Anyone that knows me also knows that I am absolutely obsessed with music. I cannot walk anywhere without my huge headphones clamped on my head, so 99% of the time, I will not hear you if you try to call my name (something I am trying to work on!). Naturally, I found a very interesting fMRI study regarding brain activity in pianists; a study that not only did I deeply appreciate because I've been playing piano since I was six, but because one can see from the research just how complex an instrument it is. 12 students were asked to play the right hand of a piece of music, and the fMRI scan showed primary activation of the frontoparietal cortical region. The truly incredible part of the study was the fact that the researchers acknowledged the importance of mental rehearsal for a pianist and implicated brain regions in this as well, which were similar to the the music performance task, with the addition of the bilateral activation of the extrastriate cortex. Music is so wonderfully complex that I found it amazing that they were able to even quantify the expression of music in the brain, especially the rehearsal aspect. Many times before I performed I ran the piece over and over in my mind, something that I always felt was a personal habit. To see this quantified in a study was amazing.
I thought that your blog post was extremely interesting, because I am also a musician and would love to learn more about what happens neurologically when we spend hundreds of hours on our respective instrument. It's really interesting to know what happens and what mechanisms allow musicians to do what they do.
ReplyDeleteI also have been playing piano since I was very young! It's pretty cool to see what brain activity is responsible for practicing (something one has to do a LOT of). Its also really cool to see that you don't have to be physically practicing, you can be mentally rehearsing (something that also applies to me when I'm thinking about choreography for dance), to activate this part of the brain.
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