Is it worse? No, according to Science Alert. They’re sharing research that shows musical training actually increases tolerance for pain:
Research has also found that persistent pain can shrink what’s known as our brain’s “body map” – this is where our brain sends commands for which muscles to move and when – and this shrinking is linked with worse pain.
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In our study, we wanted to look at whether musical training and all the brain changes it creates could influence how musicians feel and deal with pain. To do this, we deliberately induced hand pain over several days in both musicians and non-musicians to see if there was any difference in how they responded to the pain.
To safely mimic muscle pain, we used a compound called nerve growth factor. It’s a protein that normally keeps nerves healthy, but when injected into hand muscles, it makes them ache for several days, especially if you’re moving your hand. But it’s safe, temporary, and doesn’t cause any damage.
Then we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure brain activity. TMS sends tiny magnetic pulses into the brain. And we used these signals to create a map of how the brain controls the hand, which we did for each person who took part in the study.
We built these hand maps before the pain injection, and then measured them again two days later and eight days later, to see if pain changed how the brain was working.
When we compared the brains of the musicians and the non-musicians, the differences were striking. Even before we induced pain, the musicians showed a more finely tuned hand map in the brain, and the more hours they had spent practising, the more refined this map was found to be.
After pain was induced, the musicians reported experiencing less discomfort overall. And while the hand map in non-musicians’ brains shrank after just two days of pain, the maps in musicians’ brains remained unchanged – amazingly, the more hours they had trained, the less pain they felt.
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Of course, this doesn’t mean music is a cure for chronic pain. But it does show us that long-term training and experience can shape how we perceive pain.