Scans of the brains of child
musicians before and after musical training have
yielded compelling evidence that proficiency and
skill relies on hard graft, not innate genius.
Earlier studies have shown that adult musicians
have different brains to adult non-musicians.
But the latest results settle arguments about
whether the brain differences were there from
birth, or developed through practice.
"This is the first paper showing differential
brain development in children who learned and
played a musical instrument versus those that
did not," says Gottfried Schlaug of Harvard Medical
School.
Schlaug's team tested musically untrained six-year-olds
from the Boston area, 15 of whom then received
weekly keyboard lessons for 15 months, and 16
of whom didn't. When they compared magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) scans taken before and after for
both groups, they found that auditory and motor
areas of the brain linked respectively with hearing
and dexterity grew larger only in the trainee
musicians.
At the end of the training period, the musicians
also outperformed the others at specific tasks
related to manual dexterity and discrimination
of sounds. But the two groups were matched on
more distantly related skills such as arithmetic.
Schlaug says that the same pupils are being followed
in case it takes longer for these more "distant"
skills to emerge.
Reversible changes?
Other researchers welcomed the findings. "This study shows, through a 'before
and after' design, that a particular set of learning
activities is both the necessary and sufficient
causal explanation for resulting differences in
brain characteristics," says John Sloboda of Keele
University in the UK, and a long-time champion
of practice over genius.
Like muscle, brain tissue can change with "exercise",
he claims, so a valid new question is whether
the changes would reverse without practice.
Eleanor Maguire of University College London
says it would be interesting to find out if the
changes occur in adult musical trainees. In 2000,
Maguire's scans of the brains of London cabbies
showed they had abnormally large hippocampi, the
area of the brain vital for navigation.
Journal reference: The
Journal of Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5118008.2009)
