Date and time: December 1st at 14.00
Location: Peter Reichard lecture hall, Biomedicum, Solna väg 9
Speaker: Cassia Low Manting, Research Specialist, Daniel Lundqvist's research group, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet
Title: Tuning the Brain: How Music Sharpens Attention in a Noisy World
Tuning the Brain: How Music Sharpens Attention in a Noisy World
Listening seems effortless, yet beneath it lies extraordinary complexity. Everyday life bombards us with overlapping sounds—voices at a party, instruments in an orchestra, the hum of a city— and our brain must separate and interpret dozens of overlapping sounds in milliseconds. This ability, known as selective attention, allows us to make sense of the chaos around us and is crucial for communication and survival. Few activities challenge it more beautifully than music: What happens in your brain when you focus on a single melody in a noisy concert hall? Why can musicians follow multiple instruments effortlessly, while others struggle to pick one voice out of a crowd? These questions open a window into how the brain controls attention and how musical experience refines it.
This lecture explores how musical training tunes the brain’s attentional systems, revealing the neural interplay between conscious and automatic control. Drawing on neuroimaging evidence through the unique lens of the musician's brain, we will examine how experience sculpts the brain, what mechanisms underlie expertise, and how the benefits of music training transfer to broader cognitive domains such as language and memory. We will present cutting-edge magnetoencephalography research combining frequency-tagging and machine-learning to separate simultaneous brain responses and uncover how musical training sharpens selective attention. Finally, we will consider broader questions: can musical experience inspire new strategies for education, rehabilitation, or even brain stimulation to enhance focus and learning? Ultimately, this talk invites reflection on how what we practice and value shapes how we hear, think, and experience the world.
Music training can help the brain focus - Cassia Low Manting's latest research
Musical people find it easier to focus their attention on the right sounds in noisy environments. This is shown in a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Science Advances. The results suggest that music training can be used to sharpen attention and cognition.
Being able to focus on a conversation in a room full of noise is a complex task for the brain. In a new study, researchers have investigated how music training affects the brain's ability to focus attention on specific sounds.
The results show that musical people are better at using so-called top-down attention—a conscious control of focus—while being less sensitive to so-called bottom-up attention—distracting sounds (see fact box).