You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human (9 page)

PART II

Music in adult life

Chapter 4

The musical adult

‘Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.’

MARY KAY ASH

The next three chapters of the book explore the role of music in adult life. Wherever we go and whatever we do with our adult life, music will be there playing an often subtle but important role, whether we choose to play it or not. We will explore how this blanket of music impacts on our working life and our reactions to the commercial world (Chapter 5) as well as our hobbies, pastimes, and romantic life (Chapter 6). These two chapters will show how music can change the way we feel about, react to and interpret the world around us.

First I will lay the groundwork for an exploration of musical adulthood by taking a look at the full spectrum of adult musical ability from high expertise through to those individuals who live with a specific music learning difficulty, and finally the majority of us, who would not think of ourselves as ‘experts’ but who enjoy music and who are, in fact, incredibly musical.

We will explore the relationship between normal music exposure and subsequent learning (including after lessons) and brain/behaviour development. In reviewing the full spectrum of the adult musical brain we will see that music learning does not stop once we reach adulthood; it goes on and can be boosted for as long as we live, whether you are a famous
concert pianist, an enthusiastic music listener, a new learner, or simply an occasional radio surfer. This chapter will reveal the musical adult in all its variety.

Music changes the brain

At the time of writing I teach at a university in London on a course that explores ‘Music, Mind and the Brain’. Of all the lectures I give, the most eagerly anticipated is about how musical training may change the brain – I think that this particular lecture is so popular because many of my students are musicians and they want to hear all about their special brains!

You might fall into that category too, and if so then you are about to hear all about the kind of changes that may have happened to your brain as a result of your hours of hard work. Even if you are not a musician, the story of how musicianship realtes to the brain is still fascinating because it is symptomatic of a remarkable faculty that we all share: our brain’s ability to change, grow and heal throughout our lives.

Plasticity is one of the best tricks that our brain possesses; the ability to reorganise pathways and synapses in response to environmental pressures and biological needs. This ability explains how we survived as a species for so long, as brain plasticity is essential for learning from experience and for recovery from brain illness and injury.

We do not yet know exactly how brain plasticity occurs: it could be that neurons get bigger, synapses get denser, cell support structures grow, cells die more slowly than usual, nerve conduction speeds increase, and so on and so forth.
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Any or all of these mechanisms could be behind each example of brain plasticity. What matters is that the brain is incredibly flexible and continues to develop all the time.

We have a critical period of maximal brain plasticity when we are young, where we learn the most we will ever learn in such a small period of time. We now know, however, that the
idea that our minds become rigid and set in stone after this point is simply untrue; your brain remains plastic for your entire life. That means that we are never too old to learn and for the brain to change – and learning to play an instrument or sing is a powerful way to stimulate the mind.

We can pick up just about any skill as an adult, and in doing so we can mould our brains. One of the most famous studies in this area was a study of London taxi drivers
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which found that drivers who had a greater knowledge of London streets had a larger hippocampus; this part of the brain is associated with important functions for a London cabbie, such as memory, navigation and spatial awareness.

Even more convincing for the idea that adult learning influences brain structure are studies that teach adults a new skill from scratch and then watch to see if the brain changes over time and with practice. How about juggling? A study that scanned people’s brains before and after just seven days of learning a new juggling trick found an increase in the density of a visual motor area of the brain.
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How much can music change the way that your brain looks and works? There is little evidence so far that just listening to lots of music causes any significant changes to brain structure or function. By contrast, there is a long history of exploring the changes that may occur as a result of musical training. In Chapter 2 we looked at how after only a short period of music training a child’s brain starts to re-shape itself in response to its new musical input and skills.
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In this chapter we will first look at the end result of all this practice – the brains of adult musicians – and see where and how they are different.

After looking at the brains of musicians we will explore how typical musical brain development can go awry, in a special population of adults who appear to be born ‘tone deaf’. Hearing more about these people and their experiences will
help set the musical skills that the rest of us have as adults, and may take for granted, into true perspective. Finally, we will look at the evidence that just about all of us can potentially change our brains by taking up music, at any age.

Music learning and the brain

In the 19th century, scientists began to accept the notion that the primary causes of human behaviour lay in the brain. Previous to this, the soul and the heart were popular candidates. Towards the end of the 19th century, scientific interest arose in studying the brains of eminent people in order to determine what might have caused their abilities and expertise. Post-mortem brains of choice included those of mathematicians, poets and, of course, musicians.

Sigmund Auerbach (1860–1923) was a German surgeon who was fascinated by the structure of the brain. In his lifetime he contributed a great many works on the treatment of brain tumours, nerve damage and epilepsy. In the early 20th century he conducted a series of post-mortem brain dissections on five famous musicians of the time: the conductors Felix Mottl and Hans von Bülow, music teacher Naret Koning, the singer Julius Stockhausen and the cellist Bernhard Cossmann. Dr Auerbach wanted to see where and how their brains were different to the average one that he saw every day on his operating table.

