What makes us so dern smert?

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Shooshie
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What makes us so dern smert?

Post by Shooshie »

I think most of us here are musicians. Granted, not everyone is conservatory trained, and not everyone reads music fluently, or can write it like they can write forum posts, but playing an instrument always involves some method of input and processing before there can be output. We're always exercising our mental mixers and encephalic effects, taking ideas either that we read off a score or part, or that we imagine through hearing and our cultural sense of form, and applying that to our instruments, whose sounds fill some role in a musical landscape of the moment. Maybe we're playing bass. Maybe we're playing piano. Guitar. Flute. Saxophone... we're always fitting our part into a larger whole, whether we be a small part of an ensemble or the whole solo shebang, sending our musical mind out into the public, organizing their minds, giving them something to sing to, dance to, make love to, pray to, or even just to think to or "not think" to. (please pardon the precipitous prepositions)

But nobody enjoys music more than the musician playing it. We all know that, of course, and there are many works of music that we would much rather play than to listen to, but maybe we've never really known why that's true. We derive pleasure from playing our instruments, and many of you have surely noticed that playing music regularly in a disciplined way will make your other mental chores seem easier.

Well, if you've ever wondered what being a musician does to your mind, here's a short video that explains at least some of it:

This is your brain on MUSIC!

I think you'll find it to be music to your mind.
Of course... it could have been made by a musician. A pack of lies. But take heart; there is plenty of scholarly medical research done on musicians and their brains. The video does not lie. It's all true. (tell 'em Shooshie said so!)

The neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks has written about performing autopsies on brains and encountering lobes that were joined by a huge rope of a corpus callosum, the body that connects the two halves of the brain together. Because musicians' brains must talk across the two lobes fluently, especially those of pianists who must play independent lines with each hand, even within each hand, their corpus callosum develops at a prodigious rate to a size rarely seen in any other type of brain. Sacks claimed that he always knew when the subject of his autopsy had been a musician.

Of course there is much more research besides what Sacks said. His is just some of the more famous of medical mutterings about musical minds. Anyway, enjoy the video!

Shooshie
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cuttime
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Re: What makes us so dern smert?

Post by cuttime »

Thanks for the link! I loved the brain in the jar, obviously Abby Normal's. I immediately think of Fabiola Gianotti, who started out as a concert pianist, and who is now director of CERN. Her resume leaves me breathless, as I would not be qualified to pursue either career, but from what I understand, it was a very natural progression from one to the other for her.
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mikehalloran
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Re: What makes us so dern smert?

Post by mikehalloran »

His is just some of the more famous of medical mutterings about musical minds.
My daughter graduated as a Composition major at UC Davis, a school much better known for their Agribusiness, Medical and Veterinary schools.

While she was being recruited (really? for a music major at an Ag school?), we attended a parents' seminar where UCD claimed that music majors had excellent chances to get into med school if they minored in the sciences. Why? Because musicians are used to making decisions while they work, a skill required of all medical and veterinary doctors.

My oldest did not go into medicine and is now working on her Masters degree at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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Phil O
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Re: What makes us so dern smert?

Post by Phil O »

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