With the mysteries nestled inside the human cranium enthralling both scientists and non-scientists alike, one hot topic is brain plasticity — the brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself by, for example, forming new connections between neurons.
“The more we know about brain plasticity, the better it will make us at things like rehabilitating stroke victims,” says Virginia Penhune, psychology professor and chair of the Department of Psychology in Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science.
To gain more insights into white-matter connectivity, Penhune and Lucia Vaquero, a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia, studied the brains of non-musicians performing short musical tasks, such as repeating rhythms and melodies.
“We found that certain features of the brain actually predict your ability to learn in this context,” says Vaquero. “Most studies focus on musicians, so what’s novel about our approach is that we studied people with no or little musical training. Another novel aspect is the way we use software to virtually dissect the neuroimaging data in a way that allows us to adapt the dissection to the individual anatomical differences of every participant.”
Their results, published recently in NeuroImage, reveal that the volume (size) and structural properties of the arcuate fasciculus (AF) in the right hemisphere of the brain are predicting the musical performance. The AF is a bundle of axons connecting auditory and motor regions of the brain.
“The thicker their AF in the right hemisphere — and only the right — the better participants performed the musical tasks,” says Vaquero.