Auerbach concluded that all five individuals had enlargements in the middle and back areas of the superior temporal gyrus. Let’s break down that brain name. The brain is covered in folds of grey matter and a ‘gyrus’ is the upper part of a fold or bulge, as opposed to the crevice or gap (known as a ‘sulcus’). The temporal lobe is behind your ears (on both sides) and is primarily interested in processing sound. ‘Superior’ means upper part (as opposed to ‘inferior’ which would be the lower part). So to recap, the superior temporal gyrus is a
bulge in grey matter that lies in the upper part of the temporal lobe. In the five dead musicians Auerbach found a much bigger bulge than he was used to seeing.

He also noted other differences that happened in some individuals but not others, such as increases in grey matter in the posterior (back) part of the frontal lobe (behind your forehead). All in all, the brain differences he saw were not extensive, but remember we are talking about things that could be seen with the human eye and a magnifying glass.

Later studies backed up Auerbach’s findings, including a study by Dorothée Beheim-Schwarzbach in 1974 on the postmortem brains of three musically talented individuals in the famous Vogt archives, a collection of brains amassed by the German neurologist Oskar Vogt, his wife Cécile, and their co-workers between 1928 and 1953.

Fortunately, the development of brain imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the 20th century made it possible to obtain three-dimensional, high-resolution images of the living brain instead of having to wait around for famous musicians to pass away. This development also meant
we could look for the first time at more than just a handful of brains at once, allowing the use of statistical approaches to help objectively quantify differences in brain structure between experts and non-experts. Finally, as with the jugglers, these types of study make it easier to determine whether the unique anatomical features that we see in musicians’ brains are the result, rather than the cause, of skill acquisition.

In this next section we’ll look at a number of the differences that have been found in musicians’ brains when compared to those of non-musicians. Excellent extensive reviews on this subject are available in the scientific literature;
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here I pick out some of the largest and most consistent findings.

Two short but important points before we dive in. First, there is no consistent definition of a ‘musician’ in the literature – different studies tend to include people with different amounts of training and experience so there is no magic level that must be reached in order to be labelled as a musician. Typically, however, we are talking about people who have at least ten years’ training and who are still actively playing on a regular basis.

The second point is that in most cases we can’t say for sure whether musical training
caused
the changes that we see. It may be that any brain differences existed or were preprogrammed before the person started their training and this was one of the reasons that they went on to be a good musician.

The only long-term study at the time of writing that has scanned the brains of children before and after they started music lessons found evidence that the brain changes observed were not there at the start but instead were happening as a result of the training.
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But the jury is still out on this issue so remember to take the following results with a pinch of salt – music may cause these brain differences in musicians, bring them out, or be a reaction to them. Whatever the truth, we can be sure that music training is involved.

Brain structure

The brain has two hemispheres that are held together by a series of neural fibre connections in a structure called the corpus callosum. We need to be able to transmit information between the hemispheres quickly and effectively in order to coordinate activity in the left and right sides of the brain, including movements from the left and right sides of our bodies. The corpus callosum facilitates this connectivity.

One of the earliest (1995) brain imaging studies of musicians and non-musicians used in-vivo magnetic resonance morphometry. This method allows scientists to map the surface area of the corpus callosum using images from an MRI scanner. Gottfried Schlaug and colleagues
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reported that the corpus callosum was significantly larger in 30 professional, right-handed keyboard and string musicians compared to 30 non-musically trained individuals that were matched for age and gender. Moreover, the difference was driven mostly by people who started their musical training before age seven. The conclusion was that the need for complex bimanual coordination when playing keyboard or string instruments necessitates growth in the brain area that facilitates communication between the hands.

Not only is the corpus callosum bigger in some professional musicians, it also has a different way of working. You get faster transfer of all kinds of information (including visual) between the hemispheres in musicians compared to non-musicians.
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As well as facilitating information transfer between the hemispheres, the corpus callosum has to maintain a certain level of inhibition or blocking. It is a delicate balance: too much information crosses the hemispheres and the messages from each side may get confused; too little and there is less effective coordination.

You might predict that musicians would have more corpus callosum inhibition because of the increased information
from the two hands and the need to maintain independent control of movement. In fact, the inhibitory circuits in musicians have been shown to be
less
effective in this brain area, meaning that there is less blocking of signal transfer.
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One theory to explain this situation is that professional pianists in particular have gained such high levels of independence between the messages from the two hands that they can afford to let down the floodgates and share information freely between the sides of the brain without fear of confusion and breakdown in performance.

The corpus callosum is not the only point of connectivity in the brain. The whole structure is covered in white matter pathways whose job it is to transfer signals between different parts of the brain. There is evidence that musical training has an impact on the structural integrity of some of these white matter pathways, perhaps making them stronger.
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