Study Reveals How Musical Training Enhances Focus and Attention in the Brain
In environments filled with competing sounds, filtering distractions to focus on what matters is essential. Scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research report that this skill is often stronger in individuals with musical training. Using advanced brain imaging, researchers tracked how attention is directed when participants focus on specific sounds.
Cassia Low Manting, a former MIT postdoc working with MIT Professor John Gabrieli and ex-McGovern Institute PI Dimitrios Pantazis, asked participants to track one melody while another played simultaneously. Those with musical experience, unsurprisingly, followed the target melody more accurately. Analysis of brain activity suggests that musical training enhances neural mechanisms that amplify desired sounds while reducing background distractions.
“People can perceive, understand, and prioritize multiple sounds moment by moment,” explains Gabrieli, Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT. “Our study identifies specific brain mechanisms for processing simultaneous sounds and shows how musical training modifies that processing, revealing how experience shapes listening and attention.”
The research team, including senior author Daniel Lundqvist from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, published the open-access study in Science Advances on Sept. 17. Manting, now at the Karolinska Institute, notes the work is part of a broader collaboration between MIT and Karolinska.
Overcoming challenges
Participants’ musical backgrounds varied widely. Some were professional musicians, while others struggled to distinguish melodies. This variance helped researchers explore how experience changes attentional capacity. “Musicians are fascinating to study because training reshapes their brains,” Manting says.
Studying auditory attention is challenging because neuroimaging captures responses to all sounds. Manting and colleagues used frequency tagging, modulating the volume of each melody at distinct frequencies to create identifiable brain activity patterns. “You can see, for example, 39-Hertz activity for the lower-pitch sound and 43-Hertz for the higher-pitch sound,” Manting explains.
Paired with magnetoencephalography, this method allowed researchers to track how participants’ brains responded to each melody. Subjects focused on either the high- or low-pitched tune and answered questions about the final notes. Researchers increased difficulty by narrowing pitch differences or altering note timing.
Participants’ musicality scores, based on experience surveys, correlated strongly with performance: more musical participants tracked target melodies more successfully. Using a novel machine-learning approach, the team distinguished brain activity linked to focused attention even when distractions overlapped precisely.
Top-down vs. bottom-up attention
The study revealed clear patterns of top-down and bottom-up attention. Top-down attention is goal-driven, such as following a target melody. Bottom-up attention responds to stimulus properties, like sudden loud sounds. Distracting melodies triggered bottom-up activity, varying across participants.
“The more musical someone is, the stronger their top-down selective attention and the weaker the effect of bottom-up distraction,” Manting explains.
Musicians likely apply this enhanced top-down focus in everyday situations, such as following conversations in noisy settings. Manting notes, however, that some distractions—like hearing their own instrument—may be harder to ignore. She plans to investigate how musical training shapes cognition in future studies.
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