Guitar Playing and Your Brain

Ever wonder what is going on in your brain when you play the guitar? Most musicians and music educators are primarily focused on performing or teaching how to play an instrument and easily to overlook all the amazing scientific data accumulated over the past decades about brain development during music education. Neuroscientists like Dr. Daniel J. Levitin study this field extensively, and their research offers insights and dazzling data on the effects of making and listening to music on brain development.
"Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans", Levitin writes in his book titled This Is Your Brain On Music.

He continues, "Singing and instrumental activities might have helped our species to refine motor skills, paving the way for the development of the exquisitely fine muscle control required for vocal or signed speech" (260). Clearly music has had and continues to have a profound effect on our brains, and practicing scales in patterns is an excellent example of the brain stimulation that occurs while learning the guitar.
Learning how to play any instrument and reading music involves a great deal of number use, the alphabet and even roman numerals. During this process motor skills are also constantly being improved all while the memory is strengthened. Practicing scales in patterns is perhaps the ideal example of how numbers, letters and basic math come together and require a music student to maximize precisely this "exquisitely fine muscle control".
Let's take a closer look at this long-standing tradition of honing the art of scale studies in a simple example. Imagine a musical scale being a series of 8 notes forming a staircase from the lowest to the highest note:
A.8
G. 7
F. 6
E. 5
D. 4
C. 3
B. 2
A. 1

A very simple pattern consisting of a two note series could be:
1 to 2, then 2 to 3, then 3 to 4 and carry that pattern all the way through until you reach the highest note. It would look like the following:

A B, B C, C D, D E, E F, F G, and G A.
1 2, 2 3, 3 4, 4 5, 5 6, 6 7, and 7 8

As you can see, scale patterns, even on a simple level, challenge the brain by requiring several skills to be used at the same time. Each one of these accesses a different region of the brain.
So exactly what is happening in our brains as we learn how to play an instrument or move our fingers in various scale pattern combinations? Levitin shares his insights:
"At a cognitive level, playing an instrument requires the orchestration of regions in our primitive, reptilian brain--the cerebellum and the brain stem--as well as higher cognitive systems such as the motor cortex (in the partial lobe) and the planning regions of our frontal lobes, the most advanced region of the brain" (57). While performing music, the entire brain is engaged and musicians' brains are actually performing many complex calculations of multitasking all while not trying to lose a beat!

Playing a scale in patterns is a common exercise for musicians of all instruments, backgrounds and genres, and there is a good reason for that. It is an excellent way to continously challenge finger dexterity in a logical and structured manner because the initial scale pattern can be manipulated in varying degrees thus making it more challenging to execute and memorize.
Dr. Levitin explains that the enormous complexity of information our brain is processing in that moment is making use of a developed musical memory, assisting us during the task of listening and analyzing music. "The music circuits [in our brain] start to decompose the signal and separately analyze pitch, timbre, contour, and rhythm. The output of the neurons performing these tasks connects to regions in the frontal lobe that put all of it together and try to figure out if there is any structure or order to the temporal patterning of it all. The frontal lobes access our hippocampus and regions in the interior of the temporal lobes and ask if there is anything in our memory banks that can help to understand this signal. Have I heard this particular pattern before? If so, when? What does it mean? Is it part of a larger sequence whose meaning is unfolding right now in front of me?" (130-131).

This musical memory is very sharp, and music instructors and students alike can testify to its existence when playing a scale pattern by ear. As soon as the pattern has been established, no later than after the third sequence even an untrained ear will hear whether it was played correctly or not.
Curiously, it is a very rewarding feeling indeed to be able to play a difficult pattern from the lowest to the highest scale degree and hearing the repeating sequence being played correctly. Dr. Levitin holds down-to-earth chemistry responsible for this satisfactory feeling. "The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum's contribution to regulating emotions through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic systems. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods" (191).

So there you have it. Not only is practicing scales in patterns a great way to improve your technique, it is actually rewiring all kinds of beneficial brain synopses, and it even brightens up your day by increasing your dopamine levels at no extra cost! Best pick up your instrument and start practicing some new scale patterns, and don't be surprised if you catch yourself smiling as you master them!
Chris

P.S.: Five excellent scale pattern books are:
1. Essential Scale Studies For Improvisation by Tony Degradi
2. Scale Pattern Studies For Guitar by Aaron Shearer
3. Patterns For Improvisation by Oliver Nelson
4. Repository Of Scales And Melodic Patterns by Yusef A. Lateef
5. Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns by Nicolas Slonimsky (arranged for electric guitar by Dave Celentano)