Sinister Movements

One similarity between violins and violas – and cellos and basses for that matter – is that they each demand a vastly unequal division of manual labor.  The left hand subtly flutters, each finger dancing independently over the strings; the right hand could be sawing through a 2-by-4.

             The brain, of course, is controlling that left hand, while also desperately calculating how long to hold the dotted 16^th note in cut time that the eyes have just spotted up ahead.  The virtuosity of the southpaw digits is maintained through an oddity already suspected by anyone with violinist friends – their brains are different, according to a report last October in Science. 

            The authors did magnetic imaging of the brains of six violinists and three other string players, then compared them with six people who, like Jack Benny, can’t play the violin.  The musicians’ cortical regions associated with the left digits were larger than both the regions corresponding to the right hand and either region in controls.  The musicians’ brains also showed greater response to tactile stimulation of the sinister, dexterous digits.

            Of course, the violin is merely a convenient marker for asymmetrical digital stimuli.  Other studies have shown comparable adaptations in the brains of owl monkeys that had one or two digits stimulated over long periods.  (No evidence supports rumors that these reports neglect to mention violins only because the monkeys attempted to blow into them.)

            The researchers acknowledged that their experiment doesn’t prove that playing the violin makes the brain grow bigger.  It might be the other way around.  “It could be argued,” they wrote, “that individuals with a genetically determined large representation of the left-hand digits make superior string players and therefore are more likely to continue with musical training once they have begun.”  Oh sure!

            On the other hand (it had to be said somewhere in this piece), the investigation also showed that the cortical differences were largest in the musicians who began their studies youngest.  So chances are that playing indeed trains the brain.  All of which means that the conductor George Szeli was more right than he ever could have guessed when he said, “In music, one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.”

Scientific American Magazine, 1996