Functional imaging in musicians

Studying professional musicians offers an ideal model to explore the effect of long term regular practice upon adaptive plasticity of the sensorimotor system. Functional studies in musicians showed an enlargement of cortical finger representations (Elbert, et al. 1995) and of auditory representation for tones (Pantev, et al. 1998; Schneider, et al. 2002). In predisposed individuals, defective motor reorganization due to musical practice can lead to uncontrolled movements such as task induced dystonia with a smearing of representational zones (Elbert, et al. 1998; Pujol, et al. 2000). Investigations of unimanual complex motor tasks demonstrated changes in motor activation patterns due to professional musical training (Hund-Georgiadis and von Cramon 1999; Krings, et al. 2000).

Musical training involves a strong functional association between motor performance and somatosensory and auditory feedback. It has been demonstrated to induce adaptive functional and structural changes within the motor system (Amunts et al. 1997; Elbert et al. 1995; Schlaug et al. 1995; Sluming et al. 2002) as well as within the auditory network (Pantev et al. 1998; Schlaug et al. 1995; Schneider et al. 2002; Zatorre et al. 1998). Sergent et al. (1992) applied PET to study functional activations in musicians during musical sight-reading, active keyboard performance and listening to the corresponding tones. They demonstrated functional association of those three domains within premotor, inferior frontal (BA 44) and parietal areas. An EEG study suggested transmodal activation of the sensorimotor system by auditory input in professional musicians (Bangert und Altenmüller 2003). Functional coupling of auditory and sensorimotor domains in musicians and the mechanisms of bimanual dexterity has not been studied with functional imaging so far.