Tuning Slide 5.29- Experience the Music

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you,
following you right on up until you die.
— Paul Simon

I have talked before about the impact of music on musicians- or at least on this musician. It has been known to happen in a rehearsal that I get so caught up in allowing the music to flow around and through me that I lose my place. That happens especially in concert band music since there are more than a few times in any concert when the trumpets are resting and other interesting things are happening around the band.

One thought when playing a more famous and familiar piece from some well-known composer is the honor I am having by playing the piece. My part may be as simple as some moving accompaniment line that few will hear separate from the whole or it could be the wondrous melody line played by the whole section. It doesn’t matter- it is still participating in something that has been around for years or centuries and here I am in that same line of musicians privileged to be able to play it.

One particular concert I remember was one where the director chose a complete concert of numbers by George Gershwin. I have been in love with his music since 9th grade when in music appreciation class the teacher played the opening of "American in Paris". From the moment I heard the “traffic noise” and the mood of the crowds in the street, I was hooked. Over the years I have played a number of arrangements of his works. A whole concert with selections was almost more than I could bear.

“I am playing Gershwin,” would go through my mind as we rehearsed. “This is immortal music,” was my next thought. I was in awe and the music flowed. That concert was one of the more enduring memories I have of playing music. To be able to actually be part of making the music was in itself a significant life moment. I probably am still working from the store of endorphins from that one concert alone. It went far beyond just playing music, it was experiencing the music from within.

I love going to concerts as a listener. It can anywhere from bluegrass to blues, Mozart to Mahler. It can be ensembles or wind bands or brass bands. At one concert last week I was being moved by the music and, as I am often led to do, I closed my eyes. My wife thought I was falling asleep and nudged me. I later explained to her that when music like that is at work I will close my eyes so I can shut out the extraneous “noise” and sensory input from vision. I need to allow the music to do what only music an do. I describe it in four words.

• Music Moves.
Music is not static. It doesn’t just sit there. Even when I am practicing and playing long tones, no note ever remains still. I visualize it leaving me as I hold that “whisper G” and heading out the bell. Music is sound, of course, which means it is made up of waves, moving waves. The music is coming at you- or if I’m playing- moving away from me. When it doesn’t seem to move, when it might be blah or nondescript we can often say that the music didn’t “move me.” But most of the time there is, I believe, a sensory but unconscious awareness that music is movement. But it is, I believe, a special movement that our brains are made to pick up as unique and important.

• Music Flows.
What that movement is can be called “flow.” We use that word to describe a state of being that we can experience. We can be “in the flow” as psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called that special state of being energized and focused resulting in creativity, enhanced learning, peak performance, and life happiness. I believe there is a correlational and causal relationship between music and “flow” because it can often be a flowing movement. Some compositions naturally do not “flow”, or more to the point may actually interrupt flow for good reasons. But even a martial march often gives a flow to the movement forward. As a result of that movement of flow, I often sense that the music is surrounding me, moving past me, circling back and coming toward me again.
This may be why when a band is playing in a “dull” room where the sound is lost and never seems to come back, you lose the sense of flow. The music seems to leave the end of the horn and kind of drop somewhere out there. Sure it is still music and it can, I am sure, have an impact. But in the right place at the right time with the right movement, music is an unstoppable force.

• Music Infuses.
Simply put, this means that music gets inside us, into what I could call our psyche, our soul, our spirit. It is not just something outside of us, it becomes part of us. Even people who may be “tone deaf” or can’t carry a tune in a bucket can still have this happen. When the movement of music connects with the energy within us, they interact in either harmony or discord. Sometimes the music provides the discord, sometimes our lives produce it. But in that interaction, the music as waves become part of the energy of our lives. Some of that may be in the production of the hormone oxytocin- the feel-good hormone- that can help improve our sense of well-being. This is far beyond the limits of what I am talking about, but they are in some ways interconnected.

• Music Transforms.
Finally, through the movement, the flow, the infusing spirit and release of oxytocin, music transforms us. This may be why music is often seen and utilized by protest movements to energize their supporters and by the powers-that-be to combat such movements. The transformation of music as an expression of emotions, desires, anger, or hope is often irresistible. Musicologist Ted Gioia, famous for many great writings on jazz, has a recent book simply called Music that explores this from our primitive pre-historic music to contemporary movements.

I have discovered that when I play music these same things can happen to me. I am never the same when I am doing practicing. I am never the same when I am done playing a concert or another gig. When practicing I am learning to experience the movement and flow, the infusion and transformation in my own life and how to join with it in my playing. When I am rehearsing with a group, I am finding the ways that we as a group can move and flow and together, interacting with each other in some kind of synchronization so we can perform it for others. Finally, when I am performing I am taking what I have learned and experienced in the practice room and rehearsal hall and giving it as a gift from me to the audience.

So, my advice- pay attention whenever you are making music, even if the music is on the radio or coming from your computer speakers. Pay attention and, at times, you will discover that you are part of this amazing transformation that music provides.

Tuning Slide 4.11- It's (Mostly) All in Your Head

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

• Trumpet playing is
o 90% mental
o 9% air
o 1% physical
— Attributed to a number of people, most often Bill Adam

When it comes right down to it, this is what the Inner Game of Music is truly all about. It is the mental side of playing music. It attitude. It is mindfulness. It is how we think and act out what we are thinking- or not thinking. I am not sure I like that idea. It means that things like building endurance or a perfect embouchure, the right mouthpiece or instrument, or heavy caps aren’t as important as we like to think they are. They are attempts at short-circuiting the process of becoming a musician.

Not to disregard the physical side. (More on that next week.) That is real and does impact the way we play. But it is the more effective use of our energy through the mental that in the long run as the most positive impact on what we are doing. Why might that be? Here’s a thought:

The brain consumes energy at 10 times the rate of the rest of the body per gram of tissue. The average power consumption of a typical adult is 100 Watts and the brain consumes 20% of this [energy].

We also know a great deal about the many ways the brain can impact our actions, our physical health, how our bodies function. While much of it is a mystery, the effects have been seen in many studies.

