Friday, October 12, 2007

Amazing Scientific Discoveries, Part 5


Uncle Jeff, Noted Astrophysicist, writes to say that he went ahead and read the article by Rosenkranz, Williamon, and Rothwell from Journal of Neuroscience 27(19):5200-6, 2007 May 9. He correctly assumed that we'd never get around to reading it (but would say we did) and sent highlights:

p.5200 "Musicians not only have extraordinary motor and sensory skills, but they also have an increased ability to learn new tasks compared with non-musicians."

p.5200 "Similarly, musicians who started musical training before 7 years of age learn a timed motor sequence task much better than musicians who started later or non-musicians."


p.5203 "These features are compatible with the idea that both motorcortical excitability and plasticity are heightened in musicians. Because some of these changes depend on the age at which instrumental playing commenced, we hypothesize that they reflect adaptation to long-term musical practice."

p.5204 "Indeed, changes in gray matter are larger in musicians who started earlier, and they reflect the choice of instrument, consistent with a causal connection between presumed synaptic growth and the duration and pattern of training."


p.5205 "the number of hours of practice is well known to relate to musical skill"

p.5205 "Our experiments do not directly assess whether increased synaptic plasticity is produced by musical training, as a complex motor task and also a multimodal-sensory and emotional experience, or whether it is a genetic trait of successful musicians. However, some parameters correlated significantly with the age at which playing commenced as well as with practice intensity over the last 5 years."


p.5205 "Although this does not completely rule out any preselectional bias, it seems likely that some of the changes of excitability and plasticity are a consequence of long-term musical practice."

p.5205 "These changes may represent a beneficial adaptation in response to long-term musical training"



That's a lot of science for one day, so you're probably glad I skipped the bass player joke.

5 comments:

Deanna said...

aww man.. i wanted to hear the bass player joke.... lmao

ok.. i got one..... how do u get a musician off of your doorstep??
pay them for the pizza...lmao..

i heard paul mccartney tell that!! lol it made it more funny coming from him!

Lynndi Lauper said...

Paul McCartney can't do that, can he? Isn't he supposed to be a saint or something?

The best musician jokes are over at
http://c-umusic-schmusic.blogspot.com/

but Josh of Seagulls told me a good one that I'd never heard before; apparently I'm the only one who never heard it before because I live under a rock:

What did the drummer get on his SAT?
Drool.

Deanna said...

in my book sir paulcan do whatever he wants!! lol i got him in a leopard picture frame on my headboard on my side of the bed!! lol yeah i kinda like him! but what can i say.. im a beatle freak!

Hon Don Gerard said...

I don't get it.

Anonymous said...

oh I think you do!