Video Shows Patient Playing Guitar During Brain Surgery in Brazil

— -- Amazing video shows a male patient in Brazil playing the guitar while doctors remove a brain tumor.

Kulkamp Anthony Dias, 33, played "Yesterday" by The Beatles, a song in German, and music for his son born a few months earlier, as tests during the procedure, according to Hospital Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Santa Catarina, Brazil.

One of the physicians, Dr. Jean Abreu Machado, said keeping the patient awake "really is a big challenge for the entire surgical team, including the anesthesiologist," according to the hospital website.

The hospital said the procedure was recent, but did not specify a date on its website.

Andrew Sloan, director of the Brain Tumor and Neuro-oncology Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center, told ABC News that this is standard practice so doctors can precisely determine how the patient's brain is functioning with other parts of the body.

In 2010, a patient in Minnesota played the violin while doctors operated on his brain.

Sloan performs about 40 to 45 surgeries a year in which the brain patient is awake, though he's never asked a patient to play the guitar.

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"Everyone’s brain is as unique as a fingerprint," he said.

While doctors like Sloan can determine how a patient moves a finger or leg while they're asleep, other functions may be more complicated.

"Coordination and speech are very hard to figure out, to fine tune without the patient being awake, particularly speech," he said.

Sloan has asked patients to tap their fingers, answer a math problem or has given them naming tasks when showing them images of objects.

And does the patient feel pain when they're awake?

"Their skin has sensation but the brain doesn’t. They don’t feel anything in the brain. We have to numb up the scalp," Sloan said.