This also shows why that sometimes the tiredness we feel after a period of playing is perhaps even more mentally caused than physical. That’s a lot of energy going out when we are playing. For example, here are some things that are regular actions of the “mental” that impact what we do:

◆ How we practice- we have to think about that as we do it.
⁃ Slow, fast, articulation, slurs, etc

◆ Hearing the music and notes in our head as we play.
⁃ I am fairly sure that the best way to learn to play is to hear the notes in your head before you play. This is especially true of the upper register, but applies equally to the whole staff.

◆ What we think of our abilities and how far we believe we can go
⁃ I know I can’t play that run. I am unable to memorize. I am crappy.

◆ Self 1 criticizing or Self 2 wanting to just do it
⁃ This goes beyond the previous one. This happens in the middle of a performance and we get distracted. “I just missed the note! OMG! I’ll never get it,” Meanwhile I didn’t get the next three measures because I got lost. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

◆ Memorization
⁃ It takes concentration and mental effort to memorize. I have not been willing to spent the time or take the effort. And that does impact my playing. (I also tell myself I can’t do it.)

◆ Listening to ourselves and others.
⁃ I have to pay attention when listening. Engage the brain!

All that takes mental activity. The more difficult it is, the more we are distracted and the harder we have to work- and playing becomes more difficult. Part of it is what is the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves? What is it we believe about our abilities? But it is also about being intentional about taking care of our brains- the mental activities that can strengthen what we do with the trumpet. So I Googled (always a good place to start) “How do we train the brain to be more efficient?” and I got some interesting thoughts from an article on Entrepreneur.com. Here are their eight ways to improve brain power (the ideas are from the article. The thoughts about them are mine) (Link):

1. Exercise.

⁃ The work of endorphins and other neurotransmitters is essential. Exercise helps generate them and regenerate cell activity. Most of us (pointing at myself as well) do not get enough physical exercise. It really doesn’t take a lot- average about 30 minutes of walking a day and it will enhance brain power! That and the oxygen boosts efficiency, too.

2. Drink coffee.

⁃ It’s a stimulant and helps in learning. It is only a short-term solution, but what you learn helps build the brain connections.

3. Get some sunlight.

⁃ Yes, get outside. It is actually more than the sun- it is the vitamin D, I am told. But to me it is also the ability to take-in fresh air, see and experience the world, and discover new things all around you.

4. Build strong connections.

⁃ We are not meant to be lonely. We have been created as social creatures. Some have even theorized that what we call “spirituality” is the need to have connections with the world and others. When we are isolated unhealthy things can begin to happen to our bodies and brains. Get out, be social.

5. Meditate.

⁃ Mindfulness/meditation has become the “In-thing.” For very good reasons. Not the least of which is that it works. Ten minutes a day can make a big difference. I don’t just mean “sitting meditation. I would add T’ai Chi and Qigong or walking meditation to a meditation regimen. The increased inner balance gets us more “in tune” with ourselves and what we are doing. Maybe do some yoga as part of a weekly exercise program as well.

6. Sleep well.

⁃ I know the old dictum we have heard from some- “You can sleep when you’re dead” as a way to get us off our lazy couches and do something. But to ignore healthy sleep habits can potentially get in the way of health itself. Sleep hygiene can be a big help, even if you sometimes have to struggle to get enough. Look into it.

7. Eat well.

⁃ I read that and said, “Yep, I will love to eat a lot.” I don’t think that is what it means. To eat well is to eat healthy, to not subsist only on junk food, or high sugar content drinks. Feeding your body healthy fuel will certainly help the brain!

8. Play Tetris.

⁃ For some reason, Tetris is considered by some researchers to be one of the better video games. It works on spatial recognition (an aid to balance), hand-eye coordination (like translating all those black marks on the page into music?), and keeps brain matter alive and working. Why Tetris? I have no idea. But I remember when I played it on the old Gameboy. It was fun and probably helped. (Maybe I'll download it on the iPhone.)

I would add a couple other things:

◆ Take time for relaxation and hobbies.
◆ Journaling can be a great way to get in touch and keep in touch with what is going on in your own head.
◆ Read more than you watch TV.
◆ Listen to music more than you watch TV.

If I want to be a better trumpet player, I guess I need to take care of the mental. Losing my mental sharpness will not have a good result in my music.

The Tuning Slide: 3.14- The Inner Game- Why It Works

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Practice like you've never won;

Perform like you've never lost.

-various sources

When Tim Gallwey started the “Inner Game” teachings and Barry Green applied them to music, we didn’t know a lot about the brain. People like Gallwey went a lot on intuition and personal experience. As a tennis player himself and later a practitioner of meditation, he developed the principles based on seeing results from his ideas.

In those years neuroscience was often done blind since it was hard to watch the brain at work. They really had no idea how the brain functioned. As science progressed with all kinds of ways of scanning the brain a revolution began. It should come as no surprise that many of the old, traditional ideas of how the brain works were disproved. But it also should come as no surprise that many ideas that people like Tim Gallwey developed were right on target, though in slightly different ways. Scientists began to see that the brain was far more complex than they had even imagined. They learned how the two hemispheres of the brain had more to do with each other than had been thought. And it is in that interplay between the two hemispheres that the secrets of the Inner Game and mindfulness meditation were beginning to be unlocked.

The results of all this research and technological advancements is far more than I can even begin to understand in depth, let alone share in this post. But in short, much of it has given some scientific, research-based support for what Gallwey and Green have worked on with the Inner Game.

For me, one of them is how balancing Self 1 and Self 2 can have such an impact. Let’s sum it up as I interpret it:

• Self 1 is the logical, task-oriented, perfectionist who can be easily frustrated when things aren’t going right.
• Self 1 kicks your butt when you make a mistake.
• Self 1 is the one who tells me I am too old to become the type of trumpet player I have always wanted to be.
• Self 1 will hook on to all kinds of things to keep me from succeeding in order to prove my incompetence.

