Functional neuroanatomical networks associated with expertise in motor imagery

Source:
Guillot, A., Collet, C., Nguyen, V.A., Malouin, F., Richards, C., & Doyon, J. (2008). Functional neuroanatomical networks associated with expertise in motor imagery ability. NeuroImage, 41, 1471-1783. Retrieved October 31, 2011, from Scholars Portal Journals <http://simplelink.library.utoronto.ca/url.cfm/198818>

Summary:
Guillot et al. defined motor imagery (MI) as “a dynamic state during which a subject simulates an action mentally without any body movement”. They noted that MI and motor performance share the same neural networks and that MI has even been found to produce the same neuroplastic changes as physical practice, pointing to the potential benefits of MI. However, they believed that these benefits are dependent on imagery ability, which varies among individuals. Therefore, in a study that was claimed to be the first of its kind, Guillot et al. attempted to find the functional neuroanatomical networks associated with MI expertise.

First, they had to conduct a series of pre-selection tests on 50 participants to distinguish those who could reach a high level of MI performance (“good imagers”) from those who were having trouble with MI (“poor imagers”). The participants were required to perform and imagine three motor actions, during which their autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses (as measured by skin resistance) and timings were recorded. Then, they had to rate their own imagery vividness and complete the revised Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-R) as well. By combining all these measures, a global imagery score was calculated for each participant.

Based on the global imagery score, the researchers selected 28 out of the 50 participants to take part in the fMRI experiment. The 28 participants were made up of 13 good imagers and 15 poor imagers (as determined by the global imagery score). The selected participants were asked to learn a finger sequence task and they were scanned during: 1. The physical execution of this task on a four-key keyboard that recorded their accuracy and timing, 2. The imagining of the task without any movement (MI), and 3. Perceptual control condition (simply remaining motionless).

Guillot et al. found that poor imagers generally showed more widely-distributed activations than good imagers during both MI and physical execution of the task. The good imagers showed increased bilateral activations in the superior parietal lobule and the lateral premotor cortex, as well as in the left cingulated cortex, the right inferior parietal lobule and the right inferior prefrontal region. Poor imagers showed exclusive activation of the posterior cingulated and orbito-frontal cortices, as well as both the anterior and posterior cerebellar hemispheres.

Thus, the researchers pointed out that, compared to skilled imagers, poor imagers not only needed to recruit the cortico-striatal system, but also to compensate with the cortico-cerebellar system during MI of sequential movements. Since much evidence points to the fact that the cerebellum is no longer necessary when a movement sequence is well-learned, the researchers speculated that good imagers may have a more efficient recruitment of movement engrams.

Reflection:
Even though this study does not directly concern music, I still think that it is highly relevant for musicians, as MI has been noted to be the “main component of mental rehearsal” (Bangert, 2006, p. 175).

If MI can produce the same neuroplastic changes as physical practice, then mental rehearsal seems to hold great promise for performers. And if the benefits of MI simply depend on MI ability, then the logical step toward maximizing these benefits would be to try to improve one’s MI ability. The implication for performers is therefore clear: effective mental rehearsal depends on the development of good imagery ability, and especially MI ability.

But it still amazes me that MI ability could actually be measured at all. Furthermore, I marvel at the complexity of this study – at the combined use of objective neurophysiological techniques and more subjective questionnaire-based testing to differentiate good imagers from poor imagers before conducting the fMRI experiment to determine the neural networks associated with MI expertise.

And now that the result reveals that good and poor imagers indeed show different patterns of brain activations, the more important question that arises is: Would it be possible for poor imagers to receive feedback through real-time fMRI and learn to change their pattern of activations to more closely resemble that of good imagers?

More fundamentally, however, I am curious about why imagery ability should vary among individuals. Given the functional equivalence between imagery and real perception and action, could it be that good imagers are also more “perceptive” and kinesthetically aware in their everyday life and, consequently, can create more vivid and accurate mental representations? This makes sense, considering the finding that poor imagers show more widely-distributed activations than good imagers during the physical execution of the finger sequence task as well as during MI.

