the musical brain

The brain processes music in a broad fashion, but the right hemisphere appears to be specialized for the processing of melody, whereas the left hemisphere seems to be in charge of rhythmic processing. Musical stimuli activate specific pathways in several brain areas associated with emotional behaviors, including insular and cingulate cortex, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.

Making music is probably one of mankind’s most complex activities. Playing an instrument combines visual, motor, and auditory skills and memory. Musicians translate visually perceived musical symbols into motor commands with simultaneous auditory monitoring of the output. They can memorize long musical phrases, improvise, and identify tones without the use of a reference tone.

Scanning of the brains of professional musicians with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques revealed structural adaptations in response to their long-term skill acquisition and the repetitive rehearsal of those skills. Musicians have more gray matter in several brain regions and these effects increase with the intensity of their training.

But does this mean music, and especially playing a musical instrument, makes you more intelligent? For the great physicist Albert Einstein it surely did. He said the reason he was so smart, was because he played the violin since he was a young boy. Whenever he wanted to figure out some problems and equations, he improvised on his violin.