Evidence of cortical thickness increases in bilateral auditory brain structures following piano learning in older adults.

Morphological differences in the auditory brain of musicians compared to nonmusicians are often associated with life-long musical activity. Cross-sectional studies, however, do not allow for any causal inferences, and most experimental studies testing music-driven adaptations investigated children. Although the importance of the age at which musical training begins is widely recognized to impact neuroplasticity, there have been few longitudinal studies examining music-related changes in the brains of older adults. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we measured cortical thickness (CT) of 12 auditory-related regions of interest before and after 6 months of musical instruction in 134 healthy, right-handed, normal-hearing, musically-naive older adults (64-76 years old). Prior to the study, all participants were randomly assigned to either piano training or to a musical culture/music listening group. In five regions-left Heschl's gyrus, left planum polare, bilateral superior temporal sulcus, and right Heschl's sulcus-we found an increase in CT in the piano training group compared with the musical culture group. Furthermore, CT of the right Heschl's gyrus could be identified as a morphological substrate supporting speech in noise perception. The results support the conclusion that playing an instrument is an effective stimulator for cortical plasticity, even in older adults.

Brain response to visual sexual stimuli in heterosexual and homosexual males.

Although heterosexual and homosexual individuals clearly show differences in subjective response to heterosexual and homosexual sexual stimuli, the neurobiological processes underlying sexual orientation are largely unknown. We addressed the question whether the expected differences in subjective response to visual heterosexual and homosexual stimuli may be reflected in differences in brain activation pattern. Twenty-four healthy male volunteers, 12 heterosexuals and 12 homosexuals, were included in the study. BOLD signal was measured while subjects were viewing erotic videos of heterosexual and homosexual content. SPM02 was used for data analysis. Individual sexual arousal was assessed by subjective rating. As compared to viewing sexually neutral videos, viewing erotic videos led to a brain activation pattern characteristic for sexual arousal in both groups only when subjects were viewing videos of their respective sexual orientation. Particularly, activation in the hypothalamus, a key brain area in sexual function, was correlated with sexual arousal. Conversely, when viewing videos opposite to their sexual orientation both groups showed absent hypothalamic activation. Moreover, the activation pattern found in both groups suggests that stimuli of opposite sexual orientation triggered intense autonomic response and may be perceived, at least to some extent, as aversive.