Diving into the minds of musicians to uncover new learning strategies

When study­ing the brain, neuro­bi­o­lo­gists tend to focus on the struc­ture and physiolo­gic­al func­tions of our body’s most vital organ. Hom­ing in on the dif­fer­ent cells (namely, neur­ones and glia) sci­ent­ists study the ways in which they inter­act through neur­al net­works and chem­ic­al mes­sages in the form of neur­o­trans­mit­ters (sero­ton­in, dopam­ine, adren­aline etc.). And how, bio­lo­gic­ally, the mul­ti­far­i­ous com­pon­ents of this cereb­ral orches­tra har­mon­ise as one. How­ever, they do less often study the thoughts gen­er­ated by these bio­chem­ic­al and physiolo­gic­al elements. 

As such, bio­lo­gist Prof. Pierre Legrain (Insti­tut Pas­teur) is tak­ing a rather uncon­ven­tion­al approach to study the human mind to uncov­er how the brain learns new things.  Con­trary to stand­ard prac­tise, he uses a hol­ist­ic phe­nomen­o­lo­gic­al exper­i­ment that con­sists of sim­ul­tan­eously col­lect­ing exper­i­ment­al data on per­cep­tion and indi­vidu­al reports from test sub­jects through intro­spect­ive inter­views. He asks the ques­tion: what does a per­son exper­i­ence when his/her brain per­forms spe­cif­ic functions? 

“There are chil­dren for whom teach­ing meth­ods we use today do not work,” he announces. “I mean, there are a lot of kids who have learn­ing dif­fi­culties, and we tend to think that these kids aren’t ‘good’ at school. Yet, there is a lot of evid­ence to sug­gest that it is the way we teach these chil­dren that needs to be adap­ted – it’s not their fault.” 

He is refer­ring to learn­ing skills that, he says, most of us take for gran­ted. Pre­vi­ous work sug­gests that many chil­dren who are strug­gling in the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem do so because they have not mastered the men­tal strategies neces­sary to suc­ceed in school. As a res­ult, many of those who struggle to learn the basics of read­ing, math, or even social skills, may simply be lack­ing cog­nit­ive abil­it­ies that can, in fact, be learnt. 

“For example, when you hear or see things in your mind and relate those ideas to the real world, you are improv­ing your cog­nit­ive abil­it­ies. This pro­cess is impli­cit and seems obvi­ous to many of us, but it is not obvi­ous for every­one,” he says.  Legrain works closely with his col­league Alain Letail­leur, a  spe­cial­ised teach­er for pupils with severe learn­ing dif­fi­culties, who has examined these the­or­ies on those chil­dren. In doing so, he had pre­vi­ously helped chil­dren learn to bet­ter use their brains by pick­ing up cog­nit­ive strategies such as men­tal visu­al, aud­it­ory or kin­aes­thet­ic asso­ci­ations, such as com­bin­ing a math­em­at­ic­al oper­a­tion with the ges­ture made on the calculator. 

Legrain and Letail­leur there­fore seek to bet­ter under­stand what learn­ing strategies are pos­sible in order to offer them to chil­dren with learn­ing difficulties. 

To study what hap­pens to the brain as it learns – in terms of thoughts, not in a dir­ectly bio­lo­gic­al sense – they are using musi­cians as test sub­jects. Under con­trolled con­di­tions, they played them a music­al note, which they then had to identi­fy as quickly as pos­sible. “In gen­er­al, they respond almost imme­di­ately,” he points out. It’s an import­ant factor because the test relies on the logic that the sub­jects all hear exactly the same thing and identi­fy it as the same note. There­fore, the input and out­put of the brain are as con­stant as it can get. 

The only thing that changes, there­fore, is the thought that occurs in the musician’s mind. He con­tin­ues, “after the response, we asked them to describe what they felt when their brain iden­ti­fied the note.” They did this in dif­fer­ent ways, some­times using a draw­ing to form­al­ise the idea. Inter­est­ingly, the musi­cians described a vari­ety of exper­i­ences – many of which were very dif­fer­ent from one anoth­er. Amongst them were descrip­tions of vibra­tions, images, asso­ci­ation with emo­tions, their music­al instru­ments, bod­ily responses or more, allow­ing the team to cre­ate a col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent men­tal strategies used by their test subjects.

Non­ethe­less, the key find­ing came from com­par­ing the two dis­tinct groups in the sample of musi­cians they stud­ied. He explains, “on the one hand, we had music stu­dents and on the oth­er, pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians. The men­tal mech­an­isms described by the stu­dents ten­ded to be related to learn­ing strategies, where­as the pro­fes­sion­als used thoughts more related to their artist­ic prac­tice, such as the instru­ment they play.” Hence, with a musician’s ‘expert­ise’ or pro­fi­ciency in their craft, the sub­jects seemed to have developed their own per­son­al­ised men­tal strategy for identi­fy­ing music­al notes. “We named these men­tal anchor­points [appuis men­taux, in French].” 

The next step will be quite com­plic­ated because it means tak­ing sev­er­al musi­cians who use dif­fer­ent men­tal anchor­points and study­ing them togeth­er. “We are now examin­ing the dif­fer­ent strategies used in the hopes of object­ively clas­si­fy­ing them. We will then need to find a way to spe­cific­ally inter­fere with one or anoth­er men­tal anchor­point to spe­cific­ally pre­vent a musi­cian from recog­nising the note.” 

This approach is nov­el in that it attempts to link bio­lo­gic­al find­ings to the psyche, which has rarely been stud­ied until now, so the chal­lenge is there. To bridge this gap, the team will com­bine their find­ings with neuroima­ging to identi­fy the neur­al cir­cuits that are involved. “We would like to be able to bet­ter char­ac­ter­ise these men­tal anchor­points in order to find effect­ive ways to apply them to aca­dem­ic learning.” 

Interview by James Bowers