The effect of musical training on perception and processing in the auditory cortex

在过去的几年里，音乐越来越多地被用作研究人类认知及其潜在大脑机制的工具。音乐与许多大脑功能有关，如感知，行动，认知，情感，学习和记忆，因此音乐是研究人类大脑如何工作以及不同大脑功能如何相互作用的理想工具。利用人脑成像技术，我们已经报道了弦乐演奏者的音乐技能与手指的感觉运动皮层表征增强有关。受过训练的音乐家的音乐技能会增强听觉皮层对音符的表征，甚至会增强专门针对练习乐器音调的皮层表征。原则上，音乐家的大脑属性可能受到遗传密码的影响，也可能受到神经可塑性机制的诱导，例如动物研究中发现的那些在训练过程中改变突触连接和神经生长过程的机制。在以前的研究中，我们能够显示音乐家的听觉和体感皮层的短期和长期可塑性，并定量地展示其时间动态，甚至其多模态相互作用。在这个项目中，我们提出了一系列新的实验，部分的横截面设计，比较成人音乐家和非音乐家的样本，目的是增加我们的知识培训诱导的单模态和多模态可塑性的人类大脑。在这个项目中提出的不同研究之间的连接元素是听觉处理和音乐专业知识。更具体地说，我们喜欢通过<$最先进的<$MEG技术和<$波束形成器<$信号处理技术，以了解表演训练和听觉处理之间的相互作用，调查音高感知作为听觉处理基础的重要性，评估训练引起的注意力在音乐中的作用，详细探索音乐表演中涉及的神经网络，并显示交叉-专业钢琴演奏者皮层功能的模态重组，并找出是否有时间整合和分辨率之间的相关性，听觉系统和音乐中的节奏感。

During the last years music has increasingly been used as a tool for the investigation of human cognition and its underlying brain mechanisms. Music relates to many brain functions like perception, action, cognition, emotion, learning and memory and therefore music is an ideal tool to investigate how the human brain is working and how different brain functions interact. Using human brain imaging techniques we have reported that musical skill in string players is associated with enhanced sensory-motor cortical representation of the fingering digits. The musical skill in trained musicians leads to enhanced auditory cortical representation for musical notes and even to an enhanced cortical representations specifically for the musical tones of the instrument of practice. In principle, brain attributes found in musicians may be influenced by a genetic code or they may be induced by neuroplastic mechanisms such as those identified in animal research that modify synaptic connections and neural growth processes during training. In previous studies we were able to show the short- and long-term plasticity of the auditory and somatosensory cortex in musician and to demonstrate quantitatively their temporal dynamics and even their multimodal interaction. In this project we propose a series of new experiments, partly of cross sectional designs, comparing adult musician and nonmusician samples with the goal to increase our knowledge about the training induced uni- and multimodal plasticity of the human brain. The connecting elements between the different studies as proposed in this project are the auditory processing and the musical expertise. More specifically we do like by means of ¿state of the art¿ MEG technology and ¿beam former¿ signal processing technique to understand the interaction between performance training and auditory processing, to investigate the importance of pitch perception in general as fundamental for auditory processing, to evaluate the role of training-induced attention in music, to explore in details the neuronal networks involved during musical performance and to show the cross-modal reorganization of cortical functions in professional piano players and to find out if there is a correlation between the temporal integration and resolution in the auditory system and the rhythmic perception in music.