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Piano lessons are sort of like braces. For a few years, everyone's parents paid
a lot of money so their children could contort their bodies (fingers; teeth) and
But while everyone grows out of braces, some people never recover from
childhood piano lessons. This is, in part, because true pianists' brains are
actually different from those of everyone else. In this series, we've already
written about what makes guitarists' and drummers' brains unique, but playing
keys is an entirely different beast. Drums are functionally pitchless and
achordal, so pitch selection and chord voicings aren't part of the equation.
Guitar only allows for six notes at once and heavily favors left-hand dexterity.
But piano is the ultimate instrument in terms of skill and demand: Two hands
have to play together simultaneously while navigating 88 keys. They can play
up to 10 notes at a time. To manage all those options, pianists have to
develop a totally unique brain capacity — one that has been revealed by
science.
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Because both hands are required to be equally active for pianists' to master
their instrument, they have to overcome something innate to almost every
person: right or left-handedness.
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Already, then, pianists are able to make their brains into better-rounded
machines. But it turns out the heavy-tax of piano playing makes their minds
efficient in every way. A study by Dr. Ana Pinho (whose name kind of explains
her research focus) showed that when jazz pianists play, their brains have an
extremely efficient connection between the different parts of the frontal lobe
compared to non-musicians. That's a big deal — the frontal lobe
is responsible for integrating a ton of information into decision making. It plays
a major role in problem solving, language, spontaneity, decision making and
social behavior. Pianists, then, tend to integrate all of the brain's information
into more efficient decision making processes. Because of this high speed
Most shockingly, though, Pinho also found that when experienced pianists
play, they literally switch off the part of the brain associated with providing
stereotypical responses, ensuring that they play with their own unique voice
and not the voices of others. Basically, it's the opposite of Guitar Center riffage
— true innovation like Oscar Peterson:
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But piano is a taxing and complex instrument for the whole brain. Real
pianists are marked by brains that efficiently conserve energy by allocating
resources more effectively than anyone else. Dr. Timo Krings scanned
pianists' brains as they soloed and found that they pump less blood than
average people in the brain region associated with fine motor skills. Less
blood flow means less energy is needed to concentrate. Though that's likely
true of anyone who's mastered a nimble task, it only compounds the efficiency
pianists' brains develop through mutating the central sulcus and altering their
frontal lobe's function. In pianists, the change in blood flow frees them to
concentrate on other things that are totally unique to pianists — like their own
unique form of communication.