Lectures and seminars Brain and Culture Lecture: Tuning the Brain: How Music Sharpens Attention in a Noisy World

Tuning the Brain: How Music Sharpens Attention in a Noisy World

Listening seems effortless, yet beneath it lies extraordinary complexity. Everyday life bombards us with overlapping sounds—voices at a party, instruments in an orchestra, the hum of a city— and our brain must separate and interpret dozens of overlapping sounds in milliseconds. This ability, known as selective attention, allows us to make sense of the chaos around us and is crucial for communication and survival. Few activities challenge it more beautifully than music: What happens in your brain when you focus on a single melody in a noisy concert hall? Why can musicians follow multiple instruments effortlessly, while others struggle to pick one voice out of a crowd? These questions open a window into how the brain controls attention and how musical experience refines it.

This lecture explores how musical training tunes the brain’s attentional systems, revealing the neural interplay between conscious and automatic control. Drawing on neuroimaging evidence through the unique lens of the musician's brain, we will examine how experience sculpts the brain, what mechanisms underlie expertise, and how the benefits of music training transfer to broader cognitive domains such as language and memory. We will present cutting-edge magnetoencephalography research combining frequency-tagging and machine-learning to separate simultaneous brain responses and uncover how musical training sharpens selective attention. Finally, we will consider broader questions: can musical experience inspire new strategies for education, rehabilitation, or even brain stimulation to enhance focus and learning? Ultimately, this talk invites reflection on how what we practice and value shapes how we hear, think, and experience the world.