[Dixielandjazz] Do highly trained musicians think differently?

[Stephen G Barbone]

For the musicians on the list.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average  
people

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often  
felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think  
differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists  
have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use  
a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the  
left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the  
average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is  
currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

"We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look  
at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'," Folley  
said. "We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their  
daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences  
in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated  
brain activity."

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians'  
elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be  
able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

"Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and  
integrating competing information from both hemispheres," Folley said.  
"Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with  
both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good  
at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left- 
hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with  
their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right  
hemisphere."

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking,  
which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended,  
multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more  
divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music  
students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non- 
musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The  
musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments  
they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion  
instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education,  
sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative  
thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the  
first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a  
variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions  
for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The  
musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word  
association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to  
enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested  
more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical  
counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify  
new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control  
task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using  
a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS.  
NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an  
individual is performing a cognitive task.

"When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while  
completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians  
had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we  
equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance,  
this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses;  
there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about  
this information," Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ  
scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that  
intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

Source: Vanderbilt University