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By Sandra Blakeslee
New York Times News Service
Practicing the piano
for long hours in childhood alter the anatomy of the brain, German
scientists have reported. Brain areas that encode the sounds made
by a piano are larger in skilled musicians than in people who have
never played a musical instrument.
The discovery, described in a recent issue of the journal NATURE,
was made after scientists put musicians and others into a magnetic
brain imaging machine pointed at the auditory cortex, where sounds
are processed. This part of the brain contains cells, called neurons,
which are sensitive to different sound frequencies.
Neurons that fire in response to the same frequency tend to cluster
into little islands, forming a kind of sound frequency map in the
auditory cortex.
Animal research has shown these islands of
specialized cells are not static, said Christo Pantev, a neuro-scientist
at the University of Munster in Germany who helped carry out the
experiment. The cells can contract after injury or expand after
learning occurs.
In the study, researchers examined images of the auditory brain
regions of 20 trained musicians and 13 non-musicians, all of whom
were in their 20’s. The musicians had played instruments for
15 to 21 years and now practiced 10 to 40 hours per week.
When piano notes were played to both groups, the response to the
piano sounds was 25 percent higher (measured as magnetic fluxes)
in musicians than in nonmusicians. But when the same frequencies
were heard as beeps rather than as piano notes, their brains looked
the same.
The researchers said that skilled musicians use more neurons for
processing sounds from a piano or better synchronize those sounds
because of their training. Furthermore, the younger the musicians
started playing their instruments, the greater their response to
piano notes.
Musicians with perfect pitch or absolute relative pitch showed no
differences. The increased response to piano tones was the same
in those who played piano, woodwinds or stringed instruments, although
most of the musicians said that they had received early training
on the piano.
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