Larry Sherman

speaker

178 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Larry Sherman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · How Slowing Down Makes Life Better & Why Every Brain Needs Music · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

That's all got to go down the arms into your fingers.

And then there's a reverse part of that.

So your body has to let the brain know that that's all happened or it happened right or wrong.

And so there's all the sensory information that goes back up to the brain to say, OK, this is where my finger is now.

This is what just happened.

And then it starts all over again.

And then add to that your emotional response to what you're playing.

You're listening to what you're playing, and maybe you're adjusting your volume or adjusting your speed or adjusting something else.

Maybe you're playing with a quartet or a band, and somebody else has just put in a new riff, and you're kind of trying to keep up.

So all sorts of things are happening at the exact same time.

So it's an incredibly challenging thing for the brain to do.

And the result of that is we have great data now to show that when you practice an instrument like that, especially when you're first learning, you're driving a lot of cellular processes that are actually structurally changing your brain.

For the good?

In what way?

Well, we think it's for the good.

So professional musicians tend to have more neural connections called synapses.

So we can actually measure that in people.

More synapses is good because as we age, synapses tend to fall apart.

So if you have more synapses to lose as you age, you're better off just because you have more to lose.

You also are driving processes that I study in my own lab, like myelination.

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