Music and Mirror Neuron System

Musical abilities arise from an extensive practice—starting in childhood and going on throughout musician’s lifetime—engaging perceptual, motor, and cognitive domains. The shaping of brain networks that induces music skills development is sustained by the growing capability to transform auditory stimuli into their motor representation. As a result of this reiterated coupling, musicians reinforce their audio-motor integration proficiency, progressively expanding their sensory-motor repertoire. The discovery of the mirror neurons—a particular class of neurons that discharge both during the performance of a given motor act and during the observation of another person performing a motor act with a similar goal—offered a new perspective to Neuroscience to study brain mechanisms underlying musical activities. Indeed, musicians, while listening to music, activate the same brain motor areas they could have recruited during active musical performance. This peculiar ability plays a fundamental role in audio-motor consolidation occurring in music learning as in sensorimotor conversation during ensemble performances. Such audio-motor properties of human mirror neuron system could be additionally exploited in neurological rehabilitation in music-based interventions, such as melodic intonation therapy in aphasic patients and sonification-movement approaches in people suffering from upper limbs motor impairment.