Patient Plays Saxophone While Surgeons Remove Brain Tumor

Music is not only a major part of Dan Fabbio’s life, as a music teacher it is his livelihood. So when doctors discovered a tumor located in the part of his brain responsible for music function, he began a long journey that involved a team of physicians, scientists, and a music professor and culminated with him awake and playing a saxophone as surgeons operated on his brain. Fabbio’s case is the subject of a study published today in the journal Current Biology that sheds new light on how music is processed in the brain.