Prepare participants to go in the scanner by removing all metal from their body, including belts, wallets, phones, hair clips, coins, and all jewelry.When participants come in for their fMRI scan, have them first fill out a metal screen form to make sure they have no counter-indications for MRI, an incidental findings form giving consent for their scan to be looked at by a radiologist, and a consent form detailing the risks and benefits of the study.All participants should have no metal in their bodies that they cannot remove to ensure that they are MRI-safe.All participants should have no history of neurological, psychiatric, or cardiac disorders.All participants should be right-handed.Control subjects should have little to formal training in playing a musical instrument.Musicians should also be actively practicing their instrument for at least one hr/day. Training with any musical instrument is acceptable. Musicians should have at least 10 years of formal musical training.Recruit 40 musicians and 40 non-musicians. 4 in using VBM to identify these structural differences in the brains of musicians.ġ. Here, we follow Gaser and Shlaug 3 and Bermudez et al. There is evidence from multiple sources that that the brains of people who have gone through musical training are functionally and structural different from those who haven't. Musicians engage in intense motoric, visual, and acoustic training. In this experiment, we will demonstrate the VBM technique by comparing the brains of musicians with those of non-musicians. We then compare the intensity values of the voxels to identify localized, small scale differences in gray matter density. 2 In VBM, we first register all of the brains to a common space, smoothing over any gross differences in anatomy. The technique of quantifying and comparing brain structure on a voxel-by-voxel basis is called voxel-based morphometry, or VBM. For example, in a T1-weighted MRI scan, very bright voxels are found in locations where there are white matter fiber bundles, while darker voxels correspond to grey matter, where the cell bodies of neurons reside. In a structural magnetic resonance image of the brain, the intensity of each volumetric pixel, or voxel, relates to the density of the gray matter in that region. While these techniques do not avail themselves of the sophisticated knowledge that human neuroanatomists may bring to the task, they are quick, and sensitive to very small differences in anatomy. However, using modern neuroimaging techniques, we can now compare the anatomy of the brains across groups of people using automated algorithms. Many traditional methods of examining brain anatomy require painstaking tracing of anatomical regions of interest in order to measure their size. One famous example of this kind of change comes from the case of the London taxi drivers, who along with learning the complex routes of the city show larger volume in the hippocampus, a brain structure known to play a role in navigational memory. While many experience-related changes manifest themselves at the microscopic level, for example by neurochemical adjustments in the behavior of individual neurons, we may also examine anatomical changes to the structure of the brain at a macroscopic level.
It is well understood that our brains are different as a result of learning. Gimbel-University of Southern CaliforniaĮxperience shapes the brain.
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