At a Glance: How Music Keeps a Surgeon's Brain Sharp
Dr Miklós Pohl OAM is a plastic surgeon, violinist, and founder of the Australian Doctor’s Orchestra.
At 78, he still operates, plays chamber music weekly, self-published a book, and is learning new repertoire.
His life demonstrates what neuroscience research now confirms: purposeful, multi-domain challenge is the architecture that sustains professional judgment across decades.
The activities that sustain cognitive performance tend to be the ones driven by genuine love rather than obligation.
A nine-year-old in the snowfields
On New Year’s Eve 1956, a family fled Hungary through snowfields toward the Austrian border. The nine-year-old boy thought it was exciting. His older brother expected they might be shot.
Two hours later, they reached a sign in Hungarian: Welcome to the Free Land.
That boy grew up to become Dr Miklós Pohl OAM. Plastic surgeon. Violinist. Violist. Founder of the Australian Doctor’s Orchestra. Author.
At 78, he still performs skin cancer surgery at the Skin Health Institute in Carlton, plays chamber music weekly, and is currently learning the Shostakovich piano quintet because it’s been on his bucket list for decades.
When I interviewed Miklós for the Wisepreneurs Podcast, I expected a conversation about doctors who play music. What I got instead was a detailed illustration of how one person has built and maintained the mental architecture that keeps his professional judgment operating at full capacity well into his eighth decade.
What stands out about Miklós isn't any single achievement. It's how the different parts of his life support each other.
- Surgery loads precision and diagnostic judgment
- The orchestra loads social coordination and creative collaboration
- The book required research, interviewing, and editing
- The viola, which he took up at 66 because he loved the sound, demands an entirely new physical skill
Each activity challenges a different part of his thinking. Together, they form a structure that holds his cognitive capacity in place, the way scaffolding holds a building while it's being worked on. Cognitive scientists have a formal term for this kind of structure, and understanding it has practical implications for anyone whose livelihood depends on accumulated professional judgment.
What ‘cognitive scaffolding’ actually means
In cognitive science, the term ‘scaffold’ describes an external structure that supports thinking. In a corporate environment, these scaffolds are built for you:
- structured processes
- defined roles
- clear decision frameworks
- administrative support
When professionals work independently, or when they want to sustain high-level performance across a long career, they need to build their own.
Miklós has built six distinct scaffolding systems over his life, though he wouldn’t use that language.
- His surgical practice loads precision and diagnostic judgment
- The orchestra loads social coordination, creative collaboration, and project management
- The book required research, interviewing, editing, and publishing
- The viola (which he took up in 2008 because he loved the sound) loads a physically demanding new skill
- His global chamber music network loads relationship-building across cultures
- And the autobiography classes with Hazel Edwards load reflective thinking and self-examination
Dr Miklós Pohl OAM with Hazel Edwards
Each of these activities challenges a different cognitive system. Together, they create what researchers call a ‘coupled system’: a network of activities, tools, and relationships that extends thinking beyond what any single brain could do alone.
Why playing music lights up the entire brain
Miklós’s wife gave him what may be the most precise description of music’s cognitive function I’ve heard:
You’re lucky you’ve got music because you’ve got friendship, you’ve got cerebral activity, you’re doing something you love and it’s meditative. It’s physical.
That single sentence captures five distinct cognitive demands in one activity:
- social connection
- intellectual challenge
- intrinsic motivation
- attentional focus, and
- physical exertion
Brain imaging studies confirm what she’s describing. Playing a musical instrument activates auditory, motor, visual, emotional, and executive function centres simultaneously. No other single activity loads this many neural systems at once.
Miklós put it simply in the episode:
They’ve done scans of brains when there’s music playing or they are playing music. The whole brain lights up.
This matters for anyone whose livelihood depends on accumulated judgment. The kind of knowledge that clients pay premium rates for — the ability to diagnose complex situations, see patterns others miss, make sound calls under pressure — is what psychologists call crystallised intelligence. Unlike raw processing speed, which peaks in early adulthood, crystallised intelligence continues to develop through your 60s and beyond.
Recent research from Gignac and Zajenkowski, published in the journal Intelligence in 2025, found that overall human cognitive and personality functioning peaks between ages 55 and 60 when you measure the full range of capabilities that complex professional work actually demands.
But crystallised intelligence doesn’t maintain itself passively. It requires active engagement with appropriately challenging material.
Luc Beaudoin’s writing calls this ‘productive practice’: systematic engagement with demanding tasks that builds genuine capability you can deploy under pressure, not just knowledge you can recall in a quiet moment.
Miklós has been practising productively for over seventy years, though he wouldn’t use that language. When I asked what keeps him going, his answer was immediate:
If I haven’t got a target and am preparing for something, I really feel lost. I’ve just gotta always have something on the go.
The violin as a tool for thinking and connecting
Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed an idea in 1998 called the Extended Mind thesis. The core argument is straightforward: cognition doesn’t stop at the skull. When external tools become constantly available and deeply trusted, they become genuine parts of how we think. Your notebook, your trusted colleague, your well-designed workspace — these are integral components of your cognitive system.
Miklós’s violin functions exactly this way. One of the most compelling chapters in his book is called My Violin as a Passport.
Wherever he travels, he contacts the Amateur Chamber Music Players network, connects with local musicians, and sits down to play. New York, Winnipeg, Budapest, Oxford, Clunes (near Ballarat in Australia). In each place, the violin creates instant connection without credentials, small talk, or professional positioning.
For independent professionals, the principle translates directly.
The question is: what tools, practices, and relationships have become so deeply woven into how you work that they’ve become extensions of your thinking?
