Research notes more ways music affects brain

Music to our ears not only affects our mood and, if too loud, our hearing, but actually reaches into many different parts of our brains.

Tunes — especially those we perform ourselves — have a big influence in how our brains organize to process and filter sound, researchers have been finding.

Playing a musical instrument appears to both improve our ability to hear and our ability to focus and remember, according to two recent studies.

In one experiment, neurobiologists at Northwestern University in Chicago found that musicians have a perceptual advantage for being able to communicate in noisy environments.

Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Lab, said the 16 highly trained musicians tested were better than 15 non-musicians at picking out key elements of speech from background noise made up of babble from six different speakers. The study was published in November in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The researchers suspect that a musician's lifelong experience with "musical stream segregation" — separating competing voices and instruments from their own part during a performance — would hone the same brain functions needed to focus on a voice through a cacophony of surrounding noise.

"The implication is that musical experience strengthens biological processes that are useful for extracting meaningful signals from any noisy environment — a classroom, a boardroom and so on," Kraus said.

Laurel Trainor, director of the Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, told a gathering of acoustic scientists last fall that her team's work with preschool children found that those who had taken music lessons showed larger brain electrical responses in a number of sound-recognition tests compared to those with no music training.

She suggests that the musician advantage goes beyond just hearing skills, but also affects a number of regions of the brain tied to motor skills, memory and reasoning.

Other studies in children and adults over the years have found that merely listening to music doesn't have as much impact on the brain as making music, but there are still benefits.

Several studies have shown that listening to music can help alleviate chronic pain and reduce the need for pain medication. Other research has documented that music can help lower blood pressure, heart rate and anxiety in heart-disease patients.

Music therapy has been shown to help people who have lost speech skills due to stroke or other brain injury recover their ability to speak. But neuroscientists also report that music can help people with motor-skill deficits from stroke or diseases like Parkinson's regain balance and coordinated movement.

Israeli researchers reported earlier this year that music therapy — games with drums, singing games and listening to simple songs — can help toddlers who have received cochlear implants to recoup hearing and pick up speech skills more quickly than with speech training that does not involve music.

One brain region that imaging studies have shown is central to our reaction to music is the medial prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the eyes that's central to processing memories and emotions and assigning meaning to them.

Dr. Petr Janata of the University of California, Davis, did an experiment with a group of young adults a few years ago that imaged their brains as they listened to bits of songs from childhood. Activation of the medial prefrontal cortex was strongest if a song brought up a specific memory or emotion.

Janata also notes that this region of the brain is one of the last areas to deteriorate in people with Alzheimer's disease. This may explain why many Alzheimer' s patients can remember and sing along to tunes from their youth long after most other memories are lost.