Perfect Drug for Perfect Pitch? New Study Tests Valproate

CNET

You’re only as young as you think you are. But what if you could re-train your brain to absorb information as easily as a child can?

That’s exactly what scientists testing the FDA-approved drug called valproate investigated in study of adults who had little or no musical training yet demonstrated some degree of absolute pitch, an ability to identify or produce the pitch of a musical sound without any reference point.

Absolute pitch, the scientists say, can only be acquired early in life.

Valproate is currently used to treat epileptic seizures, migraines, and manic episodes associated with bipolar disorder. But scientists wanted to see if the drug had other neurological benefits.

According to the study, titled “Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch” and published recently in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, an adult male brain was able to retain new information as easily as it did during childhood thanks to the mood-balancing drug.

The team of international researchers “learned to identify pitch significantly better than those taking placebo — evidence that VPA (valproate) facilitated critical-period learning in the adult human brain,” the report concluded. “Importantly, this result was not due to a general change in cognitive function, but rather a specific effect on a sensory task associated with a critical-period.”

Takao Hensch, a Harvard professor of molecular and cellular biology and one of the authors of the valproate study, explained how the drug works. “It’s a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state,” Hensch told NPR. “It’s quite remarkable since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.”

“There are a number of examples of critical-period type development, language being one of the most obvious ones,” Hensch told NPR. “So the idea here was, could we come up with a way that would reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?”

As an experiment, half of the 24 adult male participants took the valproate drug, the other half a placebo, and then all were trained to recognize audio tones through a series of tests.

“Given the difficulty of improving AP (absolute pitch) performance in adulthood, we hypothesize that in our task, even a small advantage in pitch class identification in the VPA as compared to the placebo group is suggestive of the reopening of plasticity, as musically naive participants were trained for a relatively short time period on several pitch classes, conditions under which no existing study has shown any improvement in AP (absolute pitch),” the scientists reported inthe study.

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