Or maybe there is also a genetic component to imagery ability?

It is important to note that none of the participants in the fMRI experiment were musicians or professional typists, as the researchers wanted to “eliminate subjects with pre-existing skills requiring highly coordinated finger dexterities”. So I suppose that, in the future, it would be interesting to study precisely this group of people in order to see how the MI ability of such highly skilled individuals compares with the designated good and poor imagers.


Reference:
Bangert, M. (2006). Brain activation during piano playing. In E. Altenmüller, M. Wiesendanger, & J. Kesselring (Eds.), Music, motor control and the brain. (pp. 173-184). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Music Training Causes Changes in the Brain – Catherine Applefeld Olson, Teaching Music, April 2010

Summary

In a recent study, researchers in Massachusetts found that changers are more pronounced in children who practice music more frequently. These changes did not correlate with improved performance in mathematics, spatial skills, or phonological ability. The study consisted of comparing two groups of six and seven year olds; one with musical training and one without. After three months the children who received musical instruction showed improvements in the following areas: the motor area, the corpus callosum, and the right primary auditory region.

Additionally, the changes became more pronounced over time and the musically trained students also performed better on motor sequencing tests involving patterning. The study did not detect any difference in performance in select academic areas between the two groups. The author makes a point that although the correlation between arts and other subjects is important, it does not justify music education. The arts are crucial in themselves, not because there may be a positive relationship between them and success in mathematical patterning.

Reflection

What I liked most about this article was the author’s stance on arts education advocacy. Too often we see music educators advocating for their program because musical training may benefit other subject areas (hence the “music makes you smarter” theory). But we need to support arts education as it’s own entity and promote the benefits on its own.

I think we should promote aesthetic education and the social connections inherent in music making while supporting these claims with scientific evidence. If we are going to make the claim that there is a positive correlation between playing music and success in math, then we must ensure that music stands out on its own instead of being dependent on another subject area.

David Huron. The science of sad sound. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pwqBAS9x3U

In this video, David Huron, professor at the School of Music and Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, discusses the results of a series of experiments about sad music. Their basic question was: since sadness is an emotion that people normally do not want to feel, why would anyone listen to sad music? One of the results of the experiments is that experience of sad music depends on personality. For example, a person who scores high on openness in a personality inventory is more likely to listen to sad music. Also neurotic people tend to listen to sad music. Another striking effect is the following. When a sad event occurs, the body releases prolactin, a hormone with consoling and warming effect. Huron and his colleagues found that the body releases prolactin also when people listen to sad music, though in those cases no sad event actually happenes.

A few questions and thoughts…

I am intrigued by this short video, as it makes me wonder whether hormone release is related only to sad music, or whether, and to what extent, it relates to other kinds of music as well. Moreover, do we need a minimum level of sadness to activate prolactin? In other words, is there a level under which the brain does not engage with sadness, and maybe with other emotional states as well? Another question. Assuming that the hormonal triggering is related to more than one kind of music, what happens when we listen to music that is not related to a clearly identifiable emotion? For example, if we listen to a waltz, can we generally say that we are happy? Or sad? Or? In that case, how would hormonal triggering work? On another note, I wonder whether it is possible to activate hormones by using specific music-related parameters such as frequencies, to obtain effects similar to the ones described above, for therapeutic purposes. It seems to me that the use of specific frequencies constitutes a clear and reliable way to trigger specific mechanisms. I hope that Prof. Huron and his collaborators will continue sharing with us their fascinating and enlightening work online!

Effect of different frequencies of music on blood pressure regulation in spontaneously hypertensive rats

Reference: Akiyama, Kayo and Den'etsu Sutoo. "Effect of different frequencies of music on blood pressure regulation in spontaneously hypertensive rats." Neuroscience Letters (January 2011), 487 (1), pg. 58-60. Web. 15 Nov 2011.

