Is function paired with structure in the musician brain? A DTI-TBSS study with left-handed musicians

Abstract

Brain differences between musicians and non-musicians have been found mainly in the primary auditory and motor cortex of the right hemisphere, as well as in their connections. Some previous investigations attempting to describe the peculiarities of the musician’s brain have focused in the Corpus callosum (CC), being the common result of most of these investigations a larger anterior CC and overall thicker CC in the musician’s brain. However, differences have also been found in the way their brains work, showing that musicians have less inter-hemispherical functional connectivity between the primary motor cortices associated to the movement of the upper limbs. Thus, the aim of our study was to investigate whether structural connectivity between these regions is also different in musicians by measuring white matter (WM) tracts using Diffusion MRI in a left-handed sample of 29 musicians and 43 nonmusicians. As expected, it was found that musicians present lower FA than non-musicians in the callosal tracts connecting the upper limbs' primary motor cortices, suggesting more independence between both hands.