The Improvisational Brain


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And so it happened for Robert Levin, seated at the piano, seized with panic, at the concert hall in Bremen. Memories of note patterns and chords embedded by thousands of practice hours, we may be certain, arose from his subconscious, flooding his brain. His lateral prefrontal regions said “This is it—time to tell your musical narrative,” while his medial prefrontal region reassured him, saying “Don’t worry about how it comes out.” His right temporo-parietal junction turned down the dial on any audience gasps, his anterior cingulate made a series of snap decisions, and his dorsal premotor cortex organized them into a motor missive, which it then sent out to his fingers. A split second later, Levin started to play, and before he knew it, he was home.

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