A student of mine who works with damaged people in hospital wrote this about what we are speaking of. I had CCd my post to her. If you haven't seen this already maybe this might interest you. Starting a new career and learning to sing means that she is experiencing that of which she speaks as well as working with it in hospital with her clients. REH
Our brains are not hard wired as suggested by Mr. Hudson, but plastic, and skills that are repeated create new brain pathways: what fires together, wires together. This applies to everything from repetitive practice in learning to sing to regaining skills after a stroke, to repetitive meditations and prayers. The stories of the research behind this are delightfully written in Doidge: http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge.com/MAIN.html and Daniel Siegel's research and books: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4tR5Ebc4Mw My favorite one about repetition and practice, as you know, is Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin: http://www.geoffcolvin.com/books/ Have you read Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief? It is about the origin of the concept of epigenetics in biology, now mainstream science: http://www.brucelipton.com/biology-of-belief-overview S. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2012 3:02 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Getting somewhere sensible at last In my experience there is a duality of vision here. There are people who believe in circles and people who believe in spirals. Circles are closed, finished cul de sacs that are in reality the interior of globes that go in every direction but are essentially closed systems. Because they are 360 degrees in every direction they seem to be infinite but essentially they are closed. "Coyote once dreamed of a house with no windows and no doors." Music on the other hand is a spiral that begins in the "explosion" from a singularity and evolves "circularly" to a greatest potential and then begins to spiral down again to a singularity from which it starts all over again. A circle is a closed gift, a spiral is a journey. If you look at the spiral of music, we call it a messa di voce, it looks flat like this <> but in reality it is a tube. Sound isn't flat unless it's lost energy. Notation is flat, like these alphabetic symbols I write which are only one little slice of the communication in sounds going around in my mind. Circles are ontological while spirals are evolutionary. Spirals gather information in the expansion while developing competence and control in the diminishing of the complexity of the expansion through virtuosity. You can get a feel for it by writing two columns of numbers. One goes up from one to ten and means that you are gaining information from the environment while the other spirals up from ten to one which means you are learning to control the information in a diminishing difficulty. Potential is ten on the first case while Mastery is one in the other. If you lay the two down as a part of a left to right notational system they are called a crescendo/diminuendo. Although flat on the page they represent an evolving spiral. But not the spiral of an increasing and decreasing energy. Its more layered than that. That physical image is just one of many meanings to the symbols in sound. The crescendo spiral is the explosion from the energy of a "venturi" at the singularity. It seems powerful but in reality it is barely controlled. On one level that is the lesson that every voice teacher has to teach their student about "forcing" the voice. At the height of the crescendo is where knowledge, competence and vocal technique begins. The physical energy must be replaced with mental energy that learns as things get easier through all of the elements of practice. <> is flat but in reality both are spirals and as every voice teacher knows. The fact of being a spiral means that there is an evolving line of consecutive events as more and more information is being handled as technique increases. That increase in technique amounts to a decrease in complexity which is what is symbolized as the lines close to a point without creating another venturi effect. Lay it on a vertical and you have a mountain. There is no venturi at the top of a mountain, there is just something new. The other thing about that mountain is that you realize there is no dialogue between travelers on the various levels of the spiral. If one wants a dialogue one has to either advance to the person they wish to talk to or go back to the person they wish to talk to. There is no dialogue between the levels of the spiral. There is just trust, work and good will. The genetic/epigentic gift is the globe/circle model (maybe the transitory nature of epigenes really means they don't belong in a closed system but I'm not competent to discuss that. I'm still grounded in epigentic reality from geology.) I believe in a group consciousness and a planetary consciousness as well. I suspect that the idea of the circle of life is probably grounded in an unconscious awareness from the beginning of time of the shape of the earth as a model that we get from our mother and the amniotic sack. The spiral is the way we learn about mountains and have from the beginning of time as well. One could also say that we begin the spiral in the birth canal and reach a maturity and then must become more competent as we decline in physical possibilities. Personally that spiral is more the model I choose for learning. I'm grateful for gifts but consider them to be a diversion most of the time. REH PS Another way you could compare these two systems is in the Neurochronaxic theory of phonation of Raoul Husson vs. the Myoelastic Aerodynamic model of van den Berg. Husson believed it was an enclosed finished system while van den Berg believed it was an evolving system developing with every sound. Husson was like the bean counters talking about scarcity in Europe and America while van den Berg was Dutch, a people who managed scarcity and wrenched the very land under their feet from the ocean. He considered it to be a living system that evolved. Husson was great. He stimulated millions of dollars in research and although Van den Berg won the argument for the best scientific model for speech, the R & D stimulated made the researchers not take the mean or the average for the potential. When they wanted to know what was the potential they had to move to the ideal, the most developed voices in the world, opera singers. Theirs became an expansive rather than a contractile model based on scarcity. Ideal and inclusive rather than materialistic and exclusive. But hell, you can find all in all and both in both. The point is to not lose hope or to become jaded by advancing age. