Ry Rhythmicity Enhances Movement and Speech Motor Control in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

The study of music as a complex sensory pattern involving cognitive, sensorimotor and a ffective processes in the human nervous system has received increasing attention in behavioral and brain research in the last decade. The high performance-processing features of music, its complex perceptual demands, the interplay between intrinsic talent and capacity to learn, and its strong and universal emotional functions have made it a fascinating and intricate, yet very useful, model for studying brain functions with reference, for example, to cognitive learning, cortical plasticity, pattern perception, temporal processing in the human nervous system, motor control, and emotional response. A special role in the study of music perception must be given to rhythm as the most essential structural and organizational element of music. Thus, attention is being focused increasingly on the role of rhythm in cognitive functions such as attention and memory, as well as in motor performance and learning, within the study both of music and of behavior and brain function outside the musical sphere. We have been studying the effect of auditory rhythm on motor performance, in musi-