Review:
Mozart's music might not make you smarter, but perhaps it can lower your blood pressure. A study undertaken at the University of Tsukuba indicated that rats who were exposed to Mozart's Adagio from Divertimento No. 7 (K. 205) experienced a lowering of blood pressure for 1-8 hours.

All of the rats used in this study were twelve weeks old, male, and purchased from the same source. Before the study began, the rats were kept in a well-regulated environment for a week (room temperature, twelve hours light/twelve hours dark, plenty of food and water). At the start of the study, all of the rats who were to be exposed to music were exposed to an unfiltered recording of K. 205 which was repeated for ten hours. At the end of the ten hours, the blood pressure of the rats was observed to have been lowered.

Next, the rats were separated into three groups and exposed to music filtered by iTunes to play low frequencies (32-125 Hz), middle frequencies (250-2k Hz), and high frequencies (4k-16k Hz). Blood pressure levels stayed basically the same in the rats exposed to low frequencies, but dropped in the rats exposed to high frequencies (the same as in the unfiltered music) and middle frequencies (less than unfiltered and high frequency music). Akiyama and Sutoo believe that it may be the high frequency sounds prevalent in Mozart's music that have an effect on brain function in terms of blood pressure changes as well as alleviating symptoms of depression, epilepsy, and senile dementia.

Reflections:
There are two things one should keep in mind in interpreting the results of this study: first of all, music is only noise to animals; second, this study was funded in part by the Yamaha Music Foundation in Japan. This study is an interesting way to begin one's own exploration of the idea that blood pressure can be managed by listening to music.

As much as I appreciate what pharmaceutical drugs can do for us, I prefer not to use medication whenever possible. Many of us know people who take drugs to lower their blood pressure, and probably most of those people take other medications for other health issues as well. Some might need to add another type of pill to the cocktail to counteract the side effects of one or more of the drugs their doctors prescribe. This gets expensive and can be dangerous.

Could we treat high blood pressure with music instead of pills? I'm all for hearing a doctor say, "take two sonatas and call me in the morning."

Fascinating Rhythm

Source: Sacks, Oliver. (2008). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Revised and Expanded). Toronto: Vintage Canada.

Summary:

Chapter 19 - Keeping Time: Rhythm and Movement

Musicophilia is a compilation of stories that deal with various topics relating to music and the brain. It was put together by Oliver Sacks, a practicing physician and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre. The stories are told with a balance of intellect and emotion, and the book is as entertaining to read as it is interesting.

Chapter 19 is entitled Keeping Time: Rhythm and Movement. The chapter begins with Mr. Sacks recounting a climbing accident he had on a mountain in Norway, in which he injured his leg so badly that he could not use it to make his way back down the mountain. He decided to ‘row’ himself down to safety, similar to the way paraplegics use a wheelchair. At first he found the motion difficult and exhausting, but eventually he got into a rhythm that he mentally accompanied with a song. Each rowing motion he made synchronized with the beat of the music in his mind. He felt this musical mental aid made it much easier for him to row down the mountain. Mr. Sacks also used music to help him rehabilitate his leg in the hospital afterwards, and soon after his recovery he began using music to help another patient rehabilitate her paralyzed left leg, with much success.

Several researchers have studied the relationship between the auditory and motor systems of the human brain, and there seems to be a strong link between the two systems. This suggests that music and rhythm can be used to help people coordinate body and brain functions. Examples include helping people regain motor control lost through injury or disease, helping people carry out complex chains of actions made difficult by brain damage or disease (like getting dressed), and assisting in the mental processing and storage of information. Athletes have often used music and rhythm to regulate and refine their movements and help them push their bodies to new heights of athletic achievement. For example, swimmers often coordinate their leg kicks in groups of three, in a pattern similar to a waltz rhythm (strong kick on one, weaker kicks on two and three).

