Tune Your Brain was basically born of mix tapes. Not only did I get hooked on the power of music-mood sequencing by the mix tapes I made and received in my formative years, but I actually created the Tune Your Brain CDs by the prehistoric process of exchanging mix tapes in the mail with my collaborator at Deutsche Grammophon. The results may be digital-slick CDs with liner books and flashy art stamped on the disc, but the beginnings were old school. Conceived and created in real time with painstaking fast forward rewinding care.
So I chimed with the San Francisco Chronicle's loving coverage of the mix tape on Sunday. From a lamentation for the mix tape's demise to personal mix tape tales, book references, and links to web sites catering to mixologists of the musical type, the Chron made me miss days gone and be glad for the mixes I've made, braintuning and otherwise. I could spend hours messing around on The Art of the Mix site. Couldn't you?
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Musicophilia - Music in Your Mind
I've always had a case of music in the mind. Sometimes I invite my inner soundtrack, when I decide to ease tension or cure boredom by mentally practicing a clarinet piece, or accompany a walk with a song sung inside my head. But sometimes I don't. Music barges into my mind uninvited, playing itself out loud when I might prefer silence, sometimes taking me back in time to events I hadn't been thinking about and didn't particularly want to, sometimes just getting in the way. I always thought my mind music was a natural outcome of having spent much of my life and career attuned to music, and, outside my research for Tune Your Brain, paid little attention.
But lately it's gotten worse.
I sleep with a white noise machine, which does wonders for my insomnia and sensitivity to other, non-white noise. But several nights of late I've woken up thinking I'm going mad as classical music comes out of the white noise machine -- entire if inchoate orchestras, with moving melody lines and string sections bowing along. I have to sit up and put my ear to the machine to settle all the sounds and colors back into the single blended spectrum of white. Sometimes, as soon as I lie down again the music comes back, as if it had just ducked behind a tree when I went to examine the source and, like a playful Puck, plans to dance on my head all night long.
My eine kleine nachtmusik is still irritating but much less worrisome after reading Chapters 4-6 of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. (These are "Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination," "Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes," and "Musical Hallucinations.") Sacks tells us about his own internal music, born of his habit of obsessively playing the same recordings over and over for a period of time, during which those pieces continue to play internally when the external source has gone silent. He describes "earworms," those annoying tunes and jingles that play over and over in your head and bear a remarkable resemblance to an epileptic seizure (check out the top ten earworms). And finally, the phenomenon that explains the orchestra inside my white noise machine at night, musical hallucinations. Musical hallucinations are episodes where music spontaneously plays itself in the brain -- not just a simple repeated phrase, like an earworm, but full-blown music. They appear to be particularly common in people who have lost their hearing, suggesting a compensatory measure (though horribly intrusive and crude for some) in which the brain simply won't settle for an absence of music.
Research done by Robert Zatorre and others shows that imagining music activates the brain in much the same way as listening to it does. In other words, you don't need a band or an iPod to experience the act of listening to music in your mind. You can do it yourself without making a sound.
But why does music sometimes generate itself in the brain when you don't even try? NYU neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas postulates that the brain cells in the basal ganglia that drive our movements are constantly playing riffs for routine motions like brushing our teeth, and that when one of these motor riffs unexpectedly fires into the thalamocortical system, it can set off mind music. On the flip side, imagining music stimulates the motor cortex. Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written that playing music in your mind from memory is "biologically adaptive" because it coordinates movements, boosts energy, and may unleash repressed thoughts.
Braintuning Tip
With imagined music having similar neurological effects as what you hear through your ears, you may be able to achieve braintuning effects without speakers or CDs by imagining the music that supports the mind-body-mood state you want. In other words, make your brain your iPod.
Sacks describes rowing himself down the mountain on his arms after he lost use of his leg in a bad climbing accident, by imagining marching and rowing songs synchronized with his arm
movements. After he was rescued, he went on to teach himself to walk again by playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor in his head to coordinate the rhythms of his akimbo legs. Less dramatically, he now synchs up his strokes and kicks when he swims to imagined waltzes by Strauss.
