‘There was a question of not having a purpose in life. Just
floundering’. Leon Fleischer was a true musical prodigy. By the
age of sixteen he performed with the New York Philharmonic. He
was called ‘the pianist find of the century’. Suddenly, in 1964,
he lost control over his right hand. His fingers would simply
curl up. The end of his career. The illness which befell Leon
Fleischer and about 1% of his fellow musicians is called focal
dystonia, the loss of control over muscles involved in a highly
trained task. It is a career breaker coming out of the blue. An
investigation into the underlying neural problems leads on a
journey into the brain’s muscle control circuitry and its
ability to learn. The human brain’s motor system which controls
muscle movement is well understood. When one stimulates areas in
the precentral sulcus (see Figure on the right) one can observe
muscle movements. I actually once saw my own finger move when
this area was magnetically stimulated. Because the role of this
brain area in muscl