Page 56 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

40 • Chapter 2

Figure 2-9 Left: Listening to scales. Center: Listening to
musical scores. Right: Playing music

primary motor and premotor areas active. Although music
processing is located in both hemispheres, the more experi-
enced a musician becomes in processing musical tones, the
more the process seems to be located in the left hemi-
21
sphere. As skills become activated automatically, as op-
posed to having to concentrate on how to perform the
action, they are considered rote performances and become
located in a separate area of the brain in the left hemisphere.
The area of the brain thought to lift the technically cor-
rect performer to the level of an artist is the right hemisphere.
Many people can play adequately, but this does not indicate a
creative instinct. Those composers and performers who hear
their lives as musical interludes have a depth of activation in
the right hemisphere that may at various times seem a bless-
ing or a burden.

@ Logical-Mathematical Intelligence
A pure mathematician deals not so much with numbers, as
we remember our arithmetic classes, but with extreme
abstractions that are built with reasoning and many lines
of proofs into even more abstract results. To many people,
these abstractions often seem to have no reference to the
“real” world. It may be difficult for many people who have
had bad experiences in the past, to think of mathematics as
a potential art form. However, as is the case with the other
intelligences discussed so far, the creative genius that sparks
new theories and applications seems to reside in the right