Published in

Wiley Open Access, Human Brain Mapping, 2(37), p. 536-546, 2015

DOI: 10.1002/hbm.23045

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The "Silent" Imprint of Musical Training

Journal article published in 2015 by Carina Klein, Franziskus Liem ORCID, Jürgen Hänggi ORCID, Stefan Elmer, Lutz Jäncke
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Playing a musical instrument at a professional level is a complex multimodal task requiring information integration between different brain regions supporting auditory, somatosensory, motor, and cognitive functions. These kinds of task-specific activations are known to have a profound influence on both the functional and structural architecture of the human brain. However, until now it is widely unknown whether this specific imprint of musical practice can still be detected during rest when no musical instrument is used. Therefore, we applied high-density EEG and evaluated whole-brain functional connectivity as well as small-world topologies (i.e., node degree) during resting state in a sample of fifteen professional musicians and fifteen non-musicians. As expected, musicians demonstrate increased intra- and interhemispheric functional connectivity between those brain regions that are typically involved in music perception and production, such as the auditory, the sensorimotor and prefrontal cortex as well as Broca's area. In addition, mean connectivity within this specific network was positively related to musical skill and the total amount of training hours. Thus, we conclude that musical training distinctively shapes intrinsic functional network characteristics in such a manner that its signature can still be detected during a task-free condition.