It seems that humans also have a tendency to impose rhythmic groupings onto sounds (musical or otherwise) that are identical and occur at constant intervals. Mr. Sacks gives the example of a clock making the sound ‘tick-tick-tick-tick’. Humans might group these ticks into pairs, and the rhythm of the clock will then sound like ‘tick-tock-tick-tock’ to a human, when in actuality the ticking sounds are all equal. Interestingly, the way we group sounds varies greatly from culture to culture, which suggests that there may be a connection between musical rhythm and speech. There is a definite link between the two, with speech having its own sort of irregular rhythmic pattern. Researchers have often questioned which came first – music or speech? The question has been hotly debated and no one conclusion has been widely agreed upon.

The chapter closes with a discussion of the binding power of music and rhythm. For centuries, and across all cultures, music has functioned to bring people together, and rhythm plays a huge part in this process. One needs only to go to a rock concert and witness a crowd jumping (pulsating) up and down in time with the music to see how music can bind people together and form community. It may be that when a group of people hear a rhythm, each person internalizes it identically, creating a sort of shared experience and encouraging mimicry. In the brain, different perceptions are bound together and unified by the synchronized firing of nerve cells in different parts of the brain. Perhaps this is analogous to the use of music and rhythm to bind together communities of people.

Reflection:

One of the reasons that rhythmic cognition is very fascinating to me is because rhythm is present in so many musics of the world, and yet in some ways it differs so much from culture to culture. It seems that each culture’s music has its own distinct rhythmic flavour. As a classical musician, my coaches spent a lot of time teaching me about Viennese ‘schwung’, a type of rhythmic momentum that is characteristic of composers like Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. In the Second Viennese school of composition, it is not enough to simply play a ¾ meter in time, the pulse must have schwung. (if you asked me to put into words what this schwung is, I couldn’t do it!) I learned this type of rhythmic quality simply by listening to my mentors demonstrate it. It was only when I could imitate this particular momentum in my playing that people began to tell me I was playing in a true Second Viennese style.

I also studied a piece by Astor Piazzolla, an Argentinean composer famous for developing a style called neuvo tango. It was a short quartet, around seven minutes long, and seemed relatively straightforward. However when my group tried to play it, it just didn't sound right. We couldn't put our finger on what was wrong, but we knew that something was off. We eventually came to the conclusion that it was our rhythm. Although we all have multiple degrees in music performance and have spent the majority of our lives working on our instruments, the highly stylized rhythms of nuevo tango were simply a foreign language to us. We could play in time and play all the correct rhythms perfectly well, but it was as if we had a musical 'accent' similar to a language accent. Our rhythmic style just didn't sound authentic. I wonder if this has to do with the possible connection between the different languages of cultures and the qualities of their musical rhythm. All the practice on Viennese schwung did me no good when I tried to feel the groove of a good Argentinean tango.

Effects of Music and White Noise on Working Memory Performance in Monkeys

Source:

Effects of Music and White Noise on Working Memory Performance in Monkeys

Synnove Carlson, Pia Rama, Denis Artchakov and Ilkka Linnankoski

NeuroReport 8, 2853-2856 (1997)

Summary:

The study was done to evaluate the effects of Mozart's music, white noise, simple rhythm and silence on the delayed responses of monkeys. Mozart's music has been suggested to benefit cognitive functions, and it was later proved to only "improve spatial IQ". The working memory is processed in the prefrontal cortext, and a delayed response (DR) experiment will test the subject's ability to remember information for a short period of time. The monkeys used in the experiment were all trained to perform DR tasks, and the results of the experiment will further the researches on acoustic treatments on working memory performance. Two food bowls were shown at equal distance behind a transparent screen. A raisin is then put into one of the two bowls, and an opaque lid was then used to cover the bowls. The monkey's task was to choose the bowl with raisin in it over various delay lengths. Different monkeys had different treatments: 1) 15 minutes of the four choices (Mozart's music, white noise, simple rhythm or silence) OR 2) one choice played throughout the duration of the experiment.

