Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. E-mail: carolor email. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The influence of music on the human brain has been recently investigated in numerous studies.
Several investigations have shown that structural and functional cerebral neuroplastic processes emerge as a result of long-term musical training, which in turn may produce cognitive differences between musicians and non-musicians. Musicians can be considered ideal cases for studies on brain adaptation, due to their unique and intensive training experiences. This article presents a review of recent findings showing positive effects of musical training on non-musical cognitive abilities, which probably reflect plastic changes in brains of musicians.
Music seems to transcend time, space and culture and several studies are currently underway investigating the biological foundations of musical capacity, drawing on combined fields of genetics, developmental and comparative research, neurosciences and musicology.
The interest in studying the effects of musical training on cerebral function has grown considerably in the last decade. A body of evidence indicates that musicians possess structural and functional cerebral characteristics absent in non-musicians, which generally correlate to the age of commencement of musical training.
Musicians may serve as a unique model for studying plastic changes in the human brain, due to the complexity of this singular stimulus, normally related to very high levels of exposure during musical practice.
