During the last decades music neuroscience has become a rapidly growing field within the area of neuroscience. Music is particularly well suited for studying neuronal plasticity in the human brain ...because musical training is more complex and multimodal than most other daily life activities, and because prospective and professional musicians usually pursue the training with high and long-lasting commitment. Therefore, music has increasingly been used as a tool for the investigation of human cognition and its underlying brain mechanisms. Music relates to many brain functions like perception, action, cognition, emotion, learning and memory and therefore music is an ideal tool to investigate how the human brain is working and how different brain functions interact. Novel findings have been obtained in the field of induced cortical plasticity by musical training. The positive effects, which music in its various forms has in the healthy human brain are not only important in the framework of basic neuroscience, but they also will strongly affect the practices in neuro-rehabilitation.
Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce ...tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified ("notched") to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, customtailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.
Conflict and inhibition are considered to exert strong influences on the neurophysiological N200 and P300 brain responses as evoked in go/nogo and stop-signal tasks. In order to separate their ...underlying neural and functional mechanisms, the current experiment manipulated both conflict and inhibition. To do so, the go/nogo and stop-signal tasks were merged into one paradigm. Conflict was manipulated by varying go-trial frequencies across blocks (75% vs. 25%). Motor inhibition was manipulated by using go, nogo and stop trials each representing a different load of inhibition. Event-related potentials (ERPs) as well as current density reconstructions (CDRs) of fifteen healthy participants were analyzed. Overall, infrequent trials evoked significantly more pronounced N200s than frequent trials. The P300 predominantly revealed significant variations between trial types (go, nogo, stop). Estimated source activations of the MCC and the IFC supported the ERP results; N200-related effects were revealed in both regions, whereas the condition-specific variations of the P300 were only observed in the IFC. The results indicate that the N200 primarily reflects conflict-related effects whereas the P300 predominantly represents motor inhibition.
Skill learning results in changes to brain function, but at the same time individuals strongly differ in their abilities to learn specific skills. Using a 6-week piano-training protocol and pre- and ...post-fMRI of melody perception and imagery in adults, we dissociate learning-related patterns of neural activity from pre-training activity that predicts learning rates. Fronto-parietal and cerebellar areas related to storage of newly learned auditory-motor associations increased their response following training; in contrast, pre-training activity in areas related to stimulus encoding and motor control, including right auditory cortex, hippocampus, and caudate nuclei, was predictive of subsequent learning rate. We discuss the implications of these results for models of perceptual and of motor learning. These findings highlight the importance of considering individual predisposition in plasticity research and applications.
Objective
We evaluated whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is able to enhance dysphagia rehabilitation following stroke. Besides relating clinical effects with neuroplastic changes ...in cortical swallowing processing, we aimed to identify factors influencing treatment success.
Methods
In this double‐blind, randomized study, 60 acute dysphagic stroke patients received contralesional anodal (1mA, 20 minutes) or sham tDCS on 4 consecutive days. Swallowing function was thoroughly assessed before and after the intervention using the validated Fiberoptic Endoscopic Dysphagia Severity Scale (FEDSS) and clinical assessment. In 10 patients, swallowing‐related brain activation was recorded applying magnetoencephalography before and after the intervention. Voxel‐based statistical lesion pattern analysis was also performed.
Results
Study groups did not differ according to demographic data, stroke characteristics, or baseline dysphagia severity. Patients treated with tDCS showed greater improvement in FEDSS than the sham group (1.3 vs 0.4 points, mean difference = 0.9, 95% confidence interval CI = 0.4–1.4, p < 0.0005). Functional recovery was accompanied by a significant increase of activation (p < 0.05) in the contralesional swallowing network after real but not sham tDCS. Regarding predictors of treatment success, for every hour earlier that treatment was initiated, there was greater improvement on the FEDSS (adjusted odds ratio = 0.99, 95% CI = 0.98–1.00, p < 0.05) in multivariate analysis. Stroke location in the right insula and operculum was indicative of worse response to tDCS (p < 0.05).
Interpretation
Application of tDCS over the contralesional swallowing motor cortex supports swallowing network reorganization, thereby leading to faster rehabilitation of acute poststroke dysphagia. Early treatment initiation seems beneficial. tDCS may be less effective in right‐hemispheric insulo‐opercular stroke. Ann Neurol 2018;83:328–340
Learning to play a musical instrument requires complex multimodal skills involving simultaneous perception of several sensory modalities: auditory, visual, somatosensory, as well as the motor system. ...Therefore, musical training provides a good and adequate neuroscientific model to study multimodal brain plasticity effects in humans. Here, we investigated the impact of short-term unimodal and multimodal musical training on brain plasticity. Two groups of nonmusicians were musically trained over the course of 2 weeks. One group sensorimotor-auditory (SA) learned to play a musical sequence on the piano, whereas the other group auditory (A) listened to and made judgments about the music that had been played by participants of the sensorimotor-auditory group. Training-induced cortical plasticity was assessed by recording the musically elicited mismatch negativity (MMNm) from magnetoencephalographic measurements before and after training. SA and A groups showed significantly different cortical responses after training. Specifically, the SA group showed significant enlargement of MMNm after training compared with the A group, reflecting greater enhancement of musical representations in auditory cortex after sensorimotor-auditory training compared with after mere auditory training. Thus, we have experimentally demonstrated that not only are sensorimotor and auditory systems connected, but also that sensorimotor-auditory training causes plastic reorganizational changes in the auditory cortex over and above changes introduced by auditory training alone.
