{"id":178786,"date":"2025-09-29T23:32:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T23:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/178786\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T23:32:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T23:32:12","slug":"musicians-feel-pain-less-as-their-brains-are-wired-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/178786\/","title":{"rendered":"Musicians feel pain less as their brains are wired differently"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is no vaccine that can protect us from feeling sore when something hurts us but the next best thing might be learning to play a musical instrument \u2014 because a study has found that musicians are less susceptible to pain.<\/p>\n

There are many benefits that come with studying music, helping to boost your cognitive skills, your dexterity and your mental health. It may also reshape the relationship between your brain and your hands, researchers have discovered.<\/p>\n

Many instruments require strength and dexterity in the fingers in order to play the correct notes on the piano keyboard, guitar strings or saxophone keys. Musicians<\/a> may need to regularly push through a pain or discomfort barrier in order to practice a piece of music.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Groovy music \u2018boosts brainpower as well as mood\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Anna Zamorano, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, wrote on The Conversation, a news website: \u201cAfter 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Previous research has shown that persistent pain can change and shrink the brain\u2019s \u201cmap\u201d of the affected region, potentially in an effort to avoid over-using the pain-affected area. But some people are less sensitive to pain than others and their brains do not seem to be as strongly affected.<\/p>\n

\"Headshot<\/p>\n

Anna Zamorano, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, led the study<\/p>\n

For their study, published in the journal Pain, researchers took 19 musicians and 20 non-musicians and induced a feeling of pain in their hand that lasted for several days by injecting a protein called nerve growth factor. When injected into the hand it creates the sensation of aching that lasts for several days without causing any lasting damage.<\/p>\n

They then measured the participants\u2019 brain activity, tracking magnetic pulses on their journey through the brain to assess the areas that control the hand. They conducted these scans before the injections and then again two and eight days later \u201cto see if pain changed how the brain was working\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Should you push through the pain barrier?<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cEven 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,\u201d Zamorano said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter pain was induced, the musicians reported experiencing less discomfort overall. And while the hand map in non-musicians\u2019 brains shrank after just two days of pain, the maps in musicians\u2019 brains remained unchanged. Amazingly, the more hours they had trained, the less pain they felt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The pain caused by repetitive movements help build resilience to pain<\/p>\n

TAIYOU NOMACHI\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

This does not necessarily mean that learning to play music can cure chronic pain, she explained, but said that the findings may help scientists to understand more about why some people are \u201cmore resilient to pain than others\u201d, which might help in the designing of new treatments for those suffering from long-term pain.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, this is the most exciting part,\u201d Zamorano said. \u201cThe idea that as a musician, what I learn and practise every day doesn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is no vaccine that can protect us from feeling sore when something hurts us but the next…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-178786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}