As part of an NIH-funded experiment, soprano Renée Fleming underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of her brain in 2017. The scan highlights areas of increased signal (commonly interpreted as increased brain activity) when Fleming imagined singing while inside the fMRI scanner. Learning more about music’s interactions with the brain could lead to new and better medical therapies. Image credit: National Institutes of Health/David Jangraw.
Playing the Brain
In the last 15 years, as labs worldwide have studied how the brain processes music, some neurologists and cognitive neuroscientists started to focus on the potential of music to treat neurological disorders. As these neuroscientists entered a field once dominated by music therapists, newer trials have become more rigorously designed, Särkämö says. But these studies are “still a work in progress in many cases,” he notes, because trials are still too few and too small to unequivocally demonstrate the