Animal experiments have found microstructural changes in the cerebellum in response to long-term motor skill activity that include an increase in the number of synapses per neuron, glial cell volume, and capillary density. The sum of those microstructural changes were reported to lead to regional volume changes. We investigated whether professional keyboard players, who learn specialized motor ...

Objective Contralateral suppression of oto acoustic emission (OAE) is referred as activation of efferent system. Previous literature mentioned about the importance of contralateral suppression of OAEs as a tool to assess efferent system in different groups of population. There is dearth of literature to explore the efferent system function in experienced musicians exposed to rock music using TE...

Musicians are highly trained to discriminate fine pitch changes but the neural bases of this ability are poorly understood. It is unclear whether such training-dependent differences in pitch processing arise already in the subcortical auditory system or are linked to more central stages. To address this question, we combined psychoacoustic testing with functional MRI to measure cortical and sub...

INTRODUCTION Musical performance is thought to rely predominantly on event-based timing involving a clock-like neural process and an explicit internal representation of the time interval. Some aspects of musical performance may rely on emergent timing, which is established through the optimization of movement kinematics, and can be maintained without reference to any explicit representation of ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Brain has a capacity for reorganization that enables use-dependent adaptations to acquire skills. Previous studies demonstrated morphometric and functional use-dependent changes in the brains of musicians. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in metabolite concentrations in the planum temporale, an area strongly associated with the processing of mu...

The ability to discriminate pitch changes (or intervals) is foundational for speech and music. In an auditory psychophysical experiment, musicians and non-musicians were tested with fixed- and roving-pitch discrimination tasks to investigate the effects of musical expertise on interval discrimination. The tasks were administered parametrically to assess performance across varying pitch distance...

BACKGROUND Formal musical training is known to have positive effects on attentional and executive functioning, processing speed, and working memory. Consequently, one may expect to find differences in the dynamics of temporal attention between musicians and non-musicians. Here we address the question whether that is indeed the case, and whether any beneficial effects of musical training on temp...