It sounds like Self 1 is out to sabotage me, but it isn’t. Self 1 has some real advantages. Self 1 is the one who can figure out problems utilizing information. Self 1 is the one who will tell me why, for example, Arban’s basic exercises are so important to maintaining my skill. Self 1 will then tell me, time to push yourself, Barry. Try something a little more difficult. Then, as soon as I try, and don’t do it perfectly, Self 1 can say, “Well, I guess we shouldn’t have done that.”

• Meanwhile Self 2 is standing in the background saying, “Hey, here I am. Yes, I can do that. Give me a chance.”
• Why? Because Self 2 had been doing just that for years. Self 2 has taken the ideas and work and pushing of Self 1 and turned them into my ability to move from simple to more complex music. The simpler stuff has become “natural” and Self 1 just lets Self 2 go ahead with it.
• Self 1 knows when I make a mistake. Self 2 says, “Yep. Let me correct it.”

There are many ways of describing this whole process. One of them we have often used is “Muscle Memory.” If I keep practicing that particularly difficult lick, it will become natural and I will intuitively remember it when I get to it. What neuroscience has discovered is that this “muscle memory” is, in reality, physical, in the brain- and real. As we develop our skills at the more complex tasks, the brain makes adjustments, shortcuts, to do them. The brain actually uses fewer neurons and less of our brain to do these complex tasks, leaving the brain more available for the things we haven’t learned yet.

In other words, our brains become more efficient at processing what we already know how to do, no matter how complicated. The brain has physically changed to do them. This is known as brain “plasticity”. The brain has the amazing ability to be continually changing throughout life, reorganizing itself, finding or making new pathways that are more efficient.

How do we utilize that efficiency more effectively? In how we practice. Deliberate practice, focus, awareness, mindfulness, listening, planning, openness to change, letting go. This will come up again and again as we think about and work toward greater skill. Deliberate practice says that the best way is not just to pick up the horn and play any old thing. It won’t get us to new levels of skill without being challenged.

In the last few weeks I have noticed a sloppiness setting in to some of my practice routine, especially with working on Clarke #1. I wasn’t hitting the notes as cleanly as I had been. My fingering dexterity had become uncertain. I was even missing the very basic chromatic scale we all come to know intuitively. So I changed my focus to be a little more deliberate. I decided to really listen to what I was doing. I slowed down the tempo of the exercise, paying attention to what I was doing.

Self 1 was in logical heaven. Not only was I working in ways that made the logical Self happy, Self 1 was loving it that I wasn’t doing as well as I had. “See. You are too old for this.” But Self 2 came to my rescue. Self 2 reminded me that I can do this. In fact, Self 2 was actually enjoying the fun of finding musicality in something as basic as chromatic scales.

Things are improving.

I went back and looked at the list of items from this year’s trumpet workshop and noticed three in particular, other than the ones on the Inner Game, that apply here.

• Hear it, study it, make it become natural
That’s really what we are about in all this. Using the brain’s plasticity to increase efficiency by making new circuits and pathways for action.

• If you panic you will die
Panic is Self 1 taking over and pulling the emergency brakes, bringing everything to a complete stop. It actually sabotages its own skills of investigation. Self 1 is basically lazy and doesn’t do well at thinking in new ways. It has to be pushed. Sometimes you have to tell it to stop so it can actually work with Self 2 at finding new ways.

• Just have fun! It will happen faster.
Let Self 2 have fun- and things will usually happen more effectively and in ways you may never have dreamed.

This is not just about music. All this applies to many other aspects of our lives. Remember that the Inner Game started out as a coaching method for tennis and has been turned into coaching for golf and business success as well. Learning how to utilize these skills with music will give you a step ahead in applying the same skills to whatever occupation or vocation or even hobby you pursue.

One of my “day jobs” for the past 25 years has been as an addictions counselor. In the disease of addiction the brain has been hijacked and its natural wiring has been short-circuited. Without brain plasticity my job would have been hopeless, recovery would have been impossible. Yet these advances in neuroscience have given me and the addiction treatment field new and exciting tools.

Much to my initial surprise the skills and tasks developed by Gallwey and Green in the Inner Game are at the heart of these tools. They also work in my career, my daily life, my relationships. We are all “pliable” in emotion, in attitude, and skill. We can build new wiring, shorten brain pathways for certain activities and therefore make them more efficient, use awareness and mindfulness to improve who we are and make life even more fun.

It’s an Inner Game and it’s worth playing.

A Political Tilt-A-Whirl

I have come to the conclusion that logic and facts, while interesting and even helpful, most of the time don’t do much to win arguments. In fact, for most of us our policy could very well be, “I know what I believe. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” We will sort through loads of facts until we find the one that agrees with us out of hundreds. Global climate change is one of the current examples. Out of every 100 scientific studies it appears that at least 90 or more support the idea of climate change occurring around us right now. But if you, for some ideological or political reason disagree, well, forget those 90 some. Just look at that one.

I have done the same thing with people’s comments after a sermon, performance, or Facebook post. I could get 25 “Good job! I loved it.” Comments. But there’s that one who didn’t like it, disagreed with me, said something unkind. That’s the one that will keep me awake at night and spoil my day. That is not about being thick- or thin-skinned. It’s about how we respond and how we make decisions.

At one point in time most believed that if you could separate emotions from decision-making, we would all be able to make better decisions. The paradigm for that was good old Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet! His quote, which entered the American lexicon, was “Just the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts.” No opinions, asides, or emotions. The facts will lead us to where we want to go.

Sadly, the real world has a different reality based on other facts discovered in research. There are examples of people who have through surgery or accident had their emotional response separated from their logical response. They make decisions based only on the facts. There is no emotional content to their process. It is entirely disconnected. It would seem, according to “logical” thinking that such a person would be able to make sane, rational decisions.

That assumption is wrong. If they make decisions they are not logical or sane. In many instances they have great difficulty making these decisions at all, feeling overwhelmed by choices. Through brain scans and other tools of modern neuroscience, we have discovered that an interaction between emotion and logic is what makes the better decisions. The emotional content, also including intuition and stored memories beneath consciousness, is as important as the logical content- the facts.

