[no abstract available]

NARRATIVE REVIEW: Musician's dystonia is a task-specific movement disorder, which manifests itself as a loss of voluntary motor control in extensively trained movements. In many cases, the disorder terminates the careers of affected musicians. Approximately 1% of all professional musicians are affected. In the past, focal dystonia (FD) was classified as a psychological disorder. Over time, the ...

BACKGROUND Psychological abnormalities, including anxiety, have been observed in patients with musician's dystonia (MD). It is unclear if these conditions develop prior to MD or if they are psychoreactive phenomena. METHODS Psychological conditions were studied in 44 professional musicians with MD, 45 healthy musicians, and 44 healthy nonmusicians using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI...

INTRODUCTION Tinnitus is one of the most reported auditory symptoms among musicians and can negatively influence their ability to work, sometimes even more severely than hearing loss. OBJECTIVES To analyze the occurrence of tinnitus and other auditory symptoms in musicians who play different instruments. METHODS One hundred musicians participated by answering a questionnaire on instrument p...

As one major line of research on brain plasticity, many imaging studies have been conducted to identify the functional and structural reorganization associated with musical expertise. Based on previous behavioral research, the present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of superior verbal memory performance in musicians. Participants with and witho...

Previous behavioural research has shown that spatial attention is bilaterally represented in musicians, possibly reflecting more equal neural development between the hemispheres. We investigated this theory electrophysiologically with another measure that has shown asymmetry, interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT). Sixteen right-handed musicians and 16 matched non-musicians responded to stimuli ...

Working memory (WM) performance in humans can be improved by structuring and organizing the material to be remembered. For visual and verbal information, this process of structuring has been associated with the involvement of a prefrontal-parietal network, but for non-verbal auditory material, the brain areas that facilitate WM for structured information have remained elusive. Using functional ...

Musical expertise is associated with structural and functional changes in the brain that underlie facilitated auditory perception. We investigated whether the phase locking (PL) and amplitude modulations (AM) of neuronal oscillations in response to musical chords are correlated with musical expertise and whether they reflect the prototypicality of chords in Western tonal music. To this aim, we ...

The music genre of jazz is commonly associated with creativity. However, this association has hardly been formally tested. Therefore, this study aimed at examining whether jazz musicians actually differ in creativity and personality from musicians of other music genres. We compared students of classical music, jazz music, and folk music with respect to their musical activities, psychometric cre...