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Abstract
Musicians exchange non-verbal cues as messages when they play together. This is particularly
true in music with a sketchy outline. Jazz musicians receive and interpret the cues
when performance parts from a regular pattern of rhythm, suggesting that they enjoy
a highly developed sensitivity to subtle deviations of rhythm. We demonstrate that
pre-attentive brain responses recorded with magnetoencephalography to rhythmic incongruence
are left-lateralized in expert jazz musicians and right-lateralized in musically inept
non-musicians. The left-lateralization of the pre-attentive responses suggests functional
adaptation of the brain to a task of communication, which is much like that of language.