William Congreve famously wrote, “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” To these remarkable properties of music, we might add its ability to heighten our perceptions of sounds and even alter the anatomy of the brain.

Of course, many types of experience can alter the nervous system. But it is generally hard to study plasticity in the human brain. In a Perspective this month (page 473), Münte and colleagues suggest that people who dedicate their lives to music — professional musicians — could represent an ideal 'model organism' for the study of neural plasticity in humans. After years of intensive training, perhaps beginning early in childhood, the pianist or violinist is capable of sensorimotor feats that most of us could not begin to approach. So, perhaps it is no surprise that the brain of a musician might be specialized for listening to and performing music. Recent studies have found a variety of differences between the brains of professional musicians and those of control subjects, and research continues into how these differences might arise and what they might tell us about the functional organization of the brain.

Another group of humans in whom plastic changes seem to occur in the brain comprises those who have lost the use of one of their senses. For example, deafness or blindness can lead to improvements in performance in some tests of the remaining senses, and to alterations in brain activity that can be measured by functional imaging. Bavelier and Neville review the findings relating to such cross-modal plasticity in humans and animal models in a Review article in this issue (page 443). They conclude that a wide variety of plastic changes is possible, and that these changes depend crucially on the nature, timing and modality of the alteration or loss of sensation.