Gaser and Schlaug (2003)
From Psy3241
Presentation by: Brittany Pease & Matt Wentworth
Contents |
Introduction
• Playing a musical instrument usually requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance. • Unclear if repetition of a skill over time could create changes in brain structure. • They applied an optimized method of voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to see whether structural brain differences exist between professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non musicians that differed in musician status and practice intensity.
Methods & Materials
• 20 male professional musicians, 20 male amateur musicians, and 40 non-musicians participated in this study; ages 18-40. • All musicians were keyboard players • Professional musicians were considered performing artists, full-time music teachers, or full-time conservatory students with an average of at least 1 hour of daily practice. • Amateur musicians were defined as played a musical instrument regularly but had a profession outside of music. • Non-musicians were defined as never played an instrument. • Images of the whole brain were analyzed using a VBM for analysis of local gray matter volume differences • Registered each image to the International Consortium for Brain Mapping template • Using a modified mixture model cluster analysis, normalized images were corrected for nonuniformities in signal intensity and partitioned into gray and white matter, CSF, and background. • Applied a series of morphological erosions and dilations to the segmented images. • The resulting gray and white matter images were smoothed with a Gaussian kernel • To search for gray and white matter differences between the 3 groups, voxel-by-voxel t tests using the general linear model were used
Results
• A significant positive correlation between musician status and increase in gray matter volume were found in perirolandic regions including primary motor and somatosensory areas, premotor areas, anterior superior parietal areas, and in the inferior temporal gyrus bilaterally • Gray matter volume was highest in professional musicians and lowest in non-musicians • There was a positive correlation with musician status seen in the left cerebellum and left inferior frontal gyrus. • There were no areas showing a significant decrease in gray matter volume in relation to musician status. • The location of the maximum voxels and the extent of the clusters varied slightly from the main analysis
Discussion
• The results suggest a pattern of differences in the gray matter distribution between professional musicians, amateur musicians, and non-musicians that involve motor, auditory, and visual regions. • Structural differences were found in the left Heschl’s gyrus. • No differences between musicians without absolute pitch and non-musicians in PT size or right-left asymmetry. • The superior parietal lobe was found to play an important role in sight-reading • A strong increase in gray matter volume related to musician status in the inferior temporal gyrus was found • There are 2 explanations for the lack a finding in the white matter: 1) most of the presumed plastic changes do occur in the cerebral gray matter or 2) the VBM method is insensitive to white matter differences • A direct comparison between professional and the non-musicians showed subtle differences in the extent and maximum signal values. • Hypothesis was supported that a monotonic relationship between musician status and gray matter volumes and the cerebellum may be sensitive for showing a monotonic effect. • This study showed strong links between specialized skills and certain brain structures
Future Research
Would there be structural brain differences between a professional musician who has been playing a musical instrument since childhood and one that started playing in early adulthood?