What we see is that those decisions based solely (or mainly) on either pure logic or pure emotion are both flawed. Whether it’s the person above with only logic or the active addict controlled by the pleasure (emotional) content, they do not make the better or best decisions.

What is more to the point is that unless we have some physical or emotional reason for a disconnect between reason and emotion, we all make our decisions on a combination of both. Most of the time our brains are downright lazy and make most decisions based on intuitive reactions. We don’t even think about it. (Just because it comes through and from our brain does NOT mean we have “thought” about it. Many pre-, sub-, and unconscious ideas and reactions occur without the action of thinking.) That of course is fortunate. It is part of our survival mechanism, allowing us to react to danger in less time than it takes to think about it.

The very serious game of politics is one of those places where we can see the impact of facts, logic, opinion, or emotion. For some reason there are many people who look at a picture of Barack Obama and have a strong negative reaction. Many of them will have all kinds of logical reasons for that reaction. They can cite “information” (whether true or false, logical or illogical) for why they believe that Obama is a threat, a Muslim, an idiot, the worst president, or whatever. He has ruined the country, the economy is in a shambles, crime is up, he hates police, and on and on. Don’t show me statistics that say it ain’t so. I know it’s true because I believe it.

On the other side there are many who have the same response to Donald Trump. I saw on the web a supposed quote from the ghostwriter of his The Art of the Deal who expresses a fear for Trump’s finger on the nuclear arms button. Others say variations on this fear- all the way from his taking away American freedoms of religion and the press to an economic policy from the late 1800s that will bankrupt the world economy. Are these facts? No. Can they be supported with some sense of information? Sure. It’s all in the emotional responses.

Both sides will say that their opinion is based on “facts.” Maybe. But facts and statistics are only as good as the way we explain them. Correlation does not mean causation and in many cases truly means coincidence.

Could any of the fears about Trump come true? Yes, of course. But the likelihood is about the same as Obama having taken all your guns away in the past 7 years. And he didn’t even try.

Let’s be honest, that little fact is what helps me get through the insanity of politics today. It reminds me that all of us are caught in the same emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Which is why I keep begging, pleading, exhorting, and praying for more dialogue. We need to talk about our feelings and examine our fears in the light of reality. We need to be open to the wonders that life is still presenting to us. We need to work together in that exceptional way we have often done in the past.

I am not optimistic but I am not as fatalistic as I could be, either. I will continue to do what I can do to make that work better.

The Tuning Slide: New Comfort

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Anxiety, it just stops your life.

-Amanda Seyfried

No, I'm not going to talk about anxiety as such. I'm going to talk about how we have learned to deal with it. We all know what it is, of course. But here's one definition:

Anxiety:
a feeling of

• worry,
• nervousness, or
• unease,

typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.

One of our natural adaptations to the world around us is our response to anxiety producing times and places. When we face a situation of perceived fear or threat there are survival mechanisms that come into play.

Maureen Werrbach, MA, LCPC writes about this:

...your body is responding to a perceived threat. This is called the stress response. The stress responses, fight, flight, or freeze, help us in situations where we perceive physical or mental threat.
Link to Psych Central

Right there they are:

• Fight
• Flight
• Freeze.

They are the things of anxiety that can "stop your life." They are essential responses to life-threatening situations. The problem is that they developed when almost everything in the world around us was a life-threatening situation. That rustling of the leaves in the bush was more likely a predator than a small bird. High-level awareness was a necessity to remaining alive. What is even more important is that these responses occurred deep in the early human brain, beneath consciousness. These responses were, and are, hard-wired into who we are. These initial responses would occur in a fraction of a second before the conscious mind knew what was happening.

We still have that going on. If you are standing on the sidewalk and suddenly a car veers out of control heading at you, your mid-brain response may be as long as .2 to .3 seconds before your conscious brain knows it is happening. You will probably jump out of the way. This will happen before you know with your conscious mind that it is happening.

Two-tenths of a second doesn't seem like very long. But a vehicle moving at even 40 mph will travel about 60 feet (!) in one second. In that .2 - .3 seconds it will travel 12 - 18 feet. That may be just enough time for you to jump to safety. You probably knew that you couldn't fight the vehicle. But you may have some background that causes you to freeze instead of flee, which is fatal.

The kind of threats that our ancestors faced, though, are much less common than they used to be. We don't have wild animals stalking us, for example. Our lives, in much of the world, in spite of what we often feel or hear, are far safer on a day to day basis than they have ever been. As a result we have developed ways of evaluating anxiety-producing situations and easing the fears and sub-conscious responses. Throughout our lives we develop these self-soothing mechanisms. They are defense mechanisms against  things we don't like to feel, don't have to feel, or don't want to feel. When we enter into an anxious place where fear, worry, nervousness or unease bubble up, we all have ways we have learned to cope with these. Therefore, these situations brings old issues up- old ways of finding safety or comfort. Even if they have become counter-productive!!

They are automatic thoughts!

We have all kinds of automatic thoughts going on all the time. They are like the trailer at the bottom of the TV screen during a ball game. While the game is happening on the screen, the trailer is telling you about other games, scores, etc. Our automatic thoughts are that trailer. Which means we don't pay much attention to them unless we have to.

If, in the middle of that ball game, you hear a "ping" or "beep" that is out of place you will most likely see something like a severe weather warning down in the trailer section. The "automatic thoughts" of the trailer are now conscious. You read the warning- and you miss the game-winning touchdown as the clock runs out. In spite of what we think we can do, multi-tasking is next to impossible.

When these thoughts are "negative" and get in the way we refer to them as "Automatic Negative Thoughts"- or ANTs. That can be a way of identifying them and putting them into a more healthy place in our mind.

Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way,
ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or
a pioneer of the future.

~Deepak Chopra

But these automatic thoughts, negative or positive, are how our brains work. They are finely tuned for survival- and anxiety is a sign that something feels threatening- or at least uncomfortable and we want to change it. Which brings us back to

• fight
• flight or
• freeze.

