Music Conductors Provide Insight into Ways of Learning



Posted: Saturday, November 10, 2007

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http://www.trainingforce.com

A new study, comparing music conductors to non-musicians, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows which areas of the brain are active during a task. Conducted by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) Music Research Institute, the study showed that although activity increased in the auditory part of the brain during the hearing task, activity in the visual part decreased.More... The study, that compared 20 conductors and 20 musically untrained subjects between the ages of 28-40, seems to suggest that there are different ways people organize information, according to their professional or learned skill set, and music conductors were better focus on both the auditory and the visual stimuli as they would in their professional lives, of reading musical scores and conducting people who are playing a variety of musical instruments. (Although if you ask me, I think both the musicians and the conductors have the pieces memorized by the time a performance occurs).

According to the press release, "While lying in an fMRI scanner, the subjects heard two tones that were clearly different (middle A and E on a music scale) but began at almost the same time, only a few thousands of a second between them. The subjects had to report which tone began first. The study was made harder by moving the tones closer together in time. The subjects were not allowed to close their eyes."

For those wondering what is a functional MRI is: it is the use of MRI to measure the haemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging. Haemodynamic response is a medical term for the dynamic regulation of the blood flow in the brain. Thanks Wikipedia!

Lauren Evoy Davis has covered technology and health in reporting capacities and has written many pages of end-user documentation for custom computer applications for the education, immigration and association-management industries. She also writes for her blog http://MyGeekBaby.com

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