Musicians respond to pain differently than other people, a startling new study says.
Previous research shows that persistent pain shrinks a part of the brain’s “body map” that tracks sensations across different parts of the body. Not everyone feels these effects the same way, however. Some people are able to handle pain better as their brains are less sensitive to it.
The new study assesses whether brain changes related to musical training affect how pain is perceived.
Researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark induced hand pain over several days in 19 musicians and 20 non-musicians to figure out if there was a difference in how they responded to the sensation.
To induce pain, the researchers injected the participants with a safe protein called nerve growth factor. The protein keeps nerves healthy but makes muscles ache for days, especially if one is moving their hand often.
They then sent small magnetic pulses into each participant’s brain to generate a map of how it controls the injected hand.
They created the maps before the pain injection, two days after it, and again eight days later.
The researchers found “striking” differences in how the brains of musicians responded to pain compared to those of non-musicians.
“While the hand map in non-musicians’ brains shrank after just two days of pain, the maps in musicians’ brains remained unchanged – amazingly, the more hours they had trained, the less pain they felt,” study co-author Anna Zamorano details the results in The Conversation.
“The results clearly showed that the musicians’ brains responded differently to pain.”
The scientists suspect that musical training provides “a kind of buffer” against the usual negative effects of pain sensation on the brain.
They, however, caution that music cannot be a singular cure for chronic pain.
“This is exciting because it might help us understand why some people are more resilient to pain than others, along with how we can design new treatments for those living with pain,” Dr Zamorano says.
In future studies, scientists hope to understand if musical training may also protect from altered attention and cognition while experiencing chronic pain.
The findings may lead to the development of new therapies to “retrain” the brain in people who suffer from chronic pain, the researchers say.
