I just ordered the Michel Thaut book Rhythm, Music and the Brain after reading passages from it elsewhere. The issue for me is the study of what exactly constitutes emotion. Both as a Cherokee and a Musician, Emotion is generally described as the mask that we put over what we are perceiving from the Kinesthetic. Kinetics somewhat but especially the inner sense of feeling. Just as we do with abstract music, we place stories on the feelings and which stories or Masks we choose will be mad, sad, glad, scared, etc. Rather than be stirred to feel fear or caught in love, we have sensations that we interpret i.e. choose to perceive as a particular emotion. This has a lot of implications for the way that one teaches tonal character in singing and acting.
Your description of the work with music therapy and the musicologist's research into the archeology of music and emotion is changing the way that we think about the world and as to what constitutes value in the world when it relates to the purpose of the Arts in the marketplace. In the case of the Cherokee it has to do with the way the Arts were used to train the human instrument to have technique, or virtuosity, to handle the job of forester and in designing and caring for the forest as a Garden. This idea is not only coming from my traditions but the work of anthropologists in the Amazon working with the remnant populations of Native people has redefined the whole argument around hunting gathering and pillaging. It seems that these current activities are the result of the collapse of major population centers of millions people in the Amazon and not the pedagogical structures that were and in some cases are still in place. The Anthropologists in Brazil are far ahead of their North American peers who are still stuck in the old patronizing place that destroys the objectivity of their observations. Most of them can't even speak the languages. How many Canadians speak Indian Languages? In America? America is a colonial mono linguistic culture that mistrusts someone speaking anything but English. But back to the music: I would be interested Natalia in what you would have designed for the way the Stimulus packages were constructed? Other than for physical infrastructure what new ways of thinking about value and new sustainable services would you imagine? It seems to me that if we can't imagine a different way then we can't create one. Thank you for what you posted and what do you think? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Darryl or Natalia Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2010 10:19 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Music as medicine I had a client with Dementia whose repertoire of tunes up to, say, the late Seventies was in tact. She would remind us that she used to sing on the radio as a kid, and her utter joy at Sing-Along time, or movie afternoons, where older musicals worked best for most clients, was delightful. Couldn't remember much past a minute, but a happy decline--fortunately. We had music therapy through the local conservatory therapists in prior years, but ours was a small group, and the funding wasn't there after new rules set in. There was an onus on us to prove that we could pay 50% for workshops for at least 2 years, and it had to be weekly. We could barely pay for an eight week run. So we continued to be tortured by Sing-Along, with intermittent guitar performances or Barber Shop. But the clients loved it, needed it, and so obviously benefited from it physically because of the psychological boost and challenge to mind and body, and it was a way to relate to others they may not otherwise get along with, and they'd get to see a new face, too. Memory, however, might just be stored outside the brain. Have to remember where I read that one! Wait, it's coming back...that "What The Bleep Do We Know!?" book, page 158. It reads: A number of scientists are currently looking into the proposition that memories are not actually stored in the brain. It has been found that if you remove part of the brain where a memory appeared to be located, the memory may still persist! Where is it stored? Perhaps somewhere at the planck scale, or what some people might call "the akashic records." The brain might just serve as an instrument to pull the memories out of the universe. It might be the local storage, the local disk for the cosmic hard drive where all memories are stored. (Planck scale, currently the smallest distance that can be defined, at 10-33 centimeters, 10 trillion trillion times smaller than a hydrogen atom.) This was inset in the section where Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a prof in Dept. of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at U. of Arizona, Tuscon, (www.quantumconsciousness.org), explains that he thinks "more like a quantum Buddhist, in that there is a universal proto-conscious mind that we access, and which can influence us. But it actually exists at the funda-mental level of the universe, at the Planck scale." He is the same fellow who coordinated with Roger Penrose ( proposed that consciousness comes about when superpositions of neurons within the brain reach a certain threshold and then collapse--similar to collapse of wave function due to observation, called objective reductions (ORs). Hameroff suggested the mechanism by which this could take place. Together they formulated their Penrose-Hameroff "OR" Theory of Consciousness. Central to the collapse process are highly intelligent, self-organizing microtubules which serve as the cell's nervous and circulatory system; they process and communicate, and organize neighbouring cells to act coherently. In neurons, microtubules set up synaptic connections, and are involved in release of neurotransmitters. They organize the neuronets one level up, but are themselves affected deep within their own structure by a quantum phenomenon: the proteins of which they are made respond to signals from an internal quantum computer consisting of single electrons. These "proteins changing their shape is the amplification point between the quantum world and and our affecting the classical world in everything that mankind does, good and bad." Hameroff continues "that it's the spontaneous collapse (OR) of these microtubules, roughly forty times a second, that gives a moment of consciousness. Our consciousness is not continuous, but a sequence of "ah-ha moments". He says, "Consciousness kind of ratchets through space time in a sequence of now moments: now, now, now..." "What The Bleep Do We Know!?" has many amazing contributors, and is one of the best books ever. It's a great introduction to quantum physics, and it's not at all dry. Most libraries should carry it. It's way better than the movies that preceded it, though the movies are fun. So are the film comments as they go through the contributors. Natalia
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