(below is an excerpt from an article found via the link--interesting that more blood flow to motor areas occured with music listening. could this have anything to do with ability to dance even when normal movements are not achievable? or is one able to execute dance steps well without music- as in walking upstairs? or one could consider the newest accessory for youth--the iPod -- a brain exercise device)

http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=news_101506d

WHEN LISTENING TO MUSIC, YOUR BRAIN IS ‘MOVING’ EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT


ATLANTA, October 15, 2006 - Recent findings have uncovered that when listening to a rythmic sound, the motor region of our brain is active even if our body isn't. Research also shows, for the first time, activation of another area of our brain, the visual center, when temporarily blinded individuals recognize an object by touch...


...While you listen to music, the areas of your brain that enable your body to move are active, even if you are not. Recent research shows that you don't have to think about the music's rhythm or tap your feet to the beat to engage your brain's motor control areas.

"This finding goes against the traditional view that the brain's motor regions are involved only in executing body movement," says Robert Zatorre, PhD, of McGill University in Montreal.

Does this research help explain the irresistible urge to dance, or at the least, to tap your fingers, when music is played? "Research carried out in our laboratory and in others have already shown that both auditory and motor regions of our brain become engaged when we listen to a musical rhythm and concurrently tap our fingers with it," says Joyce Chen, who collaborated with Zatorre.

"More interestingly, we also know that when we listen to a musical rhythm and just think about, or imagine ourselves, tapping along with it, motor regions of our brain are also engaged," she adds.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Zatorre and Chen pinpointed the brain areas in which neurons became active when the human volunteers listened to music. The fMRI measures the changes in blood flow that occur when neurons are active.

The researchers used fMRI to monitor the volunteers' brains during three conditions. In the first, they asked the volunteers just to listen to the music. Next, the volunteers were instructed to anticipate, as they listened to the music, that they they would tap their fingers to the beat of the music. In the third condition, they actually tapped their fingers while listening to the music.

"The results revealed that the brain's motor regions were involved in all three conditions, surprisingly, even when the volunteers were listening to a sequence of sounds that had no explicit association to movement," Chen says.

"The sounds we used sounded like a wood block, that is, they had no pitch, so there was no melody per se. So we really think it's the complex time patterns involved in rhythm that engage the motor system."...

Several things come to mind-

I only know of two professional dancers with PD. One is an old man whose name I forget but who is a tap dance instructor in New York and who has been dancing with PD for many years. The other is our own Fiona ("the dancer formerly known as Rao") whom I believe is still going ten years or so post-dx.

Does anyone else know of any full time dancers with PD? If there is a lower percentage than engineers, for example, then it may mean that dancing prevents or repairs the damage of PD.

There is also the story from a couple of weeks ago that a researcher had found that in a mouse PD model that a large group of neurons were firing simultaneously rather than "randomly". Think of one of those electronic lighted marquees made up of thousands of individual lights. If they are all firing at the same time you have only a brightly lighted board. It is only when they fire individually that you can know that "Wayne Newton" is appearing.

The same thing applies to our brain. When it all lights up or when none of it does, nothing happens. It is only when asynchronous firing is present that things happen. Music entrains our brain and alters our functional capacity by pushing aside the rigid wave patterns and introducing fluctuations which can convey information - whether it be "Wayne" or "walk".

Music's been shown to have therapeutic benefits for years, so I don't think it's surprising that it's firing up brain cells all over the place, motor, immune systems, or otherwise.

They don't say what music they used in their studies, so I'm assuming my Zeppelin is good, right?

And I love my iPod but sometimes working the damn clickwheel when your fingers don't want to cooperate can be frustrating!

Todd
PDTalks.com

I love your description, Rick. It's as if music focuses our brain, and a specific rhythm cues our motor responses to respond to the rhythm. I sing very often when I walk and it helps me tremendously. When I'm not singing, my inner metronome picks up the slack.

Thanks, olsen!