Sacksophone
I see my evil plans to utterly warp my children's minds with piano lessons will bear--probably already have borne--fruit:
[I]f you look at a brain, either in life with an MRI, or later, you can't tell whether it's the brain of a genius or a fool, or whether it's the brain of a visual artist or a literary artist, but you can look at a brain and say, "that's probably the brain of a musician"--because musical training and involvement in music enlarges various parts of the brain: the corpus callosum (the great band which goes between the two cerebral hemispheres); parts of the auditory cortex; parts of the cerebellum; parts of the frontal lobe cortex. There are striking changes which can occur within a single year of musical training, and these are changes which are really visible to the naked eye, at least if one knows where to look. So the power of music to alter the brain is very, very striking.Oliver Sacks, interviewed by Terry Gross. Hat tip to A Cappella News. There's lots more where that came from; Sacks is the The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat guy, and he takes us into that territory again.
Labels: Keys, SoundClip, Synaesthetes
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
