Recent studies by neuroscientists of FMRI scans show that whereas activities like reading a book, doing math problems, or even listening to music only stimulate partsof the brain, playing an instrument engages the whole organ. Not only does the musician’s brain light up like the sky on the Fourth of July as it hustles to process “different information in intricate, interrelated, and astonishingly fast sequences,” it also seems to store memories more efficiently than its counterparts, using a complex “tagging” method the narrator compares to that of a “a good internet search engine.”