Movements are encoded in the brain by modular building blocks that can adapt to specialized skills such as playing a musical instrument.
Joseph Classen at the University of Leipzig in Germany and his colleagues used a sensor glove to measure joint movements in the left hands of 15 skilled musicians while they played the piano or violin (pictured). The researchers then evoked random finger movements in musicians and non-musicians at rest using transcranial magnetic stimulation to excite neurons in the motor cortex. They broke these movements down into basic units and used these to reconstruct voluntary instrument-playing postures.
The authors' statistical analysis revealed that reconstructions of random movements made by musicians more closely matched the instrument-playing movements than did the reconstructions of non-musician controls.
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Neuroscience: The motor skills of musical minds. Nature 467, 887 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467887d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/467887d
