More on Planum Temporale
By Josh Jenik, on 03/20/2002.
Professional musicians use their left brain more than other people when listening to music, a magnetic-resonance study suggests1. Musicians, unlike others, may process music much as a language, the result hints.
When played a recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, all the study's 28 subjects showed activity in the planum temporale, part of the temporal lobe above the ear canal that is thought to be responsible for many auditory tasks. Non-musicians' brain activity was concentrated in the right side of the planum temporale, but in musicians the left side dominated.
This left-hand brain activity was most pronounced in people who had started musical training at an early age, as well as in those with absolute or 'perfect' pitch (the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without hearing it in the context of other notes).
The age correlation suggests that musical traits such as absolute pitch are the result of childhood training, not genetic predisposition, says Takashi Ohnishi, of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, who led the study.
"Musical experience during childhood may influence the structural development of the planum temporale," he says. "Our data suggest that absolute pitch should be acquired through experience rather than innate ability."
"We've been discussing things along these lines for a while, but we never believed there was such a clear outcome as there is here," says Thomas Elbert, the neuroscientist at the University of Konstanz in Germany who was in the news last week for his study of chess grandmasters.
Take note
The left planum temporale is thought to control language processing. Although absolute pitch has a verbal element - the connection of a name with a musical tone - scientists cannot explain why musicians should rely so heavily on a language-processing region of the brain.
"The most simple explanation is that we learn to label tones by names," says Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist who studies perfect pitch at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The truth may lie deeper, he suggests. "There may be underlying principles of analysis of language and music that involve the same brain structures."
Musicians seem to process music as writers do language, Elbert agrees. "When a composer stops creating music, musicians say that he 'has nothing more to say'," he says. "They use language terminology daily to describe their way of music processing."
Whether musicians actually perceive music differently is a question that Ohnishi hopes to probe in further studies. "It is possible that musicians develop a different way of listening to music, which is inherently more analytical," he says.
- Erica Kalrreich
References
Ohnishi, T. et al.Functional anatomy of musical perception in musicians. Cerebral Cortex, 11, 754 - 760, (2001).
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