Research On Brain Plasticity Induced By Musical Training

Musical training has emerged as a useful frame work for the investigation of training-related plasticity in the human brain. Learning to play a musical instrument requires complex multimodal skills involving the simultaneous perception of the auditory, visual, somatosensory modalities, as well as the motor system. Previous evidence indicates that musical production involves motor areas in conjunction with other functional systems such as the somatosensory, auditory, visual, emotional and memory loops. We thus hypothesized that musicians would exhibit a higher level of intrinsic activity intensity in these multi-sensory and motor systems compared with non-musicians during the resting state. The improvement of cognitive, emotion and linguistic functions has been reported widely in musicians. However, it is unclear whether there is a common foundation for the improvement of various cognitive functions.This study conduct the investigation on brain plasticity induced by long-term music training of musician based on resting state functional magnetic resonance brain imaging techniques and the analysis method of brain network. From the view of network hierarchy : in terms of the primary network, this study discover that significantly increased functional connectivity among the motor and multi-sensory cortices in musicians. These findings indicate enhanced functional integration among the lower-level perceptual and motor networks in musicians, and might reflect functional consolidation(plasticity) among the primary network function resulting from long-term musical training, involving multi-sensory and motor functional integration. In terms of advanced cognitive-related network, the markedly enhanced functional connectivity in local regions and increased functional integration of the salience network in musicians,this finding indicated the salience network as a key target of musical training and might help to propose a new hypothesis that the improvement of integration of the salience network would contribute to the common foundation of the excellent higher-level cognitive processes in musicians. In addition, the increased functional connectivity between left insula and right anterior TPJ in musicians might be in response to long-term musical training.In the resting state,this study further confirm the fundamental impact of long-term musical training on brain function. The findings will help us a better understanding of the different ways of how musical training shape the different brain functional networks,and it is meaningful to neural plasticity research in cognitive neuroscience and music therapy in clinical application.