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