Merry Christmas

The Drifters melodiously wish for a Christmas that's white -- a nice nostalgia break after too much time with the new Wii.

http://www.thecompassgroup.biz/merryxmas.swf

Tunes to Defy the Headphone Ban

In an update to last week's entry, I just stumbled across an unexpected running tune. Keep the beat with your feet to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On," and according to the treadmill, you'll clock 11-minute miles. That's hot. (Whether you're defying a headphone ban or not.)

Music for Your Marathon

The group that manages marathons around the country has finally figured it out: music gives athletes a competitive edge. So suddenly impressed is USA Track & Field by this fact that they've taken the unprecedented step of banning portable music players from marathons.

The ban has led to a rumpus on both sides of the issue. Old-schoolers who think music is anathema to a marathon competition, not least because of the performance boost, love the ban. New-schoolers are so devoted to their musical running partner that they're risking disqualification by defying the ban in droves.

Fortunately you remain free to wear earbuds at the gym or running around the local reservoir (for which you want open construction headphones that let you hear cars and such). Depending on your pace, your running tunes should clock in around 160-170 beats per minute and have Energizing characteristics. Build a playlist with your favorites and play it on shuffle so you can't predict the segues -- surprise adds to the energizing effect. A recent addition to my list (which I'm not admitting to my friends lapping up the new Radiohead) is "Hold My Hand" by Hootie and the Blowfish. It's the right speed to set the pace and spur endurance, and with Hootie intoning "I will run with you," the steps fly by.

You can get New York Times readers' favorite workout tunes, along with lots of comments on the headphone ban, here.

Internet Radio Day of Silence

Darn it's quiet today.

This Is Your Brain on Money

This is your brain on money: Write a check to charity, get a pleasure hit. Sell your sorry old Ford stock at a loss instead of your high-flying Google shares at a gain, and feel a deep pain in your brain that belies the fact that dumping the loser is the smart thing to do. Folks, welcome to neuroeconomics, a recent entry in the quest to link up brain structures and functions with how we are as humans.

Scientists are using MRI technology -- the same machines that have yielded much insight about how music works in the brain -- to study the brain centers involved in making money decisions. The results are standing the dismal science on its head. It turns out we might not make getting and spending choices in the rational way economists presume. Our money-related behavior may stem instead from rather irrational responses to pleasure and pain.

First, on why you'd sell Google and hold Ford: Behavioral studies show that people feel the pain of an economic loss about twice as much as the pleasure of an economic gain -- and recent research suggests it may be your brain to blame. In a study that used MRI to peek at the brains of people making gambling decisions, researchers found that as the potential for gains rose, the participants showed increased activity in the brain's dopamine systems. As the potential for losses increased, on the other hand, activity decreased. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released not by higher thought, but by things like eating food, having sex, and taking drugs. Apparently, the prospect of losing yummy dopamine is significantly more terrible than getting more is good, and this drives our financial decisions.

Another recent study reported in the journal Science used MRIs to discover that giving money to charity lights up brain areas called the nucleus accumbens and the caudate nucleus -- pleasure centers, again, which might help explain why we give money away when any rational economic maximizer would keep it for herself.

Could we get an MRI study that introduces music into the mind-money equation? Retailers have long known that playing Energizing music makes consumers buy more, which may relate to the increased brain wave activity, confidence and drive to do that Energizing music can cause.

If your brain on money is less rational than you might like, counter by putting your brain on the right type of music. I recommend preserving your assets by doing all your online shopping and banking to the strains of Relaxing music. When it's time to do taxes or work up a budget, Focus music keeps the clear-thinking alpha brain waves flowing. But though it may make you spend more, feel free to let the Uplifting music rip when writing checks to charity. You deserve to feel good when doing good.

Don't Let Music Overload Your Multitasking Brain

The New York Times reports today on the toll that the trend towards multitasking is taking on brain performance. In a world of cell phones, instant messaging, e-mails, and multi-windowed browsers bringing millions of web sites to your desktop, serious brainwork has to squeeze in edgewise. Don't let your iPod (or other music playback device) become part of the problem.

As the Times correctly reports, music with lyrics can interfere with cognitive processing for certain tasks. So can music that is too complex, loud, or emotional, and music that you don't like. When you listen to demanding or disturbing music while also trying to think, read, or learn, you create what scientists call a dual task paradigm. You can just call it a distraction. This effect can be more pronounced when listening over headphones -- so with the wrong playlist, your iPod could make you more prone to mistakes and less efficient.

On the other hand, the right kind of music can actually help you concentrate, by blocking out other distractors and generating alpha brain waves. Just reverse the checklist above -- choose instrumental music (no lyrics) with steady pace and volume. Make sure the sound pleases you without demanding your attention. Dial down the volume until the music melts into the background and your thought process takes center stage.