I have spent years working in addiction counseling and treatment. For some people the anxiety response they have developed over the years is to drink or use chemicals. They are seeking comfort from, ease of the anxiety and fears. It becomes the default response. They are not even aware how it happened or, at times, even why. It has become hard-wired. It is a "flight" response. Escape. Get away.

That is an extreme example, but the way it happens is similar to the many other ways we respond. Here are some other ways:

• Flight: not taking solos because of anxiety; dropping out of the group since you can't "keep up"
• Fight: always be a rebel and a trouble-maker; be unwilling to accept what someone else is suggesting because it makes you uncomfortable; passive-aggressive responses can be just as much "fight" as some overt action.
• Freeze: Not responding to a suggestion, keep doing what you have always done and ignore the ideas. (This can look like passive-aggressive, but is different in attitude.)

When these become habitual they are also chemically wired in the per-conscious mid-brain. Does this mean we are now stuck in these old ways of dealing with these situations and feelings? Fortunately, the answer is no. One of the discoveries of neuroscience is that the brain is quite "plastic," It can "rewire" itself. If it couldn't a person who had a stroke could never learn to walk or talk again. The brain develops work arounds. We can help that process.

Actually, we have to or it won't happen. That is the purpose of physical therapy/rehab after a stroke or traumatic brain injury.  That is the purpose of recovery activities for an addict. These help the brain rewire itself in more healthy ways. Learning anxiety work arounds will help our brains move beyond the ways we have always done it and find new sources of comfort in anxious times.

On the website mentioned earlier, Maureen Werrbach suggested these proven methods (Link to Psych Central):

• Embrace imperfection. Striving for perfection always leads to stress. Practice replacing perfectionistic thinking with more acceptable, less extreme ones.

• Identify automatic thoughts. Uncover the meaning of these thoughts and you can begin to replace them with more appropriate thoughts.

• Become a neutral observer. Stop looking at the stressful situation through your emotion-filled lens. Imagine that your stressful thoughts are someone else’s. You will notice that you can see things more objectively this way.

• Practice breathing exercises. Focus your attention on your breath. Fill your lungs slowly and exhale slowly for a count of 10. Start over if you lose count. This exercise is meant to reduce your body’s response to stress.

• Accept and tolerate life events. Acknowledge, endure, and accept what is happening in your life at the moment. Focus on the present and be mindful of your surroundings. Be deliberate about allowing this exact moment to be what it is, rather than what you wish or hope it to be.

Don't expect an immediate, extreme change. Anxiety and stress response habits are as ingrained as any other long-term habit. But as we learn the newer responses and practice them as needed, they will slowly but surely become our new comfort and new normal.

P.S. You’re not going to die. Here’s the white-hot truth: if you go bankrupt, you’ll still be okay. If you lose the gig, the lover, the house, you’ll still be okay. If you sing off-key, get beat by the competition, have your heart shattered, get fired…it’s not going to kill you. Ask anyone who’s been through it.

~Danielle LaPorte

Tuning Slide: Logic vs Emotions

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

― Leo Tolstoy

Yeah, but what did Tolstoy know? The music that is arguably the most amazing in western history is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach- and it is some of the most logical music ever written. Mathematically precise; ordered in almost uncanny exactness. No wonder that when Wendy Carlos (under her birth name of Walter Carlos) wanted to show the amazing use of the Moog Synthesizer, she used the music of Bach. (Switched on Bach. 1968.) There should be no emotion in a computer-generated song; no human input to play it other than the 1s and 0s of computer/digital coding.

Yet it was an amazing album that touched people deeply, and not just because of the newness and uniqueness of it. For many of us who first heard it in 1968, the album, for example, captured the emotion of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring with amazing clarity.

Logic will get you from A to B.
Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein

As much as mathematical precision, Bach also used imagination that allowed him to place layer upon layer of things never before seen or heard. The imagination of Wendy Carlos added another layer which grabbed us like nothing ever seen or heard before. Yet it was all there in Bach's logic combined with his musical imagination.

Then we have Miles Davis on Kind of Blue or John Coltrane on A Love Supreme. At one moment their solos can sound as precise as Bach's mathematical journeys. The next moment, then, is filled with an emotion that sweeps in and takes over, surrounding us with things that are like nothing ever seen or heard before. All of us who work with music from the rank amateur to the amazing heights of Davis or Coltrane know that everything they do is based on all the logical manipulations of music theory. They may twist those theories and make up a few new ones of their own, but they are acutely aware of the logic behind what they are doing.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.

It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

- Rabindranath Tagore

It is no doubt obvious where I am going with this. We are not dealing with an either/or situation when we deal with logic and emotion. It must be a both/and for it to go beyond just the notes on the page or in our heads. In human thinking it used to be that we believed that if only we humans would be "logical," then we would always make the right decisions. When faced with choices, we should be able to use the coolness and precision of logic to make the good choices.

Without going into all the details, science, medicine, and psychology were all shocked when this proved to be an incorrect theory. There were examples where a person, through an injury or surgery, lost the ability to connect emotions to decision making. All their decisions were based on good old-fashioned rational thinking. "Just the facts!" The old theory would say that their decisions post-trauma should have been better decisions- emotions weren't in the picture.

That is not what happened. In essence, they actually lost some of the critical ability to make any decisions in the first place. Neuroscience had to be rewritten. Cold, impersonal logic does not make good decisions alone. To disconnect emotion is to take away what makes us human- and what makes human decision-making human in the first place.

Which is why I think music has played such an essential and foundational role in human culture and development. Daniel Levitan, neuroscientist, session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, captured this idea in his two seminal works, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Somewhere in our brain, music, I think, brings together emotion and logic in ways very few things do.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words
and that which cannot remain silent.
― Victor Hugo

So, let's get back to you and me and how this is important to us. Actually, in some ways it is another way of reminding us of things already discussed and beginning to put them into a "logical", effective, and helpful place.For example, we have talked about being able to be aware of, and able to share, "your story" in your music. How do you know your story? By your feelings, among other things, and then applying logic and thinking to it. We discussed the importance of the "groove" in music. Well, first we have to have the "logical" ability to play the notes correctly. Then we add the feeling, the emotion we are sensing in the notes. That becomes the groove.

