Similarly, people have thousands of habits—such as how to use a pen—that we perform automatically because we’ve created lasting changes in our brains through repetition. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes show up conspicuously on brain scans. If you’ve practiced an instrument several hours a day for a couple of decades, it makes a big difference. Flute players, for instance, have especially large physical representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips. “They’ve distorted their brains,” Merzenich explains.