• Pick: Vivaldi's Guitar Concertos are a great counter to information overload -- and all the better when performed by the legendary Romero brothers and on sale at amazon!

Spring Ahead: Music to Reset Your Sleep Clock

I'm a light junkie. I sit in the sun, keep the blinds open, drive a double-moonroofed Mini, and live in an (almost) glass house. So today, I'm delighted. Congress, in its wisdom, has saved the daylight by legislative fiat, giving us each an extra hour of luminescence every evening from now until the darkening days of fall.

But, sadly, Congress didn't see fit to also change the time the workday starts tomorrow. So somehow we all have to get to sleep at our usual bedtime tonight despite it being an hour premature and following so close on the heels of sundown.

If the excitement of seeing daylight after dinner has you still buzzing at bedtime, use music to reset your sleep clock tonight, and every night until you're back on track. Start by turning the TV off before you get ready for bed, switching to some soft music instead. Then, pick a comfortable spot -- bed or somewhere else -- to dim the lights, lie down, and listen to ten minutes of Relaxing music at a satisfying volume. Don't talk, read, or run through your to-do list. Just listen. This will slow down your brain waves and evoke the relaxation response.

• Pick: Fila Brazillia, Soft Music Under Stars on Asian Travels (Six Degrees).

If you like, you can reduce the volume and let the music keep playing until you drift off to sleep. (Make sure that all the music on your CD or playlist is soft and soothing with no jarring surprises.) Stop listening and let yourself float above the sounds. Sleep sweetly. It's the season of light!

What Your Playlist Says About You

Swapping top tunes is a time-honored way to chitchat - and it turns out that this may be more than mere talk to fill the empty air. PsyBlog posted recently about why we talk about music when we meet new people. Research says that our top ten song list provides good predictors of three out of five key personality elements, and offers info you're otherwise unlikely to get from a stranger.

The so-called Big Five personality traits are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness. Good things to know about. According to PsyBlog, openness to experience is the trait communicated best by your top ten tunes. I haven't been able to dig up the current article, but here's an earlier article on the topic by the same authors.

By posing the question differently, researchers have also discovered that our personalities shape our musical tastes. The same five personality factors influence how we feel about tempo, rhythm, number of melodic themes, sound volume, and meter.

If you're not discussing the Billboard charts on dates and at job interviews, maybe it's time to start.

Your Music in Your Time?

How do you listen to your music in your life? You get a recording of it and play it when you're ready. Right?

The latest volley in the debate that's raged ever since consumers got access to recording technology seeks to limit your ability to "time-shift" -- that is, play your music when you want to hear it. This time the question is whether it's okay to record satellite radio onto a special MP3 player that lets you listen to it later. Listening Post places this development in context, which might calm you or make you crazy, depending on your view of the unstable state of digital copyright.

While we wait for the litigants to duke it out, I just love the time-shifted music available by podcast at KCRW's Today's Top Tune.

Sweet Dreams for Teens - and the Rest of Us

The other morning, as I tried to defog after a night of too much work and too few dreams, I heard sleep doctor Helene Ensellem worrying on NPR that teenagers aren't getting enough sleep.

"Teenagers?!" I yelled at the cat, my adult responsibilities weighing heavy on my eyelids. Whatever.

I cheered up when I heard Dr. Ensellem give some classic braintuning advice: Set a nightly cut-off time for all electronic devices -- except the ones that play music. "I encourage teens to listen to music at night, and make a playlist that's soothing," Emsellem says. Well done. But the doctor need not limit her wise advice to any particular age range. In a sleep-deprived nation, we should all make relaxing music de rigeur at bedtime.

Some favorites from my sleep playlist:

• Mojave 3, Ask Me Tomorrow
• Sequentia singing Hildegard von Bingen
• Keola Beamer, Mauna Kea White Mountain Journal
• Tune Your Brain with Mozart: Relax

As for form, I part ways with Dr. Ensellem in preferring playback over speakers to a personal MP3 player. That way you can start the music while you get ready for bed, skip the logistics of earbuds, and drift off without worrying about rolling over on your iPod. Buona notte.

Dreamgirls' Dark Underbelly

It's good by me that Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson won Golden Globes for their roles in Dreamgirls. As a music fan and scholar, I'm less thrilled that the critics have gone gaga for the film itself, giving it the Globe for best musical-or-comedy and calling it silly things like "exhilarating entertainment that brings back some of the delicious excitement of the great movie musicals." I could fill this page with links to like hyperbole.

