If you want evidence of how music affects the brain, it makes sense to look at the brains of those who play a lot of music — professional musicians.
Musicians
have bigger, better connected, more sensitive brains. (3)
Musicians
have superior working memory, auditory skills, and cognitive
flexibility. (4, 5)
Their
brains are physically more symmetrical and they respond more symmetrically when
listening to music. (6)
Areas
of the brain responsible for motor control, auditory processing, and spatial
coordination are larger. (7)
Musicians
also have a larger corpus
callosum. (8)
This
is the band of nerve fibers that transfers information between
the two hemispheres of the brain.
This
increase in size indicates that the two sides of musicians’ brains are better
at communicating with each other.
While
most of us aren’t professional musicians, we still listen to a lot of
music — on average of 32 hours per week. (9)
This
is enough time for music to have an effect on the brains of non-musicians as
well.
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