The present study investigated the cortical large-scale functional network underpinning audiovisual integration via magnetoencephalographic recordings. The reorganization of this network related to ...long-term musical training was investigated by comparing musicians to nonmusicians. Connectivity was calculated on the basis of the estimated mutual information of the sources’ activity, and the corresponding networks were statistically compared. Nonmusicians’ results indicated that the cortical network associated with audiovisual integration supports visuospatial processing and attentional shifting, whereas a sparser network, related to spatial awareness supports the identification of audiovisual incongruences. In contrast, musicians’ results showed enhanced connectivity in regions related to the identification of auditory pattern violations. Hence, nonmusicians rely on the processing of visual clues for the integration of audiovisual information, whereas musicians rely mostly on the corresponding auditory information. The large-scale cortical network underpinning multisensory integration is reorganized due to expertise in a cognitive domain that largely involves audiovisual integration, indicating long-term training-related neuroplasticity.
The central auditory system has a crucial role in tinnitus generation and maintenance. Curative treatments for tinnitus do not yet exist. However, recent attempts in the therapeutic application of ...both acoustic stimulation/training procedures and electric/magnetic brain stimulation techniques have yielded promising results. Here, for the first time we combined tailor-made notched music training (TMNMT) with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in an effort to modulate TMNMT efficacy in the treatment of 32 patients with tonal tinnitus and without severe hearing loss. TMNMT is characterized by regular listening to so-called notched music, which is generated by digitally removing the frequency band of one octave width centered at the individual tinnitus frequency. TMNMT was applied for 10 subsequent days (2.5 hours of daily treatment). During the initial 5 days of treatment and the initial 30 minutes of TMNMT sessions, tDCS (current strength: 2 mA; anodal (N = 10) vs. cathodal (N = 11) vs. sham (N = 11) groups) was applied simultaneously. The active electrode was placed on the head surface over left auditory cortex; the reference electrode was put over right supra-orbital cortex. To evaluate treatment outcome, tinnitus-related distress and perceived tinnitus loudness were assessed using standardized tinnitus questionnaires and a visual analogue scale. The results showed a significant treatment effect reflected in the Tinnitus Handicap Questionnaire that was largest after 5 days of treatment. This effect remained significant at the end of follow-up 31 days after treatment cessation. Crucially, tDCS did not significantly modulate treatment efficacy--it did not make a difference whether anodal, cathodal, or sham tDCS was applied. Possible explanations for the findings and functional modifications of the experimental design for future studies (e.g. the selection of control conditions) are discussed.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Tinnitus is one of the most common diseases in industrialized countries. Here, we developed and evaluated a short-term (5 subsequent days) and intensive (6 hours/day) tailor-made notched music ...training (TMNMT) for patients suffering from chronic, tonal tinnitus. We evaluated (i) the TMNMT efficacy in terms of behavioral and magnetoencephalographic outcome measures for two matched patient groups with either low (≤8 kHz, N = 10) or high (>8 kHz, N = 10) tinnitus frequencies, and the (ii) persistency of the TMNMT effects over the course of a four weeks post-training phase. The results indicated that the short-term intensive TMNMT took effect in patients with tinnitus frequencies ≤8 kHz: subjective tinnitus loudness, tinnitus-related distress, and tinnitus-related auditory cortex evoked activity were significantly reduced after TMNMT completion. However, in the patients with tinnitus frequencies >8 kHz, significant changes were not observed. Interpreted in their entirety, the results also indicated that the induced changes in auditory cortex evoked neuronal activity and tinnitus loudness were not persistent, encouraging the application of the TMNMT as a longer-term training. The findings are essential in guiding the intended transfer of this neuro-scientific treatment approach into routine clinical practice.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
To localize the neural generators of the musically elicited mismatch negativity with high temporal resolution we conducted a beamformer analysis (Synthetic Aperture Magnetometry, SAM) on ...magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from a previous musical mismatch study. The stimuli consisted of a six-tone melodic sequence comprising broken chords in C- and G-major. The musical sequence was presented within an oddball paradigm in which the last tone was lowered occasionally (20%) by a minor third. The beamforming analysis revealed significant right hemispheric neural activation in the superior temporal (STC), inferior frontal (IFC), superior frontal (SFC) and orbitofrontal (OFC) cortices within a time window of 100-200 ms after the occurrence of a deviant tone. IFC and SFC activation was also observed in the left hemisphere. The pronounced early right inferior frontal activation of the auditory mismatch negativity has not been shown in MEG studies so far. The activation in STC and IFC is consistent with earlier electroencephalography (EEG), optical imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that reveal the auditory and inferior frontal cortices as main generators of the auditory MMN. The observed right hemispheric IFC is also in line with some previous music studies showing similar activation patterns after harmonic syntactic violations. The results demonstrate that a deviant tone within a musical sequence recruits immediately a distributed neural network in frontal and prefrontal areas suggesting that top-down processes are involved when expectation violation occurs within well-known stimuli.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