The plot of Dreamgirls is as disturbing as the slice of American music history it came from: While two talented African American musicians on their way up (Murphy and Hudson) get put down in the name of "crossover," the blandest, whitest pop music that could be crafted from the roots of R&B is elevated to exalted #1 status and an excruciating pitch in one "exhilarating" number after another. This includes the title song "Dreamgirls," a misogynist's fondest dream and all too emblematic of how women, especially black women, have been pressed into service by the music industry. After stopping to dabble in the conflicts and personal drama that crossing over engenders, the film ends in a farewell concert featuring an unsettling reprise of "Dreamgirls" that reminds any viewer with ears on that while the commercially successful can walk away, many more wanna-be dreamgirls and black musicians will submit to the machine.

Are the critics missing the message about the troubling twin commodification and erasure of racial identity that this movie represents, or do you have to be a mad ethnomusicologist to see it? Dreamgirls shows rhythm and blues as the dark underbelly of Motown, and its transformation to colorless crossover confection as "delicious excitement." Though R&B goes down fighting in the form of Hudson's and Murphy's characters, down it goes indeed.

It may be telling that Dreamgirls, which paints a thick beauty-school gloss over certain ugly realities of American culture, took the Globe over Little Miss Sunshine, which peels the gloss painfully, hilariously away. Sunshine makes a great antidote to Dreamgirls, as does an hour or so with Big Mama Thornton -- Hound Dog and all.

Cold Snap

It's cold in California. A billion dollars' worth of oranges are at risk and the homeless shelters are packed with people trying to make it through the night. Canadian birds caught in the Sunshine State on their way to Mexico huddle together in cross-breed group hugs.

I have it easy, with a home and heat. Yesterday I bundled up and hiked in the foothills above Palo Alto among patches of ice, making fast progress on the frozen ground hard underfoot instead of the usual winter mudbowl. Later though, chilled, I sat blank at my computer staring at the screen. No words, no will to move. What to do?

Young Punx to the rescue! I had just enough energy before I succumbed to the numbness to navigate to the web page where this mash-up crew is giving away their mp3s for free, and download Wake Up, Make Up, Bring It Up, Shake Up. I put it on and did all that. If we're lucky, that's how we weather the winter.

Staying in the Sweet Spot

Have you hit your sweet spot yet this year?

The sweet spot is a yummy brain state defined by the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that brain performance tracks an upside-down U with your arousal level. When you're lethargic, activity spreads lazily throughout your brain like hot fudge running down a scoop of ice cream. The result: random, low-level thoughts. Not so good if you're trying to analyze a problem or make a presentation. Under stress, on the other hand, thoughts flee the high-falutin' prefrontal area and cower in the lower, emotional mid-brain, which is fine for fast reaction but hard on your focus and memory. The so-called sweet spot is -- you guessed it -- at the tip of the U halfway between lethargy and stress. This is where you learn, think, remember, and create best.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman worries that the high-pressure testing regime required by the No Child Left Behind Act will hurt kids' learning ability by causing classroom anxiety that frazzles students straight out of the "sweet spot" in their brains.

It's not just kids under the constant threat of life-wrecking tests who need to stay in the sweet spot. Even we who have made it past K-12 get stuck on one low end of the U or the other. Time to make a U-turn: Let music push you up the hill to the sweet spot. When you're on the left/lethargic side of the U, play music that's Energizing, Uplifting, or Focus (IQ-boosting or beta-wave) to perk up your thought control circuits. If instead you feel frazzled and your brain is raging away on the right side of the U, choose Relaxing or Focus (alpha-wave) music to mellow you out. When you hit the sweet spot, continue with something in between.

Some current picks:

• For moving from left to right, take a quick hit with the late great James Brown and I Feel Good, or settle in for the long haul with, perhaps, some trumpet concertos.
• For moving from right to left, The Charlie Haden Quartet West.
• For staying in the sweet spot, my perennial favorite -- Tune Your Brain with Mozart: Focus, on random play.

Tell your kids about the sweet spot. They might not know that studying to Eminem isn't always the thing.

Give Peace a Chance

On New Year's Eve, just after midnight in the first tender minutes of 2007, my beloved and I searched the Rhapsody music service for John Lennon's chestnut Give Peace a Chance. We needed the song to muster the strength to face the new year.

We didn't find John's record -- his estate is apparently in denial about digital streaming -- but we found enough covers to get us through the night. My favorites by far were the reggae version by The Maytals on From the Roots, and a holy roller rendition by Joe Cocker on Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Check them out when you need an Uplifting hit in times like these.

You can also find Lennon's music working for human rights with Amnesty International's Make Some Noise project (2005), featuring covers of Lennon songs by artists from The Black Eyed Peas to Snow Patrol. Rumor has it that Yoko Ono donated the entire Lennon songbook to Amnesty for this purpose. Now if only we could hear it online though our fully paid, fully legal subscription service.