There's no doubt the musicians could play each piece note-perfect without a conductor: each performance is the culmination of years of practice, hours of painstaking work to refine their art.

CNN: Valery Gergiev: Russian maestro

Reading, going to work and navigating a busy life may be enough to maintain brain health, but lifting performance takes massive amounts of practice--learning a new language, taking regular music lessons, doing complex jigsaw puzzles--to produce enough chemicals to make synapses stronger.

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