The results showed a significant improvement in the white noise group. Whereas other groups of monkeys had more mistakes as the delay time increased, the white noise group did not show dramatic difference between the time-mistakes ratio. Mozart's music, on the other hand, increased the number of mistakes over all other delays except the shortest delay.

Reflection:

Many studies were done to prove or disprove the "Mozart Effect" and this experiment on monkeys really opened up the ambiguity of previous findings. Mozart's music was said to improve spatial IQ, however, this was not seen in the monkeys' experiment. One explanation would be that monkeys do not have the same auditory knowledge as the humans. People may not know Mozart, but they can follow the tune of a melody, notice patterns in a passage, and "feel" the emotions music express. The monkeys may hear Mozart's music as a complex auditory stimulus that disrupts attention. The white noise, on the other hand, acts like an auditory mask that blocks out distractions.

This is an interesting finding because the effects of music were supposedly "universal", but the results of human experiments were much more different than those of monkeys. Would this due to the fact that humans have a language system and music is also a language? Would that contribute to the effectiveness of music toward performance enhancement? White noises were also proven to improve sleep. It would be interesting to see if white noise can act as a "healing"property, like what people say about music therapy. One future project is to redo the experiment (maybe more complex) with human participants and see if similar results are found.

Tinnitus Sound Therapy Using Customized Sound / Music (A Web-Based Neuro...

In life, there are very few health problems that one can resolve on-line!

If you want to avoid the flu, then you make an appointment with your

GP and have a flu shot. Need stitches? Can't do that on-line. Have an

infection? Can't receive antibiotics thru your computer's finger pad. It

almost seems silly to contemplate a resolution of any medical condition

via the Internet.

However, through music therapy, some help may be a click away!

"Tinnitus" a condition suffered by millions throughout the world may be

addressed while sitting at home in front of your computer. "Beyondtinnitus"

is a website designed to help those who suffer the "endless ringing in the ears"

or the constant "cacophony of chirping birds."

From Beyondtinnitus.com, we read the following;

In the last 2 years, new discoveries have been made in tinnitus therapy. Researchers and physicians at University of California Irvine have discovered that certain unique sounds can make the ear ringing sound (tinnitus) to give significant relief for some periods of time. These sounds can be used to reduce tinnitus even when listened to for a short time. The problem that has been found is that finding these sounds was found to require significant time consuming sessions in physician or audiology testing. In addition, when listened to on their own, these sounds may not be very pleasant listening.

Enter the innovation of the physicians and researchers at beyondtinnitus.com. Our physician researchers have developed a patent-pending technology, our clinical researchers found that customized tinnitus therapy can be delivered to any patient around the world. The technology allows the research-based harmonic masking therapy to be delivered to the patient using innovative sound mixing technologies and the power of the web. The patients can mix the therapy sound with their own music on their own computer. This is downloaded onto an MP3 player for a customized tinnitus therapy. This way you can listen to your own music while getting relief from your tinnitus. This is unlike the Neuromonics approach of using the same 4 musical pieces every single day! This revolutionary technology is available to anybody at less than 1/10th the cost of Neuromonics!

Reflection!

When I was about 6 years of age, I can remember the first time I went outside to enjoy our new backyard. In the distance, about a kilometre away, Highway 401 thundered along. It was almost unbearable! However, to my surprise, and about a week later, my brain removed that dominant sound from my consciousness, and for the rest of my days living in that area, I never really noticed the highway sounds again. In a way, my brain, while hearing a specific sound from my environment, somehow had turned it off. I no longer perceived the sound as real!

"Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of sound." Like the Phantom of the opera, it seems more appropriate to describe it as "a figment of the imagination." For years, tinnitus was thought to be the result of ear damage, specifically located in the cochlea region. Instead, research now suggests that it "affects the areas directly around the damaged zones in the brain. Is it possible to turn off certain frequencies, sounds that appear to be of the imagination? Beyondtinnitus.com suggests that, through music therapy, it is possible and consultation in the privacy of your own home is a reality. This is the new wave of tinnitus treatment, however, results are only now beginning to prove its effectiveness!