Mental Skills in Jazz Applied to Modern Life I play jazz not for the improvement in mental agility or psycho-motor coordination that it gives, but for the sheer enjoyment. But I have thought about what playing jazz requires our brain to do. And how these skills are in fact required for daily living in the modern world, which is characterized by a need to deal with the deluge of information we are constantly exposed to. We have to find ways to handle all this information and let it be the basis of decision-making. Managing information includes classification into categories, forecasting possible scenarios, prioritizing, and optimization of time and resources and abstract pattern recognition. Having these skills is actually at the heart of all modern jobs that cannot be replaced by machines. The human skills listed below, and which in my opinion are what we practise when playing jazz, are what gives us the advantage over robots which are ever-increasing in their intellige...