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The Journal of Neuroscience, September 24, 2008, 28(39):9632-9639; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2254-08.2008

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Cortical Plasticity Induced by Short-Term Unimodal and Multimodal Musical Training

Claudia Lappe,^1 * Sibylle C. Herholz,^1 * Laurel J. Trainor,^2,3 and Christo Pantev¹

¹Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, 48149 Münster, Germany, and ²Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour and the ³McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Christo Pantev, Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, Malmedyweg 15, D-48149 Münster, Germany. Email: pantev{at}uni-muenster.de

Learning to play a musical instrument requires complex multimodal skills involving simultaneous perception of several sensory modalities: auditory, visual, somatosensory, as well as the motor system. Therefore, musical training provides a good and adequate neuroscientific model to study multimodal brain plasticity effects in humans. Here, we investigated the impact of short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training on brain plasticity. Two groups of nonmusicians were musically trained over the course of 2 weeks. One group [sensorimotor-auditory (SA)] learned to play a musical sequence on the piano, whereas the other group [auditory (A)] listened to and made judgments about the music that had been played by participants of the sensorimotor-auditory group. Training-induced cortical plasticity was assessed by recording the musically elicited mismatch negativity (MMNm) from magnetoencephalographic measurements before and after training. SA and A groups showed significantly different cortical responses after training. Specifically, the SA group showed significant enlargement of MMNm after training compared with the A group, reflecting greater enhancement of musical representations in auditory cortex after sensorimotor-auditory training compared with after mere auditory training. Thus, we have experimentally demonstrated that not only are sensorimotor and auditory systems connected, but also that sensorimotor-auditory training causes plastic reorganizational changes in the auditory cortex over and above changes introduced by auditory training alone.

Key words: multisensory; plasticity; auditory cortex; magnetoencephalography; auditory; learning

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Received May 19, 2008; revised Aug. 6, 2008; accepted Aug. 11, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Christo Pantev, Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Münster, Malmedyweg 15, D-48149 Münster, Germany. Email: pantev{at}uni-muenster.de

This article has been cited by other articles:

				K. M. Lee, E. Skoe, N. Kraus, and R. Ashley Selective Subcortical Enhancement of Musical Intervals in Musicians J. Neurosci., May 6, 2009; 29(18): 5832 - 5840. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				K. L. Hyde, J. Lerch, A. Norton, M. Forgeard, E. Winner, A. C. Evans, and G. Schlaug Musical Training Shapes Structural Brain Development J. Neurosci., March 11, 2009; 29(10): 3019 - 3025. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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