That's why we practice. First to find the notes- the specifics of this song in this place. Then we find the groove- the story, the emotions, the nuances. These are built on the logic of knowing the fundamentals as well as how we are feeling. We may be able to play a piece with clockwork precision, but does it "feel?" It is in the feeling that we connect with the music.

Am I just repeating the same thing over and over, driving it into the ground until you say, "Enough already! We get it."? Perhaps, but I have found over the past year that I forget these things on a regular basis. I get bogged down in the notes on the page or the dynamic markings. I forget to listen to the music as I am playing it in my practice room. I rush through the notes instead of listening to them; I try to get the piece down cold in one or two attempts; I don't savor the world found in each note. Or, in performance, I can ignore the other musicians I am playing with. Sometimes I get so emotionally involved in a song that, without me realizing it I get sloppy and the technique can get lost.

I have to be constantly reminded of the interaction of logic and emotion- unless the emotion I want to drag out of the horn, myself, or the listener is disgust. It is in the balance of our logic and emotion that practice turns into performance, that we discover how a particular song can express our own story.

We will look a little more at this in another post in a few weeks on some ways to work with the Inner Game in new ways. For now, don't let your logic close out your emotions- or your feelings dismiss logic. Together they make quite a duet.

A Great Phrase

Let's start with the headline I saw on NPR.org:

How Do We Grow To Like The Foods We Once Hated?

Basically it's an article about food tastes and how they can be changed. Here's the first couple paragraphs:

Why do some of us like to slather hot sauce or sprinkle chili powder onto our food, while others can't stand burning sensations in our mouth?

It probably has to do with how much we've been socially pressured or taught to eat chili, according to Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied attitudes toward food for decades.

Rozin uses as examples how foods native to the western hemisphere, for example, became staples of Europeans who had never had them before.

And that flavor in Mexico is chili and it is on virtually every savory food they eat. Chili pepper, when it came to Europe, tasted so bad. So this terrible-tasting food comes over along with potatoes and tomatoes and all these other relatively good ones, and it becomes a major flavoring in the cuisines of West Africa, of South Asia and a good part of Southeast Asia. And it makes their food taste better to them.

So I got curious about how the hell that happened.

He then goes on to say that the change happens in the brain, not the tongue. The same information is still being sent, it is just received differently. We, as children, don't like many things that we come to learn to like- even truly enjoy- as we mature. So, unless one has a physical allergy to something, it is possible, it seems, to learn to like things that once might have turned us away in horror.

Of course some things don't change- I still don't like liver- and can only take olives in small amounts. Over the years I have come to enjoy many foods. Basically, you have to eat a lot of the foods before you become accustomed to them and enjoy them. Which brings me to the "money quote" that caught my attention:

I call it "benign masochism," which is to say that we learn to like things that our body rejects. And it's benign because it doesn't hurt us.

I love it: benign masochism.

And that's where I will leave it... and pass me more of that hot sauce.

The Powers of Music

My wife and I were sitting discussing music on the way home from the Brule concert last Sunday. What had struck us was the similarity of some of the Native America-style music that sounded very similar to ancient music we call "Plainsong" or "Chant." We thought about how in all kinds of places in the world the plainsong-style of music was a very basic and foundational style. At times it is played on different tonalities with different types of scales that are far different from what we in the more modern west are used to. It is still the same style, though. It most often has a single melodic line and a free flow to it that carries the words or tones from one to the other in an almost unbroken tune.

We kept thinking about what it is that makes "chant"-style music so foundational? Whether antiphonal where a line or musical phrase is sung by one group then repeated by another (cantor and congregation, for example) or when all sing the melody together, it is a powerful style.

I thought on my own experience in liturgy as a worshiper. Several of the old hymns of the church came to mind as well as the style of the Anglican/Episcopal liturgy I participate in during worship. I realized that what I experience is that movement of the music within me. It lifts me, it touches something within the neurology of my brain and takes me into a different state of mind.

There are all kinds of studies that show that we are born with a musical sense. Other studies have discovered the impact of music in all kinds of settings from pediatric ICU to Alzheimer units. Perhaps it is somewhere in there that we have a cross-cultural, human instinct that comes out more naturally in chant or plainsong.

Sure it can be boring and put us to sleep. That isn't all bad. Listen to O Come Immanuel in a basic chant style or even Silent Night for that matter. Check out some Bach pieces and see that they are at times based on that same style.

Then, as the music on my 1Tunes shuffle switched to an antiphonal style, the chant begins to take on a multiple layered feel. That's where we got the idea of harmony. What an amazing gift music is- and it is always within us.

Ever Wonder....

What makes a song interesting, so interesting that it becomes a classic? That thought came to mind the other evening when I was working and listening to my shuffle on iTunes. The Johnny Cash song, "Ring of Fire" popped up and I found my attention taken away from what I was doing listening to the song and humming quietly (I was at the local Caribou Coffee). As I tapped my toe and let the music do its thing on my brain chemicals I noticed something that I had heard before but never struck me as part of the song's power and endurance.

As the words go

• "I fell into a burning ring of fire" the music line goes UP the scale, not down. 
• "I went down, down, down" floats over the same RISING line. 
• "And the flames went higher" then takes the music down the scale.

It is almost irresistible. Somewhere in the recesses of our brain where music is a primal occurrence, the dissonance between the words and music lines makes an impact. Even if we don't know why, we are caught by the music.

It is a very simple song with just enough complexity and cognitive dissonance to make a difference. It isn't in the fine execution of the song or any profound sentiment. It is a raw song that nonetheless does more than just entertain us. It changes us in some inner way.

I don't, of course, sit and analyze all the music that comes through my headphones when I am working. Many times I am almost oblivious to what's happening there. But when something grabs my attention as quickly and powerfully as Ring of Fire I realize something is interesting about it.

Perhaps this is mindfulness at another level. When something grabs our attention away from something important, then something is working in the pre-conscious or unconscious levels of our brains.

