Music, Brain, and Rehabilitation: Emerging Therapeutic Applications and Potential Neural Mechanisms

Abstract

Music is an important source of enjoyment, learning, and well-being in life as well as a rich, powerful, and versatile stimulus for the brain. With the advance of modern neuroimaging techniques during the past decades, we are now beginning to understand better what goes on in the healthy brain when we listen, play, think, and feel music and how the structure and function of the brain can change as a result of musical training and expertise. In the healthy brain, there is already mounting evidence that a large-scale bilateral network of temporal, frontal, parietal, cerebellar, and limbic/paralimbic brain areas associated with auditory perception, language, syntactic and semantic processing, attention and working memory, semantic and episodic memory, rhythmic and motor functions, and emotions and reward underlies the processing of music (Koelsch, 2011, 2014; Zatorre and Salimpoor, 2013; Janata, 2015) and to which extent this neural network could be shaped by musical training (Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010; Herholz and Zatorre, 2012; Brown et al. 2015). In the field of neurology, music has traditionally been studied in the context of musical deficits (e.g., amusia; Peretz et al., 2003), music-related symptoms (e.g., musicogenic epilepsy; Maguire, 2015), cases of exceptional or preserved musical functions (e.g., singing in aphasia; Johnson and Graziano, 2015), and neurological disorders of professional musicians (e.g., musician's dystonia; Altenmüller et al., 2015).