Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
The brain sounds kinda nice.
Oliver Sacks explores how the power of music can make the brain come alive. You need to watch this soon. It will only be available to watch for one week, from July 1-7, 2009, due to right restrictions.
I’ve been extremely light on the blogging front lately, but I have big plans to breathe new life into this site. I’ll be shifting gears as I reexamine my time, attention, and creative work. In the mean time, here’s a few links I’ve been meaning to share.
Mind Hacks pointed me to an interesting study by science journal PLoS One on the cognitive neuroscience of Jazz.
Here’s some recent podcasts from around the web that I’ve been inspired by musically. Read on…
MindHacks pointed me to the just launched Musicophilia, the site and book by Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who has become quite popular publishing books about his patients and who also contributes to the advancement of music as a powerful tool for healing and awakening.
This is an amazing story.
First the Dilbert creator loses his voice due to a rare condition known as spasmodic dysphonia. Now he reveals in an amazingly affecting personal blog post how he learned to speak again. In Bodyhack.
Full link: Scott Adams ‘Hacks’ His Brain
Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable? When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or caffeine.
read more | digg story
I’ve espoused the virtues of accelerated learning techniques and I’m on record as saying that every other absolute pitch ear training course out there could be drastically improved if they only “got it.”
And while I don’t like to go “off topic” in my blog too much, I felt I had to, given the significance this [...]
Your most precious resource is your mind. Your ability to think, plan, decide, and take action is the most powerful force for good in your life. Make a commitment to yourself to take complete responsibility for your mind. Exercise MIND CONTROL.
Image streaming is the exact technique used by geniuses such as Einstein, Edison and Tesla. Not only will image streaming enhance your creativity, it will actually increase your IQ!
Image streaming is your doorway to the subconscious mind. This stream-of-consciousness visualization technique delivers spontaneously-generated thoughts directly from the subconscious mind as an answer or solution to [...]
A neuroscientist explains why women want rock stars to father their children, and how melodies can work like Prozac.
This looks like a good book: This Is Your Brain On Music. I always get nervous, though, when scientists try to reduce everything to “The Brain.” There’s obviously a lot more going on in the universe than [...]
From Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain
Hearing is the first sense we develop in the womb. The regions of the brain that deal with hearing are the first to finish the developmental process called myelination, in which the connecting “wires” of neurons are finished off with fatty sheaths that insulate the neurons, [...]
From Mind Hacks:
All abilities are skills; practice something and your brain will devote more resources to it.
Brain scanning of musicians has shown that they have larger cortical representations of the body parts they use to play their instruments in their sensory areas — more neurons devoted to finger movements among guitarists, more neurons devoted to [...]
Milton Erickson’s power of influence was legendary. He was considered the greatest innovator of hypnosis and became famous for his unique hypnotic methods. He could put people into a hypnotic trance just by shaking hands.
What Erickson understood was that while speaking to a client at a conscious level, they were also listening at an unconscious [...]
Think of your brain wave in an altered state of consciousness as a piece of chewing gum stretched out. It gets thin and easily breaks apart if hit with new programming. When your brain reorganizes itself, it integrates the new information. In other words, it accepts the new idea. The more it is exposed to [...]
From Noise can make you smarter:
Wired Magazine interviews Bart Kosko, author of Noise, a book that argues that adding noise to our signals can actually make them clearer.
Can background music make you smarter?
The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up [...]
The mind is like a muscle: it swells with exercise. Gould’s and Kozorovitskiy’s work reminds us not only how easy it is to hurt a brain, but how little it takes for that brain to heal. Give a primate just a few extra playthings, and its neurons are capable of escaping the downward cycle of [...]
Participants in the study were presented with 50 to 150 random elements on a monitor. Ten of the 12 participants improved their ability accurately to guess the number of elements immediately following TMS treatment to the left anterior temporal lobe, a skill that receded an hour later, the newspaper said.
I’ve got to try this! I’ve [...]
…is for tomorrow’s ears.
As you learn new skills or behaviors, neurons connect into new groups of cognitrons, where the connecting synapses are reinforced with repeated use. In other words, these new ideas need to “shake hands” a number of times before they can become good friends. So practice, practice, and practice some more!
I'm a songwriter and recording artist who sings, plays keyboards, and explores the vast world of sound hoping to find some magical moments along the way. I'm also a Mac geek.
If Heroes needed a new superhero, it would be Montage Man. He can speed things up and add a catchy tune. 18 hrs ago
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