Pat Martino RIP

Per the Libet Experiment, the neural mechanism for your moving your hand has already fired before you make the actual motion. In terms of flow in improvisation, there is a microsecond delay from when the player’s neurons fire and when they play over some changes. For the performer, there is also a flow between the "planning" and the execution. If you're soloing over several minutes on the same changes, you're thinking ahead on phrasing, reacting in real time to what the other players are doing. Over time it creates habits, or what Rupert Sheldrake calls Morphic Resonance. If that’s true, musical ability emerges from that field. It might be what allows neurons to regrow after a brain injury.

Before watching Rick Beato’s tribute, I wasn’t aware that Pat Martino had a brain tumor in the 1970s. After watching the documentary, Unstrung, I was thinking about how the brains of musicians fire in different ways. There’s a difference between a brain of someone listening to a piece of music and being engaged with it over long periods—even a lifetime, and someone that hears music just like everyone else and is indifferent to it. But what was interesting about Pat's recovery is that the motor skills came back more quickly, but the theory took longer. This discrepancy manifested in different ways: For example, he remembered Joe Pesci as a famous actor, but not that he was also a friend. You enter a kind of uncanny valley where you're "sort of you". You're the tribute band of yourself. I had this experience after I began knowing more theory. I forgot how I used to understand music once it was replaced. Knowledge can change the brain, but it isn't as permanent as the part of the brain that handles motor skills. It's like the Ship of Theseus myth as to whether the replacement of the ship is fundamentally the same.

If you’ve ever had a "digital stroke" from a hard drive failure, attempts to restore it are either fully or partially successful. Once you’ve had a chance to look at what you thought you lost, you can revisit some of it. But if you recreate it from memory there's a good chance it will come close to the original, and usually better.