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Posted on 10/08/2025 10:12:11 AM PDT by nickcarraway
It's well known that learning to play an instrument can offer benefits beyond just musical ability. Indeed, research shows it's a great activity for the brain – it can enhance our fine motor skills, language acquisition, speech, and memory – and it can even help to keep our brains younger.
After years of working with musicians and witnessing how they persist in musical training despite the pain caused by performing thousands of repetitive movements, I started wondering: if musical training can reshape the brain in so many ways, can it also change the way musicians feel pain, too?
This is the question that my colleagues and I set out to answer in our new study.
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Scientists already know that pain activates several reactions in our bodies and brains, changing our attention and thoughts, as well as our way of moving and behaving. If you touch a hot pan, for example, pain makes you pull back your hand before you get seriously burned.
Pain also changes our brain activity. Indeed, pain usually reduces activity in the motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls muscles, which helps stop you from overusing an injured body part.
These reactions help to prevent further harm when you're injured. In this way, pain is a protective signal that helps us in the short term. But if pain continues for a longer time and your brain keeps sending these "don't move" signals for too long, things can go wrong.
For example, if you sprain your ankle and stop using it for weeks, it can reduce your mobility and disrupt the brain activity in regions related to pain control. And this can increase your suffering and pain levels in the long term.
Research has also found that persistent pain can shrink what's known as our brain's "body map" – this is where our brain sends commands for which muscles to move and when – and this shrinking is linked with worse pain.
But while it's clear that some people experience more pain when their brain maps shrink, not everyone is affected the same way. Some people can better handle pain, and their brains are less sensitive to it. Scientists still don't fully understand why this happens.
Hands playing a piano Learning to play an instrument can offer benefits beyond just musical ability. (TrueCreatives/Canva) Musicians and pain In our study, we wanted to look at whether musical training and all the brain changes it creates could influence how musicians feel and deal with pain. To do this, we deliberately induced hand pain over several days in both musicians and non-musicians to see if there was any difference in how they responded to the pain.
To safely mimic muscle pain, we used a compound called nerve growth factor. It's a protein that normally keeps nerves healthy, but when injected into hand muscles, it makes them ache for several days, especially if you're moving your hand. But it's safe, temporary, and doesn't cause any damage.
Then we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure brain activity. TMS sends tiny magnetic pulses into the brain. And we used these signals to create a map of how the brain controls the hand, which we did for each person who took part in the study.
We built these hand maps before the pain injection, and then measured them again two days later and eight days later, to see if pain changed how the brain was working.
When we compared the brains of the musicians and the non-musicians, the differences were striking. Even before we induced pain, the musicians showed a more finely tuned hand map in the brain, and the more hours they had spent practising, the more refined this map was found to be.
After pain was induced, the musicians reported experiencing less discomfort overall. And 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.
Close up on man's open mouth The differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians were striking. (Towfiqu barbhuiya/Pexels) This was a small study of just 40 people, but the results clearly showed that the musicians' brains responded differently to pain. Their training seems to have given them a kind of buffer against the usual negative effects, both in how much pain they felt and in how their brain's motor areas reacted.
Of course, this doesn't mean music is a cure for chronic pain. But it does show us that long-term training and experience can shape how we perceive 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.
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Our team is now conducting further research on pain to determine if musical training may also protect us from altered attention and cognition during chronic pain. And off the back of this, we hope to be able to design new therapies that "retrain" the brain in people who suffer from persistent pain.
For me, this is the most exciting part: the idea that as a musician, what I learn and practise every day doesn't just make me better at a skill, but that it can literally rewire my brain in ways that change how I experience the world, even something as fundamental as pain.
This article was commissioned by Videnskab.dk as part of a partnership collaboration with The Conversation. You can read the Danish version of this article, here.The Conversation
Anna M. Zamorano, Assistant Professor, Aarhus University
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Physical pain? Guess I should have read the article... oh well...
This woman lives in her own bubble. Did anyone, including John, ever tell Yoko her voice could invoke pain and suffering ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68
I don’t know if I have a particularly high pain threshold, but anyone listening to me practice sure does.
I did at first! Lol!
It’s like those hip musicians and their complicated shoes.
George Costanza
Yoko Ono’s uncle was high ranking diplomat standing right behind the emperor during the signing of the Japanese surrender in WWII.
So the cure to chronic pain: practice an instrument for 10 hours a day over ten years and you’ll be fine. Easy!
Might explain Keith Richards and Willie Nelson.
If they could, they’d be better at tuning their instruments.
“I’ve suffered for my music, now it’s your turn.”
I guess that explains all the ugly ‘music’
If ol’ Willie can survive being rolled up in a blanket and whanged with a broom handle (by his then-wife) he can pretty much take anything.
“I’ve often wondered if music helps institute a dopamine effect.”
Absolutely! It also increases conscious awareness. There is an energy out there you can tap into.
Of course the most important takeaway from the study is how female musicians respond and adapt to spankings.
Those who can compose original music have God-like properties from my perspective. I listen to Enya, Vangelis, and a bunch more. Of course, Bach and his ilk. Why even PP&M astound me. Music is very magical to me. Only rap and similar noises annoy me.
Too bad I can't make music. I started to learn the piano; but, progress is really slow since I have to work through it by myself. Nobody wants a 76 year old music student ... you can bet safely on that.
“Nobody wants a 76 year old music student ... you can bet safely on that.”
Lol, I get it. But it really is good for the mind as we get older. Maybe you have patience now to teach yourself you didn’t have then? It is not about the goal of becoming a master, it is just about the mental exercise even if you perpetually suck. Just the challenge to the mind is good even if you never accomplish much. MIDI USB keyboards are cheap and matching PC software is free... :)
“Those who can compose original music have God-like properties from my perspective.”
I often wonder where they even find it. Those of us who have mastered our instruments can improvise on the fly and feel that energy that flows through us, it takes over and puts you on autopilot. But to be a master who composes for a whole symphony must be on another whole plane and dimension to be able to do that.
That ability is beyond comprehension for even the most accomplished of musicians... Music is Mathematics, so I can imagine that the greats must have had the mental capabilities of Einstein and Tesla and the metaphysical abilities of a Yogi. :)
Sure it is. I want them to think of me instead of Vangelis. ;-D
Drugs and alcohol have that effect.
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