Graph theoretical analysis of brain functional connectivity differences between musicians and nonmusicians

Abstract

This thesis study evaluated the effect of musical training on brain functional connectivity using graph theoretical concepts from a holistic perspective. While most studies based on this topic include the effects of the types of music or noise on a population of musicians or nonmusicians, this study was designed to try and differentiate the two populations directly by comparing their functional connectivity while listening to classical musical versus listening to white noise to compare the functional connectivity differences between the two populations using graph theory measures. It was found that musical training largely impacts the theta band during passive visual attention tasks such as facial recognition. Musicians and nonmusicians showed statistically significant difference in the average nodal degree, global efficiency, clustering coefficient, network densities, and modularity when considering the difference between the music and noise conditions in the theta band. Any differences between the populations in the alpha, mu, and beta bands were found to be statistically insignificant with a significance level of 0.05.