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The Musical Brain and Emotions
Professor Iscte Social Sciences and Humanities
Researcher CIS-ISCTE
We need to understand what mechanisms underlie these associations – between music and other domains – and what this tells us about how our brain works.
What questions does the MUSE project aim to answer?
MUSE stands for Music for the Development of Socio-Emotional Skills and is a project (*) that is part of the area of cognitive neurosciences. We want to contribute to understanding two fundamental concepts. "Brain plasticity" is how the brain changes and adapts according to experience, and that of "transfer of learning", i.e. how learning in a given domain can have consequences beyond that domain. To study these concepts, we use the musical experience as a model.
We are asking whether the brain plasticity caused by learning a musical instrument can affect musical skills that improve extra-musical skills. This question is essential, not least because of the educational implications it can have.
For example, studies have asked whether learning music increases IQ or visuospatial reasoning. Still, little has been done to investigate whether learning music improves social-emotional skills, such as the ability to recognise emotions in others. We studied children and adults and combined techniques from experimental psychology with techniques from neuroscience, such as electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging.
How was this research team formed?
The team I coordinate involves several international and national collaborators. We had as partners the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto – where I graduated and where I was at the time I applied for this project, which I brought to Iscte – and the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Lisbon. A partnership at the University of Porto was helpful because the local research group had experience in longitudinal studies on musical knowledge, and the study we did with children was implemented in the Porto area. In the Psychology of the University of Lisbon, there is a group led by Professor Ana Pinheiro, who has extensive experience in encephalography, which is also a component of this project.
At Iscte, other people were involved, including PhD students and a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Marta Martins. We also have a senior FCT researcher, Glenn Schellenberg, who came from Toronto, and other international collaborators, namely from the United Kingdom, with whom I already worked before this project: Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at the University of London, and Samuel Evans, from King's College London. Everyone collaborated on different dimensions of the project.
When we talk about projects in neurosciences, the fact that diverse teams come together is common. We often need to combine people with different profiles and expertise to meet the demands of the various facets of the project.
The problem of causality is central and much debated in research. For this reason, we combine correlational studies with longitudinal studies.
From the point of view of the methodologies used?
The project includes several studies. With adults, we use a correlational approach to compare people with and without musical experience to see to what extent there are differences, for example, in brain functioning, either with magnetic resonance imaging or electroencephalography. However, these studies have the limitation of not allowing causality to be inferred. Suppose musicians have a different brain activity in a particular area than people who have never learned music in this study. In that case, we cannot understand if this is a consequence of having learned music – a reflex of plasticity – or if the difference was already there before and was what made these people discover music. This problem of causality is central and much debated in research.
For this reason, we combine correlational studies with longitudinal studies, particularly in children. For example, in a school, we create groups of children; One group has a music training program, another group has a sports program, and a third group does nothing. Before these training programs, we ensure the groups are demographic, age, and cognitively similar. We then administer these training programs and see how far the groups differ. If they differ after training rather than before training, that gives us more robust evidence of causality.
What were the conclusions of this research project?
Some data are still under analysis or in the process of being published. Regarding central contribution, we confirm that brain plasticity induced by musical experience can have consequences beyond music. However, these consequences go further than many authors argue. In the last 20 years, the idea that music makes us smarter has been created, inspired by the discovery of the MozARTE effect in the 90s. Some studies have documented that music training correlates with better IQ test performance. This suggests that musical practice can have consequences far beyond what it is to know how to play the piano.
Our results moderate this argument. In domains relatively close to music – auditory or motor control tasks – we found that music training does seem to induce minor improvements. These tasks closer to music are what we call near transfer. But if the question is: are there far-transfer effects? In this case, there are no or are negligible. We verified this empirically, and in a meta-analysis that reviewed all studies of the impact of music on language, we found that the effects are non-existent or minimal. In the central area of the project, social-emotional processing (the ability to recognise emotions in facial expressions – for example, knowing by the tone of voice whether someone is happy or sad) – we concluded that there were no advantages caused by musical training.
