If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Says here, piano players’ brains are actually different from everybody else’s.

We knew that!

Up to a point, it applies to other musicians. Guitarists, for instance. They can synchronize their brains with other guitarists while playing together. A 2012 study in Berlin had researchers scan the brains of 12 pairs of guitarists while they were playing the same piece of music. Their neural networks would begin to synch before they started to play, and more and more while they played.

So it isn’t just Vulcans that can do the mind meld thing! We musicians have been hip to that, but earth people didn’t believe us. Now there is proof.

And guitar players are highly intuitive. Brain scans show that when a guitar player shreds, he/she tamps down activity in the area that handles heavy planning to reach big goals, and shifts from conscious to unconscious thought.

Guitar players learn new pieces more easily by watching them played than by reading music; and the music they read is more like music shorthand than regular music notation.

I tend to kid guitar players about being so high-strung and fretting a lot, but being really plucky. Seriously, I respect good guitar players a lot.

Drummers are much put upon, often being told, “Why don’t you take your drum and beat it?” But they tend to be assertive, and not easily intimidated.

A study in Stockholm found that reasoning ability and problem solving are linked to good timing and the kind of motor function used by drummers. Drummers adept at playing in time score higher on intelligence tests than sloppy ones.

Listening to music with a good beat improves cognitive function. A University of Texas Medical School study found that elementary school boys with ADD performed better after listening to catchy, tight rhythms, and that learning to use rhythm band instruments caused long-term, significant improvements in their IQ scores and academic performance.

When I was playing jazz piano a lot, I found that a good drummer could “lift” my performing ability. I was fortunate in having one of the best in the same group, and, oddly enough, I can still hear him when I play some songs, although he has been gone for years.

A drum machine would work, right? Precise, predictable, solid. My Casio can do good drum rhythms. But it isn’t innovative and imaginative and creative and passionate. It doesn’t have that human rhythm that great drummers can find within themselves, and share with others.

Turns out piano players’ brains are different from those of other musicians. Playing keys is a whole nother thing. In a combo, a piano may be in the rhythm section, along with a guitar, a bass and drums. But it can just as well be out in front, as were Ray Charles and Oscar Peterson and Art Tatum and, yes, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Floyd Cramer and…

Pianists have to use both hands and at least one foot (and sometimes two) and command 88 keys. Other instrumentalists can play one note at a time, or two, (bowed strings), or up to six in a strummed chord (guitarists) or longer arpeggios (harpists), but piano players can play 12 at a time in a pinch (using a double thumb bridge) and commonly play different groups of eight, nine or 10 in rapid succession.

To do this well, pianists develop a kind of brain capacity that other humans don’t need, and they have to overcome something most of us have: dominance, especially of one hand over the other—handedness. Most of us are right handed or left handed. Piano players have to be both.

A piano player may still prefer one hand for other tasks, such as writing (to the extent that people still write) or eating or paring apples. But the non-dominant hand has been trained to be as capable as most people’s dominant ones.

Scanning the brains of pianists, researchers found that their subjects had more symmetrical central sulcuses than any non-pianist subjects. Ordinarily the central sulcus is deeper on one side or the other, the deeper side relating to the dominant hand.

It isn’t that some people are born with symmetrical sulcuses and this predisposes them to play keyboard instruments! No, playing piano causes the sulcus to develop in a way that makes a person ambidextrous—at least, at a music keyboard.

So much information has to be processed by piano players, and so many signals must be transmitted to parts of their bodies (not just fingers or even hands, but wrists and arms and shoulders and trunks and legs and feet) that their brains must become more efficient than they otherwise would need to be. Yes, there are other kinds of keyboards, like the one I am using at the moment, but I don’t have to control dynamics by regulating the force with which I strike them. I don’t have to think about touch and phrasing, and use pedals. And I certainly don’t have to engage in freeform improvisation, as a jazz pianist does, while using this computer input device.

Scans are showing that jazz pianists often turn off the part of the brain that controls stereotypical responses.

“Piano brains” become conditioned to operate more efficiently, and even direct less blood and oxygen and fuel to the areas associated with motor control—although they are doing more “fine coordination” than most people have to do. Amazing! That’s because pianist brains have automated subroutines, and have developed the ability to cluster many operations.

Seeing that children who play instruments are among the better academic learners in schools has caused us to suppose that music is a great mind trainer. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t so much cause and effect as an indication that the families that provided or encouraged musical development were the families that supported diligence in other learning.

Now we know that music study does improve brain function and learning ability! Especially learning piano. This brain scan research also indicates that this applies to piano playing at any age.

Peace.