by Medical Faculty of Ruhr‐University Bochum

Main titles

• People who play the drums differ from others in brain structure and brain function.
• Drummers have fewer but thicker fibers in the main connecting tract that separates the two halves of the brain.
• "Most people can only perform fine motor tasks with one hand and have problems playing different rhythms with both hands at the same time, drummers can do things that are impossible for untrained people." - Dr. Lara Schlaffke
• The study wanted to discover more about the organization of complex motor processes in the brain, a task that was accomplished by assessing the differences in the brain that were brought about by training with drums. Researchers used information from MRI imaging, about the structure and the function of the brain.
• The front part of the corpus callosum is involved in motor planning, and drummers had fewer but thicker fibers allowing a more efficient transfer of data between the two hemispheres.
• The brains of drummers also exhibited less activation in motor tasks than nondrummers, a phenomenon known as sparse sampling, where more efficiency equates to less activation.

Source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com