Since the mind music-motor connection is strong, physical activity is a good place to try your first mental braintuning. Use Energizing principles to choose some tunes that match your movements and experiment away -- your playlist is limited only by your memory, and you can easily adjust the tempo to match your pace. Try a stress break with some Relaxing music from your mental repertoire. Have some Healing music cued up in your memory for your next visit to the doctor. Decide which Cleansing tune you'll call on when someone cuts you off in traffic. And so on. Keep a list of your mental braintuning favorites by category, so you can grow your inner playlists and keep them top of mind.
But lately it's gotten worse.
I sleep with a white noise machine, which does wonders for my insomnia and sensitivity to other, non-white noise. But several nights of late I've woken up thinking I'm going mad as classical music comes out of the white noise machine -- entire if inchoate orchestras, with moving melody lines and string sections bowing along. I have to sit up and put my ear to the machine to settle all the sounds and colors back into the single blended spectrum of white. Sometimes, as soon as I lie down again the music comes back, as if it had just ducked behind a tree when I went to examine the source and, like a playful Puck, plans to dance on my head all night long.
My eine kleine nachtmusik is still irritating but much less worrisome after reading Chapters 4-6 of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. (These are "Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination," "Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes," and "Musical Hallucinations.") Sacks tells us about his own internal music, born of his habit of obsessively playing the same recordings over and over for a period of time, during which those pieces continue to play internally when the external source has gone silent. He describes "earworms," those annoying tunes and jingles that play over and over in your head and bear a remarkable resemblance to an epileptic seizure (check out the top ten earworms). And finally, the phenomenon that explains the orchestra inside my white noise machine at night, musical hallucinations. Musical hallucinations are episodes where music spontaneously plays itself in the brain -- not just a simple repeated phrase, like an earworm, but full-blown music. They appear to be particularly common in people who have lost their hearing, suggesting a compensatory measure (though horribly intrusive and crude for some) in which the brain simply won't settle for an absence of music.
Research done by Robert Zatorre and others shows that imagining music activates the brain in much the same way as listening to it does. In other words, you don't need a band or an iPod to experience the act of listening to music in your mind. You can do it yourself without making a sound.
But why does music sometimes generate itself in the brain when you don't even try? NYU neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas postulates that the brain cells in the basal ganglia that drive our movements are constantly playing riffs for routine motions like brushing our teeth, and that when one of these motor riffs unexpectedly fires into the thalamocortical system, it can set off mind music. On the flip side, imagining music stimulates the motor cortex. Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written that playing music in your mind from memory is "biologically adaptive" because it coordinates movements, boosts energy, and may unleash repressed thoughts.
Braintuning Tip
With imagined music having similar neurological effects as what you hear through your ears, you may be able to achieve braintuning effects without speakers or CDs by imagining the music that supports the mind-body-mood state you want. In other words, make your brain your iPod.
Sacks describes rowing himself down the mountain on his arms after he lost use of his leg in a bad climbing accident, by imagining marching and rowing songs synchronized with his arm
movements. After he was rescued, he went on to teach himself to walk again by playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor in his head to coordinate the rhythms of his akimbo legs. Less dramatically, he now synchs up his strokes and kicks when he swims to imagined waltzes by Strauss.
Since the mind music-motor connection is strong, physical activity is a good place to try your first mental braintuning. Use Energizing principles to choose some tunes that match your movements and experiment away -- your playlist is limited only by your memory, and you can easily adjust the tempo to match your pace. Try a stress break with some Relaxing music from your mental repertoire. Have some Healing music cued up in your memory for your next visit to the doctor. Decide which Cleansing tune you'll call on when someone cuts you off in traffic. And so on. Keep a list of your mental braintuning favorites by category, so you can grow your inner playlists and keep them top of mind.
The way the brain works makes imagining music a tangible experience of music itself. In a very real sense, even if you're more a "passive" consumer - someone who listens to music made by other people -- than an "active" performer, music resides within us all.
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