Your frameworks for diagnosing client problems, your trusted advisory network, your physical workspace — these can function as cognitive infrastructure when they’re deliberately designed and consistently maintained.
How the body thinks before the conscious mind catches up
Miklós described a rehearsal at a church in the Bendigo region where the lighting was blacked out, leaving only sconce lights on the music stands. The quartet could barely play because they couldn’t see each other.
After decades of performing, he realised only then how much of chamber music communication happens through the body: eye contact, gesture, physical movement, subtle shifts in posture that signal tempo changes and emotional shifts.
Barbara Tversky’s research on spatial cognition calls these ‘epistemic actions’: physical actions performed primarily to help us think.
When a quartet player reads micro-signals from other musicians — a subtle lean forward signalling acceleration, an almost imperceptible nod cueing an entrance — the body is processing information faster than conscious analysis can follow.
David Eagleman’s neuroscience research explains the mechanism. Through decades of practice, the brain converts conscious, effortful processing into automated neural circuits. Eagleman calls this ‘software-to-hardware conversion.’
A novice performing the same task as an expert burns significantly more brain energy because they’re running conscious simulations, while the expert operates through pre-compiled circuits that execute without engaging conscious processing.
This is why experienced professionals can walk into a client meeting and have a sense that something is wrong before anyone has spoken. It's not some sort of weird mystical intuition.
It’s the product of decades of productive practice operating through the body. The patterns have been converted from slow, deliberate analysis into fast, automatic recognition. Miklós experiences the same phenomenon in music. The difference is that he’s been cultivating it deliberately for seventy years.
Building a community through shared practice
In 1993, Miklós attended the Mount Buller Chamber Summer School for Strings and noticed a disproportionate number of doctors among the musicians.
He approached Chris Martin, a professional violist, and said: I want to put together a doctor’s orchestra.
Martin’s reply: Sounds like an interesting challenge.
Thirty years later, the Australian Doctor’s Orchestra still performs twice a year. Every member pays an entrance fee covering costs. Professional soloists and conductors are engaged. All proceeds from concerts go to medical charities.
Esko Kilpi’s research on networked organisations describes how value is created between people, not within individuals. The orchestra is a direct illustration. It doesn’t produce value through any single musician’s capability. It produces value through the interaction: shared preparation, collective performance, and a charitable purpose that gives the whole enterprise meaning beyond personal enjoyment.
Miklós described the orchestra’s most important contribution as ‘salvage’: bringing busy doctors back to playing music they’d dropped during demanding careers. The orchestra gives them a reason to pick up their instruments again, which leads to chamber groups, music camps, and collaborative playing that enriches their lives beyond the twice-yearly concerts.
Self-publishing a book through personal trust
When Miklós decided to publish Music Is Medicine, he didn’t have the $5,000–6,000 needed for printing. His writing mentor Hazel Edwards, whom I interviewed on Wisepreneurs Episode 43, suggested a practical solution: ask the 28 doctors featured in the book to pre-order two copies each at $50 before publication.
He rang everyone. And they said yes.
The book was published through BookPod, and Miklós has personally sold around 500–600 copies since, paying for postage himself and asking buyers to donate directly to Motor Neuron Disease research in memory of his friend, artist Tom Samek.
There’s no marketing funnel here. No social media campaign. Miklós isn’t even on LinkedIn. The entire distribution mechanism runs on relational capital: trust built over 30 years of playing music together and a shared commitment to the cause.
For anyone considering a book, course, or knowledge product, this model is worth examining. The constraint isn’t audience size or marketing budget. It’s whether your professional relationships run deep enough that people will invest before seeing the finished product.
What this reveals about sustained professional performance
Miklós hasn’t designed a cognitive vitality programme. He’s built a life where purposeful demand is woven into ordinary weeks.
The principle for anyone building a practice around accumulated expertise is practical. Cognitive performance isn’t maintained through passive consumption: reading articles, attending conferences, watching content.
It’s maintained through active production: creating, performing, teaching, solving unfamiliar problems, and engaging with material that stretches current capability.
David Eagleman’s research identifies exactly why this matters. The brain changes specifically when its predictive model fails — not when familiar information arrives.
This ‘prediction error’ triggers the neurotransmitters that signal circuit modification. Routine, familiar work doesn’t generate this signal. Novel challenge does.
Miklós keeps introducing strategic novelty: a new instrument at 66, a book project during COVID, the Shostakovich quintet on his bucket list, a trip to the Aldeburgh Festival in the UK.
The activities that sustain us tend to be the ones we love.
Miklós isn’t thinking about brain health when he sits down with the Shostakovich. He’s doing it because it brings him joy. But the cognitive architecture he’s maintaining in the process is precisely what enables him to keep operating, keep diagnosing, and keep contributing meaningful work at 78.
Consider where that kind of purposeful, multi-domain engagement exists in your own practice. And if it doesn’t, consider what you might build.
Listen to the Wisepreneurs Podcast Episode 84 Miklós Pohl OAM Music Is Medicine
Bibliography
Barrett, L.F. (2020). Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Beaudoin, L.P. (2014). Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. Leanpub.
Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998). "The Extended Mind." Analysis, 58(1), 7-19.
Eagleman, D. (2020). Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain. Pantheon Books.
Gignac, G.E. and Zajenkowski, M. (2025). "Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective." Intelligence, 113, 101961.
Kilpi, E. (2016). Perspectives on New Work: Exploring Emerging Conceptualisations. Sitra Studies 114.
Tversky, B. (2019). Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. Basic Books.
Pohl, M. (2023). Music Is Medicine. BookPod. Available from the author at [email protected], with all proceeds supporting Motor Neuron Disease research. Also available on Amazon and Booktopia.