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Research Articles, Behavioral/Cognitive

Musical expertise shapes functional and structural brain networks independent of absolute pitch ability

Simon Leipold, Carina Klein and Lutz Jäncke
Journal of Neuroscience 25 January 2021, JN-RM-1985-20; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1985-20.2020
Simon Leipold
1Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
2Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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Carina Klein
1Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
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Lutz Jäncke
1Neuropsychology, Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland
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Abstract

Professional musicians are a popular model for investigating experience-dependent plasticity in human large-scale brain networks. A minority of musicians possess absolute pitch, the ability to name a tone without reference. The study of absolute pitch musicians provides insights into how a very specific talent is reflected in brain networks. Previous studies of the effects of musicianship and absolute pitch on large-scale brain networks have yielded highly heterogeneous findings regarding the localization and direction of the effects. This heterogeneity was likely influenced by small samples and vastly different methodological approaches. Here, we conducted a comprehensive multimodal assessment of effects of musicianship and absolute pitch on intrinsic functional and structural connectivity using a variety of commonly employed and state-of-the-art multivariate methods in the largest sample to date (n = 153 female and male human participants; 52 absolute pitch musicians, 51 non-absolute pitch musicians, and 50 non-musicians). Our results show robust effects of musicianship in inter- and intrahemispheric connectivity in both structural and functional networks. Crucially, most of the effects were replicable in both musicians with and without absolute pitch when compared to non-musicians. However, we did not find evidence for an effect of absolute pitch on intrinsic functional or structural connectivity in our data: The two musician groups showed strikingly similar networks across all analyses. Our results suggest that long-term musical training is associated with robust changes in large-scale brain networks. The effects of absolute pitch on neural networks might be subtle, requiring very large samples or task-based experiments to be detected.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT A question that has fascinated neuroscientists, psychologists, and musicologists for a long time is how musicianship and absolute pitch, the rare talent to name a tone without reference, are reflected in large-scale networks of the human brain. Much is still unknown as previous studies have reported widely inconsistent results based on small samples. Here, we investigate the largest sample of musicians and non-musicians to date (n = 153) using a multitude of established and novel analysis methods. Results provide evidence for robust effects of musicianship on functional and structural networks that were replicable in two separate groups of musicians and independent of absolute pitch ability.

Footnotes

  • The authors declare no competing interests.

  • This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), grant no. 320030_163149 to Lutz Jäncke. We are extremely grateful to Désirée Yamada for her invaluable help in data acquisition and research administration. We also thank Silvano Sele for his support with the statistical analyses, Marielle Greber and Lisa-Katrin Kaufmann for helpful comments on the manuscript, and Chantal Oderbolz for proofreading the manuscript.

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Musical expertise shapes functional and structural brain networks independent of absolute pitch ability
Simon Leipold, Carina Klein, Lutz Jäncke
Journal of Neuroscience 25 January 2021, JN-RM-1985-20; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1985-20.2020

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Musical expertise shapes functional and structural brain networks independent of absolute pitch ability
Simon Leipold, Carina Klein, Lutz Jäncke
Journal of Neuroscience 25 January 2021, JN-RM-1985-20; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1985-20.2020
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