Psychological intervention

Neuroscience

Brain development

Cognition

Psychiatry

Developmental psychology

Neonatal intensive care unit

Psychology

Salience (neuroscience)

Music therapy

Brain activity and meditation

Intervention (counseling)

Electroencephalography

Medicine

Audiology

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Significance Preterm babies are cared for in neonatal intensive care units (NICU), which are busy places with a lot of mechanical noise increasingly recognized to disrupt normal brain development. NICUs therefore invest in developmental care procedures, with music for example, but neurobiological evidence for these interventions is missing. We present results from a clinical trial to study the effects of a music intervention on preterm infants’ brain development. Based on resting-state fMRI, we provide evidence that music enhanced connectivity in a brain circuitry involving the salience network with regions implicated in sensory and higher-order cognitive functions, previously found to be altered in preterm infants. To our knowledge, this study is unique in observing an impact of music on brain development in preterm newborns.

Music in premature infants enhances high-level cognitive brain networks