Skip to main content

Want a bigger motor cortex? Play violin for one side, piano for both sides now...

 New Scientist (15/5/21) reports on the work of Stanford Uni's David Eagleman, a neuroscientist seeking to build new senses - such as helping deaf people develop a new sense of 'hearing' via a wrist band which vibrates in time with sounds.

Eagleman's work rests on the way the brain has been found in recent years to develop physically, building new connections and capabilities in response to repeated activity. This is usually known as neuroplasticity, where the synapses between the brain's neurons develop. Eagleman argues that this is too narrow a term as even the wiring within (rather than just between) neurons can develop, and prefers the term "livewired" to represent the way in which billions of neurons can reconfigure their circuitry every second.

So what has this to do with making music? As a stark example of neuroplasticity Eagleman reports that when the brain of a violinist is viewed via a brain scan, one side of the motor cortex is larger, because the violinst is using one hand with great precision. The part of the motor cortex responsible for driving movement in that hand enlarges in response. Likewise, a pianist needing fine, high precision movement of both hands will have enlargement of both sides of the motor cortex.

Make music, grow your brain.

My son giving both sides of his motor cortex a good workout

Update 31May21: I've been digging into Prof. Eagleman's book Livewired: The inside story of the ever-changing brain for the original research to back up this finding. The source papers are:1,2.

The feature of the brain affected is the gyrus: a little Ω- shaped wobble in one of the external folds of the brain. In a non-musician the gyrus runs straight. For a violinist, whose left hand does the detailed work, the gyrus on the right side has a puckering detour. For pianists, the gyri on both sides have the puckering detours.

  1. Elbert T et Al (1995), Increased finger representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players, Science 270: 305-6
  2. Bangert M, Schlaug G (2006), Specialization of the specialized in features of external human brain morphology, EUR J Neurosci 24: 1832-34


 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

You don’t need perfect pitch to benefit from music making

Music making does you good at any level, from beginner to pro. A recent study (Leipold et al., 2021) examined a large (n=151) group of both musicians and non-musicians. They confirmed previous results that making music strengthens the connectivity between the hemispheres of the brain (see Practice that piano for a collosal callosum ). Interestingly these effects were consistent between the groups of musicians and non-musicians. Even better news, while half of the musicians studied had absolute pitch (commonly known as perfect pitch), there was no significant difference in the effects of music making on the brain functional and structural networks between the two groups. Incidentally, did you know that most birds only have absolute pitch? This sounds like a good thing, but in fact it means that if you train them to recognise a tune, and then play the same tune in a different key, they no longer recognise it. By contrast, primates (humans are primates) have been shown to have specialist

Five good reasons to make music

Struggling to pick up your instrument to practice? Not sure if making music is for you?  Here are five good reasons to take the plunge, backed up by sound science: Playing an instrument as a child leads to a sharper mind in old age : those who had played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on tests to measure memory and other cognitive abilities than those with no musical background. 1 Higher intelligence: Children who received music lessons for one year gained an average of 2.7 IQ points more than a control group of children who did not over the same period, with particularly large increases in verbal ability, spatial ability, processing speed and attention. 2 Participating in making music for older people can result in lower mortality rates 3 ; lessen deterioration in physical health 4 and reduce the use of medication. Playing the piano exercises the heart as much as a brisk walk 5 . Making music develops your brain : extensive instrumental music trai

Study says learning a musical instrument increases your IQ by 10 percent (?)

 A study of more than 4,600 volunteers has been reported recently . The volunteers chose a new hobby from a list including knitting, exercising and learning an instrument.  Apparently the "highest IQ increase came from the music-makers, averaging a score increase of 9.71 percent." and this was achieved after just six months. I'll be digging into the details of this study to establish its robustness.