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, July 14, 2012 5:24 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Getting somewhere sensible at last Science has already placed a bomb under present-day polar politics -- between the left-wing and right-wing orientations that preoccupy (as far as one can see) every country on earth whatever its formal governmental system. The essential nature of the bomb is that it is being increasingly shown that everybody's personality and main skills are laid down clearly at puberty. There is nothing any of us can do to change this situation, except to modify this or that aspect from then onwards according to the accidents and circumstances of life. As far as left-wingism is concerned, this means that comprehensive attempts at 'fair' equalisation of welfare and opportunities are strictly limited somewhere along the line. As far as right-wingism is concerned, it means that gross inequalities of income and wealth are in no way deserved by the 'entrepreneurial' qualities of those at the top of the heap. The truth of the matter is that we are automatons, or very largely so. Each of us is programmed according to factors quite outside our individual control. In my opinion, freewill must exist -- or else we couldn't possibly consider its possible existence -- but how or why or to what extent it operates must remain inexplicable for now, and perhaps forever. It is a problem of the same complexity as the real nature of the quantum world, or the unknown 95% mass of the universe or whether evolution is a random game or is intrinsic to the creation of the universe (if it was created). As to the automatic nature of our lives, what are the exterior programmes which control it? We are born with a specific set of genes as a random mix from our parents. Many of these genes have sub-optimal variations within them, and these immediately set the first outermost range of limits to our subsequent performance in life. We also inherit an additional, more refined expressibility of many of our genes. These are our epigenetic settings, and these derive from the chemical and psychological environment of our parents. These set a second set of cultural limits to our normal behaviour. Subsequently the partiality given to some of our natural aptitudes by the family in which we are raised from our earliest months and years sets a further inner boundary to our potential abilities. Lastly, and increasingly up to the age of puberty, particular aptitudes are developed under the increasing control of the values of the peer group in which we spend out time. All the above is carried out by the fashioning of the neuronal networks of, mainly, the rear crinkly skin of our brains (left and right). Skills and behaviours which we can't possibly carry out at the age of puberty -- or do ineptly -- are forever denied us for the rest of our lives. From then onwards, the favoured aspects of our personalities and skills are developed further by a surge of millions of new neurons which grow in the frontal regions of crinkly skin. This surge tails off by about the age of 30. From then onwards we are increasingly unlikely to have innovative ideas or to develop new social skills which can place us much higher in the status ranking which pervades in all organizations whether they be hobby groups or large nations or multinational corporations. The above is what science is now telling us. There may be other surprises still to come which will affect our personalities and skills but they're unlikely to be major ones because all of them so far are already reducible to the workings of our genes and we can't go further downwards (save to ask existential questions alluded to above). As evolutionary biology and neuroscience fill in more details in the years to come, what will this mean politically? It means that in order for everybody to have some status we will gradually have to disassemble the vast hierarchical systems that nation-states have inherited from a couple of centuries of heavy artillery warfare (and the hierarchies that are necessary to run such events). We will have to assemble the sort of groups which co-evolved with the more specific aspects of our personalities for millions of years as primates. What such a social system would look like -- or, indeed, the political mechanics of getting there -- is impossible to describe here and now. We may simply note two things. Firstly, this is what science is telling us about how to live with maximum social welfare and efficiency. Secondly, it is already the case that there is a small power group at the head of every significant function of our lives which, overtly or covertly, takes the important decisions. Unless scientific research is snuffed out completely in the coming years then it will inevitably be the case that the growing political demand of the future will be that the well-being and satisfactions already experienced by the small power-groups be translated downwards to us all. In a vague way as yet, this is called 'Decentralization'. It is the growing ineptitude of large governments and the growing cynicism of electorates towards politicians which is driving it. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com <http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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