It’s well known that learning to play an instrument can offer benefits beyond just musical ability. Indeed, research shows it’s a great activity for the brain – it can enhance our fine motor skills, language acquisition, speech, and memory – and it can even help to keep our brains younger.

After years of working with musicians and witnessing how they persist in musical training despite the pain caused by performing thousands of repetitive movements, I started wondering: if musical training can reshape the brain in so many ways, can it also change the way musicians feel pain, too? This is the question that my colleagues and I set out to answer in our new study.

Photo © Jordan Whitfield/Unsplash

Scientists already know that pain activates several reactions in our bodies and brains, changing our attention and thoughts, as well as our way of moving and behaving. If you touch a hot pan, for example, pain makes you pull back your hand before you get seriously burned.

Pain also changes our brain activity. Indeed, pain usually reduces activity in the motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls muscles, which...