Genius Hacks

Viral Nova posted 23 Genius Hacks for the brain the other day. Some of them were okay, but this one struck me:

18.) The physical effects of stress (increased breathing rate, heart rate etc.) mirror identically the physical effects of courage. So when you’re feeling stress from any situation immediately reframe it: your body is getting ready to do courage, it’s Not feeling stress.. A great example of cognitive reframing, researchers found that you do better when you appraise a stressful situation as a challenge, not a threat
Read more at Viral Nova

The idea in all of them was positioning, cognitive reframing, different ways to look at our own lives and the world around us. One of the many interesting things that science has been working on in recent years is how thinking and action can go together. Then, how acting differently can get you to think differently. Cognitive reframing, in spite of the fact that it is a "brain hack" is, in reality a new way of acting as much as it is a new way of thinking.

Which is why this one on courage and stress is so good.

Try it yourself sometime and see if it might work. No, I don't think it will necessarily make you super-brave or uber-courageous, but it will get you through some difficult times.

Basic Training

When we begin to talk about the ways and whys of training the brain into mindful and attentive paths, we could end up all over the place. Basically, from a scientific point of view it is simply this:

Mindfulness is good for you and helps your health!

All around the country science has been researching the impact of meditation on people of all kinds with all types of issues. Some have studied Tibetan monks; others have worked with terminal cancer patients. With the rise of newer technology such as functional MRI scans we can look at things in the living brain that reveal more mystery than answer- but show the positive ways meditation and mindfulness can touch our lives.

One way it has been described is that positive emotional states can be a learned skill. In other words, we don't have to stay locked into negative emotions. We can learn ways to help ourselves move into new ways of thinking which can have benefits in many areas, physical as well as emotional.

Remember that all signals and information transferred around our bodies from toe to head and back again are through physical interactions- electrical and chemical. If things get short-circuited (electrical) it can throw off the chemical balance. And vice versa! There is a fine and critical balance in our brains between chemical and electrical that simply change the ways we feel or can feel. Different physical or emotional events can throw any of these off. Some of these are even genetic.

For example:

• Pain- we produce too much of some chemicals as a buffer, or response to pain. We are thrown off.
• Depression- perhaps for many a genetic concern that doesn't produce the right balance of the right chemicals.
• Stress and anxiety- the fight or flight response is sure a chemical reaction that changes things quickly.
• Substance Abuse- talk about throwing off the chemical balance!

These areas, by the way, have been shown through much research to be positively impacted by mindfulness and meditation! That does not mean that all we have to do is learn to meditate and these things will go away. Oh, if it were only that easy. But to train our brain- or in many instances, re-train the brain- is to improve the foundation on which can be built new coping skills, positive emotional responses, stress relief, and recovery.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan

Note: When I talk about "training the brain" I am not referring to the idea that we should keep training the brain as we get older. That concept is a narrow focus and isn't where I am going when I talk about it.

Training Your Brain

I'm going to take a step back now in this series of posts on meditation and mindfulness. I am doing this from a course I am involved in right now on Attention and Interpretation Therapy with Dr. Amit Sood here at Mayo and his book:

• These thoughts are all mine, by the way. The understandings and interpretations are my own of what I have been reading and experiencing. 

The past seven weeks I have posted on the seven daily themes that we are invited to cultivate in each day's growth in awareness and mindfulness. They are:

• Monday: Gratitude
• Tuesday: Compassion
• Wednesday: Acceptance
• Thursday: Deeper Meaning
• Friday: Forgiveness
• Saturday: Celebration
• Sunday: Reflection and Prayer

Having set that out, I want to think a little more deeply. Over this and the next seven weeks I will look at some of the background. This will include things like awareness, meditation, paying attention.  To get it started I want to talk this week about why this is important. The title of this post sets it out- the purpose is to train the brain- train ourselves- to be more intentional, aware, and focused. So much goes by us in each day and even each moment. So much happens that we never see because we are simply not paying attention.

Mindfulness and meditation get us trained to see things that are already there and to experience things that are already around us- and we don't even see or experience them most days.

I will simply start the week, then, with a quote from the man who has probably done more to pull all this into the American health care consciousness, Jon Kabat-Zinn.

The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.
― Jon Kabat-Zinn

The more we are aware of those things and those moments, the better we will be at life.

They are not little. I will ponder that, meditate upon that for today.

Keep Those Boxes Separate

I am amazed sometimes at how dense I can be. Or more to the point, how easy it is to not allow information from one place in my life be brought to mind in another. I was reminded of this one day the other week while watching Jeopardy! The clue for Final Jeopardy!

The category was Poetic Characters and it had to do with the title character of a poem whose name came from "good news" in Greek. My wife and I sat there for the 30 seconds of "do, do, do do..." and couldn't come up with an answer. Of course neither of us are all that versed in poetry (pun intended) so we were at a loss.

Well, Alex, what's the answer?

Evangeline.

Doh!

Evangel = good news

Did I mention that my wife and I are both seminary trained pastors?

It was an excellent example, though, of how our brains don't always make connections across disciplines or thought patterns. Ask me right out what Greek word means "good news" and I could tell you in the drop of a consonant. Put it into a question about poetry where I am less aware and I am lost.

Amazing.

The Power of Memory

Memory is amazing. After 42 years of probably not even being aware that a song used to- or even still exists- there it is.

I was listening to Folk Alley this evening (HIGHLY recommended) and I hear a strumming followed by some more strumming. Then the drums start and a chorus singing.

I know that song.

Peace in the end.

I glanced at the screen and a multicolored medieval-hippie dressed group appeared.

Fotheringay.

Hope in the end

I know them. A one-album, no-real-hit wonder of British folk-rock in 1970. A break-ff from Fairport Convention. Kind of a 70s cult favorite.

I couldn't pull back all the words, just that title line. But it was as real and familiar as if I had just heard it yesterday.

What makes this all the more amazing is that recent science has shown that there is really no where in my brain that this song memory is stored. Not a single location. It is all over the place and my brain had to put it back together from these scattered bits and pieces. 

