of music-playing research shows that regularly playing the piano has a direct impact on the size of your corpus callosum, which is a bundle of nerve fibres which connect the two halves - hemispheres - of your brain. 

It all makes good sense: both hands have to make fine movements, which as reported previously grows your motor cortex. But more importantly here, those movements, involving nerves in both hemispheres, have to be tightly coordinated. That requires the rapid exchange of information between both hemispheres, and a big chunky corpus callosum is the superhighway for that information.



The original work is from a paper by Sara Bengtsson at the University of East Anglia [Bengtsson,05] I particularly love the nice clear graph which shows the cumulative effect of the piano practice which subjects put in throughout their lives:

The x-axis shows the hours of practice in thousands  (no-one said it would be easy!

This TED-ed video based on the same paper gives more details in a really clear and compelling way -  much recommended.

Now, go and practice!



Reference

[Bengtsson, 05] Extensive Piano Practicing Has Regionally Specific Effects on White Matter Development, 
  • October 2005
  • Nature Neuroscience 8(9):1148-50, 
    • DOI:10.1038/nn1516, 
  • Source
  • PubMed

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