"60 Minutes" once had a story about people whose brains were damaged by bad clams. One man had no short term memory at all. None. If he spoke with you, one sentence later he'd forget the first statement. Anyway, he could still play the piano, quite well. It was amazing.

"When people suffer trauma to the brain, they may lose speech if the trauma affected the area responsible for speech. But music is almost always unaffected because it is so thoroughly distributed throughout the brain."