The Fredösphere

[I]f you look at a brain, either in life with an MRI, or later, you can't tell whether it's the brain of a genius or a fool, or whether it's the brain of a visual artist or a literary artist, but you can look at a brain and say, "that's probably the brain of a musician"--because musical training and involvement in music enlarges various parts of the brain: the corpus callosum (the great band which goes between the two cerebral hemispheres); parts of the auditory cortex; parts of the cerebellum; parts of the frontal lobe cortex. There are striking changes which can occur within a single year of musical training, and these are changes which are really visible to the naked eye, at least if one knows where to look. So the power of music to alter the brain is very, very striking.

Labels: Keys, SoundClip, Synaesthetes