Neuroscience Finds Musicians Feel Pain Differently From the Rest of Us | By Anna M. Zamorano, Medical Xpress | 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.
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.
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Read more on this research here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/neuroscience-finds-musicians-feel-pain-differently-from-the-rest-of-us/
Read the original article from The Conservation here:
https://theconversation.com/neuroscience-finds-musicians-feel-pain-differently-from-the-rest-of-us-265815
This story was originally published on Medical Xpress.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-neuroscience-musicians-pain-differently-rest.html
Grumbling Composers Have a Point: Music is Good For Us
By Jane Shilling, The Telegraph
Upbraiding Basil Fawlty for slacking, his wife Sybil remarked that he could have finished his chores if he hadn’t spent the morning “listening to that racket”. “That’s Brahms’s third racket”, cried Basil in anguish. Appearing on Desert Island Discs over the weekend, composer Mark-Anthony Turnage suggested that when it comes to modern classical music, the listening public has more than a touch of Sybil.
GQ magazine once put contemporary classical music at number one in its list of biggest turn-offs, and Turnage recalled hearing disobliging remarks about his compositions by audience members, including one who wondered, “What twisted person would write this sort of rubbish?”
The composer insisted that he doesn’t write “really difficult music”, and works by a host of contemporary classical composers – George Benjamin, Thomas Adès and the former and current Masters of the Queen’s and King’s Music, Judith Weir and Errollyn Wallen – are far from inaccessible.
Yet a resistance to modern classical music persists: I recently went to a concert by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. The auditorium was packed for Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 1, but rather threadbare for the second half of the programme, which included the world premiere of Freya Waley-Cohen’s Mother Tongue. “They do that,” said my neighbour, indicating the now empty seat to my right: “Come for the popular stuff and then go home.”
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Read more of this opinion here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/grumbling-composers-have-a-point-music-is-good-for-us/