Musicians - from karaoke singers to professional cello players - are better able to hear targeted sounds in a noisy environment, according to new research that adds to evidence that music makes the brain work better.
"In the past ten years there’s been an explosion of research on music and the brain," Aniruddh Patel, Senior Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said today at a press briefing.
Most recently brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language.
Language is a natural aspect to consider in looking at how music affects the brain, Patel said. Like music, language is "universal, there’s a strong learning component, and it carries complex meanings."
For example, brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois.
But for people without a trained ear for music, the ability to make these patterns decreases as background noise increases, experiments show. Musicians, by contrast, have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up.
At the same time, people with certain developmental disorders, such as dyslexia (诵读困难), have a harder time hearing sounds amid the continuing loud confused noise - a serious problem, for example, for students straining to hear the teacher in a noisy classroom.
Musical experience could therefore be a key therapy for children with dyslexia and similar language-related disorders, Kraus said.
In a similar vein, Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has found that stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak can be trained to say hundreds of phrases by singing them first.
In research also presented today at the AAAS meeting Schlaug demonstrated the results of intensive musical therapy on patients with lesions (损伤) on the left sides of their brains, those areas most associated with language.
Before the therapy, these stroke patients responded to questions with largely incoherent sounds and phrases. But after just a few minutes with therapists (治疗师), who asked them to sing phrases and tap their hands to the rhythm, the patients could sing "Happy Birthday," recite their addresses, and communicate if they were thirsty.
"The underdeveloped systems on the right side of the brain that respond to music became enhanced and changed structures," Schlaug said.
Overall, Schlaug said, the experiments show that "music might be an alternative medium for engaging parts of the brain that are otherwise not engaged.\
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