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Musicians from karaoke singers to professional cello players are better able to hear targeted sounds in a noisy environment, according to new research that adds to evidence that music makes the brain work better. In the past ten years there s been an explosion of research on music and the brain, Aniruddh Patel, Senior Fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said today at a press briefing. Most recently brain-imaging studies have shown that music activates many diverse parts of the brain, including an overlap in where the brain processes music and language. Language is a natural aspect to consider in looking at how music affects the brain, Patel said. Like music, language is universal, there s a strong learning component, and it carries complex meanings. For example, brains of people exposed to even casual musical training have an enhanced ability to generate the brain wave patterns associated with specific sounds, be they musical or spoken, said study leader Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Illinois. But for people without a trained ear for music, the ability to make these patterns decreases as background noise increases, experiments show. Musicians, by contrast, have subconsciously trained their brains to better recognize selective sound patterns, even as background noise goes up. | 
