It's a difficult concept to grasp, but it's one of the coolest things about being a pianist. 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. 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. Less blood flow means less energy is needed to concentrate. Timo Krings scanned pianists' brains as they soloed and found that they pump less blood than average peopleВ in the brain region associated with fine motor skills. Real pianists are marked by brains that efficiently conserve energy by allocating resources more effectively than anyone else. Basically, it's the opposite of Guitar Center riffage - true innovation like Oscar Peterson:Д«ut piano is a taxing and complex instrument for the whole brain. 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. Pianists, then, tend to integrate all of the brain's information into more efficient decision making processes.В Because of this high speed connection, they can breeze through slower, methodical thinking and tap into quicker and more spontaneous creativity. It plays a major role in problem solving, language, spontaneity, decision making and social behavior. That's a big deal - the frontal lobe is responsible for integrating a ton of information into decision making. Ana PinhoВ (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. But it turns out the heavy-tax of piano playing makes their minds efficient in every way. To manage all those options, pianists have to develop a totally unique brain capacity - one that has been revealed by science.ДЄlready, then, pianists are able to make their brains into better-rounded machines. Guitar only allows for six notes at once and heavily favors left-hand dexterity.Д«ut piano is the ultimate instrument in terms of skill and demand: Two hands have to play together simultaneouslyВ while navigating 88 keys. Drums are functionally pitchless and achordal, so pitch selection and chord voicings aren't part of the equation. In this series, we've already written about what makes guitarists' and drummers' brains unique, but playing keys is an entirely different beast. This is, in part, because true pianists' brains are actually different from those of everyone else. Both were formative experiences.Д«ut while everyone grows out of braces, some people never recover from childhood piano lessons. For a few years, everyone's parents paid a lot of money so their children could contort their bodies (fingers teeth) and lie about doing something daily that, really, they never did (scales rubber bands).

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