Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kroner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.
Source: The Opinionator, The New York Times, October 12
• • • • •
People who spend many hours in the practice room not only process information unusually efficiently, but they also do a superior job of not letting occasional errors derail them.
These findings “suggest that playing a musical instrument might improve the ability to monitor our behaviour and adjust our responses effectively when needed,” writes a research team led by cognitive neuroscientist Ines Jentzsch of the University of St. Andrews. “As these processes are amongst the first to be affected by cognitive aging, our evidence could promote musical activity as a realistic intervention to slow or even prevent (one type of) age-related decline.”
In the journal Neuropsychologica, the researchers describe an experiment featuring 36 young adults. They were divided into four groups: musicians who had accumulated at least 5,000 hours of practice; those who had clocked 2,000 to 5,000 hours; the lightweights (or newcomers to music) who had practiced for 200 to 2,000 hours; and non-musicians.
Source: Pacific Standard, September 25
In a TED talk, Maestro Benjamin Zander explains a complementary aspect of music and success http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html