Musicians use both sides of brain

NASHVILLE, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- Trained musicians really do think differently than those who can't carry a tune and they may be a bit smarter too, U.S. researchers said.

Vanderbilt University psychologists recruited 20 classical music students -- which at least eight years of training -- from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The instruments the musicians played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The two groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers asked the subject participants to take household objects and make new functions for them. In a second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique.

The study, scheduled to be published in the journal Brain and Cognition, found trained musicians more effectively used a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also used both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres -- because musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments, the researchers said.