THEN, in even more miraculous ways, feelings and other memories come along. A smile of an unremembered memory of some night I might have played that song on my radio show. An internal feeling of being 22 again as if I never left that time behind.

I don't know what part all this plays in the evolutionary development of humanity and human consciousness. I don't know why it's so important. It may be human hubris to believe it is even important at all. Yet it exists. I am not the only one who it happens to. Each of us has more than a few of these things in our memory bank. The awe I feel at the ability to experience today is probably more than the awe of the first memory.

And it wants to spur me to continue to make these kind of memories and not live in the one from the past. God forbid if all I have to look forward to is a glorious past.

Anyway- with the help of You Tube, here's my rolling bits and pieces put back into a song. Enjoy, even if you have never heard it before.

Make a memory.

I Always Knew This to Be True.

New research has found that those with higher IQs tend to be nocturnal night-owls. That's what The Week has reported.

Some of the info:

Eveningness is an "evolutionarily novel preference" made by people with "a higher level of cognitive complexity." Basically, smart people evolve to stay up later.

So far so good. I would agree as a historic night person. It appears to be genetic, with which I would certainly agree. I have been a night person my whole life. Just because I get up at 5:30 every weekday morning and go work out has not changed that desire to stay up later and work and read.

But there is a downside:

Night owls tend to be less reliable, more emotionally unstable, and more likely to have problems with addictions and eating disorders, according to a 2008 study by psychologist Marina Giamnietro.

I'll have to get back to you on that one.





Morningness-Eveningness Test

We Are Not As Logical As We Think We Are

I have talked about this in various posts before, but it is one of those topics that I for one need to be reminded of on a regular basis. We do not think only logically. In fact, behavioral and cognitive scientists among others have discovered a whole slew of biases that regularly stump and stymie us. They are usually placed into four areas:

• Social biases,
• memory biases,
• decision-making biases, and
• possibility/belief biases.

Scribd. has posted a slide show that has information on these biases as taken from Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia:

A cognitive bias is the human tendency to make systematic errors in certain circumstances based on cognitive factors rather than evidence. Such biases can result from information-processing shortcuts called heuristics. They include errors in statistical judgment, social attribution, and memory. Cognitive biases are a common outcome of human thought, and often drastically skew the reliability of anecdotal and legal evidence.

I have had two interesting examples of this recently. One was a personal experience. I was having a conversation with several people about some of the Academy Award-winning movies and we got around to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I commented that I really liked the film and it coincided with my clinical experience at a state mental hospital in Pennsylvania in 1974. The problem is, the movie wasn't released until 15 months after I had finished my clinical training. What I think has happened is that I read the book at around the time I was doing my work at the state hospital and my mind put the book, the movie, and the experience together.

The other experience was in another conversation when an acquaintance was remembering a very specific event in his life. He says it happened when he was 13 and the KC Chiefs had just won the Super Bowl. There were a number of problems with his memory:

• The Chiefs were in the first Super Bowl in January, 1967. They lost (to the Packers).
• They were next in the Super Bowl in January, 1970. They won (against the Vikings.)
• My acquaintance was 13 in 1965.

He gave me a stunned look and just sat there.

These can be found in various forms among the 104 cognitive biases that regularly lead us astray. Does that mean we shouldn't trust our memory? Well, partly. But it does mean that we should be careful when we think we are so right that we can't in any way, shape, or form, be wrong. Chances are, I might very well be wrong and basing my life-or-death decisions on incorrect information.

Cognitive Biases - A Visual Study Guide

Overheard in Recovery: Catching the Brain

Someone recently found the following quote which they shared with a group of us:

Don't believe everything you think.

It is a catchy way of expressing the truth that in addiction your brain is hijacked by the addiction itself. Wiring is short-circuited; old connections are remade in potentially unhealthy ways; pleasure or power become over-riding principles; the foremost relationship in life becomes the relationship with the substance.

And your brain keeps telling you it's all right. The "mature" thinking brain agrees with the instinctual brain and we discover we are doing things we don't "want" to do if we could only get real about it. But the brain won't allow us to. We "believe" what we are "thinking."

Which may be why cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, and the behavioral re-framing of the 12 Steps work so well. They help us reconnect with the thinking process and more healthy instincts.So, in other words, if thinking the same things and acting the same ways keeps giving us the "wrong" results, don't believe your brain when it tells you that "next time" it won't happen.

Yes, it probably will.

Don't believe what you are thinking. Catch your brain. Challenge your thinking. Re-frame and begin the work of re-wiring.

Clocks or Clouds

Jonah Lehrer posted on his Frontal Cortex blog some info from an earlier article of his in Wired magazine.

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Interesting. Lehrer is talking about the desire to get to the root of all things human- the genetic sequencing that will give us all answer to all things. He is saying that this comes from the old "clock" idea. Somewhere at the heart of all things, the "clock" idea says, is a fine-tuned instrument that always runs like "clockwork." But in many ways we know that this is just not so.

It is also interesting when you apply the same thoughts to the ideas about God. There was a time when the theo-philosophers saw God as a great Clockmaker in the sky. he put it all together and then just let it go. That gave an orderliness to it- the universe went like clockwork. But as we have come to see a more chaotic world where things don't seem to always fall into place, perhaps it is time to see God in the universe of clouds.

God- unpredictable? You bet. Just take a look at the Bible. He always does what is least likely to be expected. Choosing a nobody people. Having his Son die. Resurrection. Nah- that's not a clockwork God. It is a God who cares.

Which may be at least something that we can- and should hang on to.

And I Quote.....

Time for a quote day. These four seem to fit the bill today. I'm not sure why, but they just look good on the unprinted page....

What better place to start than the always quotable Mark Twain.

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

For some reason the next quote from Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson seems to speak to the same situation. Only with a different angle:

"People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."

Entertainer and comedian Emo Phillips goes right to the source of all these problems identified by the quotes above:

"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."

And finally, a quote from an unnamed New York City detective who gives but one more example of how we are so willing to fool ourselves into doing, thinking, believing, and just plain being blind:

"I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her."