Abstract
A number of previous studies have examined music-related plasticity in terms of multi-sensory and motor integration but little is known about the functional and effective connectivity patterns of spontaneous intrinsic activity in these systems during the resting state in musicians. Using functional connectivity and Granger causal analysis, functional and effective connectivity among the motor and multi-sensory (visual, auditory and somatosensory) cortices were evaluated using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in musicians and non-musicians. The results revealed that functional connectivity was significantly increased in the motor and multi-sensory cortices of musicians. Moreover, the Granger causality results demonstrated a significant increase outflow-inflow degree in the auditory cortex with the strongest causal outflow pattern of effective connectivity being found in musicians. These resting state fMRI findings indicate enhanced functional integration among the lower-level perceptual and motor networks in musicians, and may reflect functional consolidation (plasticity) resulting from long-term musical training, involving both multi-sensory and motor functional integration.
Highlights
An increasing body of evidence indicates that musical training can alter functional and structural organization in the brain, and musicians’ brains are thought to provide a suitable model of neuroplasticity [1,2,3,4]
Functional connectivity analysis For each region of interest (ROI), significant positive and negative correlation maps were identified in non-musician and musician groups
The regions with significantly positive functional connectivity with the left VII was similar with that found in left VI, the area with maximum positive correlation was observed at calcarine gyrus for VI, and middle occipital gyrus for VII
Summary
An increasing body of evidence indicates that musical training can alter functional and structural organization in the brain, and musicians’ brains are thought to provide a suitable model of neuroplasticity [1,2,3,4]. At the task-based, functional level, studies over the last two decades have reported distinctive differences in a wide range of brain regions in professional musicians including those involved in gestural motor skills, auditory perception, and other aspects of cognition such as emotion and memory [8,9,10]. Using fMRI, Herdener and colleagues have reported that musical training induced functional plasticity in the hippocampus as a novelty detector in the temporal domain of the acoustic modality [11]. Taken together, these findings appear to reflect stable (structural imaging) and transient (task-based functional imaging) information, suggesting that musical training can induce neural plasticity. Little is known about the functional and effective connectivity patterns of spontaneous intrinsic activity between brain regions during the resting state in musicians
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