All those hours practicing the piano pay off big time by biologically enhancing a person's ability to quickly recognize and mentally process sounds that carry emotion, according to a new study.

Studying music can change the way a brain is wired, new research finds.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

The study, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., offers a new line of evidence that the brain we end up with is not necessarily the same brain we started out with. "We are measuring what the nervous system has become, based on an individual's experience with sound," Nina Kraus, director of the university's groundbreaking Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, said in a telephone interview. Kraus and a team of researchers attached electrodes to the heads of 30 people, half of whom were serious musicians and half of whom had no significant musical training. The electrodes measure electricity, "which is, of course, the currency of the nervous system," Kraus said. The study revealed two major differences between the musicians and the nonmusicians. Read More