The brain plasticity induced by musical experience can have consequences beyond music. However, these consequences go further than many authors argue.
It's a counter-current conclusion.
Yes. We have found that the transfer effects of musical training are fewer than we thought and seem limited to tasks that are very close to what is trained.
Another contribution: while researchers focus on plasticity and transference – what potentially happens after learning to play a musical instrument – we should start thinking about what happens first. What is it that makes someone go to learn music? Will there be differences at the outset?
There are associations between 'natural' musicality and socio-musical abilities that do not need training to emerge. If we evaluate the natural musicality of people who have never learned music, we find that it can be associated with extra-musical aspects. For example, naturally, more musical people can better identify emotions through tone of voice.
These associations between music and other cognitive domains make us question how music is organised in the brain concerning other cognitive functions. Someone with more musical aptitude may want to learn to play an instrument. So, when we find correlations between music training and IQ, or between music training and social-emotional skills, for example, it may not be due to training but rather due to greater musical aptitude, probably already present before training. The many advantages we see associated with music training reflect brain plasticity and inherent associations between musicality and other skills. This raises new questions: Which brain areas are expected to be affected by music and language? Or music and emotional processing?
We conclude that trained people, but not professionals, have higher global cognitive abilities than non-musicians.
And what did they find?
One of the essential discoveries came precisely in the wake of the interest in knowing whether music improves cognition or if other variables should be considered. In the case of IQ, if the answer were yes, great musicians must be 'geniuses', and intuitively, that is not necessarily what happens.
We studied a large group of musicians compared people who learned music and then abandoned this learning/practice—in my case, I studied piano—with musicians who have made a career, who are in orchestras, in jazz, who went to conservatory, etc. We conclude that trained people but not professionals have slightly higher global cognitive abilities than non-musicians. However, professional musicians with higher experience do not have this advantage. They are similar to non-musicians.
This seemingly counterintuitive result was vital because it shows that the relationship between music training and cognitive performance is not cause-and-effect. If this were the case, more training would be associated with greater advantages. With this discovery comes a host of new questions about causality and different profiles of musical expertise.
And now, what avenues could be explored following this project?
Research projects generate more questions than answers. That's good because we often find questions we didn't even know we would ask.
From here, we want to understand the limits of plasticity in musical training, and we are more careful with exaggerated extrapolations from correlations. Most of the studies are not longitudinal; if not, we do not know if the differences detected would not have been present. This is a caution we need to have. However, the question that excites me now is about understanding what makes someone more or less musical, regardless of whether or not that person learns a musical instrument.
Another question: what are the implications of being more or less musical for extra-musical domains? For example, is someone musically more 'talented' better at understanding speech in a noisy environment? And what is expected of the two aspects, the perception of music and the perception of speech? We need to understand what mechanisms underlie these associations – between music and other domains – and what this tells us about how our brain works. This line of research on the association of music with other domains allows us to obtain valuable information. There are already PhD projects in psychoacoustic abilities being researched in these fields.
Is there any basis for thinking that there are biological bases for a person, in his expression, to be more or less musical?
Undoubtedly! Several studies, many done with twins, prove that the hereditary component of music can be very strong, about 40% on average, and can go up to 80%, depending on the musical competence we are talking about. But more interesting is that not only do musical abilities have a genetic component, such as the propensity to learn music and the time that the person will invest in this learning, but they also have a genetic influence. And even associations between music and cognitive abilities – typically thought of as a cause-and-effect relationship, as we talk about – we now know have a biological component. There appears to be a shared genetic component between music and general cognitive skills, which helps explain the association.
* The project was financed by FCT (PTDC/PSI‑GER/ 28274/2017) and cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Regional Operational Program of Lisbon 2020 (LISBOA‑01‑0145‑FEDER‑028274) and the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization (POCI‑01‑0145‑FEDER‑028274).