How Music Enhances Our Brains and Our Lives |
New Orleans. Just hearing the city’s name brings music to mind. This is, after all, where jazz was born. On any given day, music flows out of clubs in the French Quarter and beyond. What a tailor-made place to study music and the brain, I thought. So I reached out to a local neuroscientist during a recent visit.
Paul Colombo, PhD, grew up near Buffalo, New York. He trained in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley under Professor Mark Rosenzweig, a pioneer in the field. Rosenzweig’s research showed that rich, stimulating environments can change the brain, even in adults, by increasing brain volume and improving brain function. This ability of the brain to change is known as neuroplasticity.
When Dr. Colombo set out to find a full-time job, he ruled out returning to northern climes and accepted a position at Tulane University. He was drawn not only by the warm weather but also by NOLA’s strong music culture—as a drummer, the city’s musical energy appealed to him.
Nevertheless, Dr. Colombo did not begin to study music and the brain until later in his career. Trained in cellular neuroscience, he focused for the first half of his professional life on how memory works at the cellular and genetic levels. In a study with young and old rats, he found that memory formation is related to concentrations of an enzyme, protein kinase C, in the brain.1 In another study, he showed that learning activates the synthesis of proteins necessary for memory formation.2 A further finding from these studies was that the brain’s multiple memory systems, once thought to operate independently, were interactive.3
Dr. Colombo describes his primary research approach in this way: introduce a behavior—such as giving an........