Music and the mind

In September, I started taking piano lessons.

I've played the piano off and on for years (more off than on, I'm afraid), but was entirely self-taught.  To say my formal music background is thin is an understatement; I had a lousy experience with elementary school band, said "to hell with it," and that was the end of my music education in public schools.  However, I was (and am) deeply in love with music, so I picked up the flute at age sixteen, and taught myself how to play it.  I took four years of lessons with a wonderful flutist and teacher named Margaret Vitus when I was in my twenties, but until last fall those accounted for the sum total of my instruction in music of any sort.

My experience as a student -- both with Margaret forty-odd years ago, and with J. P. (my piano teacher) now -- has been interesting from a number of standpoints.  In both cases I profited greatly by having someone tell me what bad habits are holding me back, and (more importantly) what I can do to remediate them.  But my spotty background has resulted in some unique challenges.  On the upside, I have an extraordinary ear and memory for melodies and rhythms, to the point that my wife calls it my "superpower."  I once heard a piece of Serbian music in a Balkan dance class when I was in my twenties, and heard it again thirty years later, and immediately knew it was the same tune even though I hadn't heard it or played it during that time.  

The downside, though, is that my lack of formal training means there are great gaping holes in my knowledge.  I'm currently working on a charming and whimsical piece by Claude Debussy, "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum," which like much of Debussy's music twists around our sense of keys and harmonies. 

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Every day, practice, practice, practice."

So J. P. -- for whom music is about as natural as breathing -- will look at some passage, and say something that sounds like, "Oh, that's a B-flat Minor Seven Demented chord."  Once I analyze what he told me using paper, pencil, and a slide rule, after three or four hours of study I can usually say, "Oh, okay, I guess I get it," but it definitely isn't anything close to intuitively obvious.  Like, ever.  So I'm still at the point of having to read each note slowly and painstakingly, and although I think the piece is lovely (well, when someone else plays it), I don't have any real comprehension of its structure.

If you're curious, here's how it's supposed to sound:

Fortunately, J. P. is an extraordinary teacher and gets my struggles, and is working to help me fill in the gaps in my knowledge.  It's slow going, but I guess that's no different from anyone learning a musical instrument.

The reason this comes up today is a study by a team from the University of L'Aquila and the University of Teramo that discovered an interesting correlation; people who have studied music seriously have better working memory -- the ability to retrieve and load information into their "attentional stream."  Stronger and faster working memory is positively associated with a greater capacity for divergent thinking, and thus the facilitation of creativity.

The authors write:

Musical practices have recently attracted the attention of research focusing on their creative properties and the creative potential of musicians.  Indeed, a typical cliché of musicians is that they are considered predominantly artistic individuals, meaning that they are creative and original.  Practicing music is certainly an intense and multisensory experience that requires the acquisition and maintenance of a range of cognitive and motor skills throughout a musician’s life.  Indeed, music practice increases a wide range of cognitive abilities, such as visuospatial reasoning, processing speed, and [working memory], from the early stages of life.  For this reason, musicians are considered an excellent human model for the study of behavioral, cognitive, and brain effects in the acquisition, practice, maintenance, and integration of sensory, cognitive, and motor skills...

[E]xperience in the music field enhances [divergent thinking] in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality.  Strengthening the associative modes of processing, which facilitate the retrieval of information from long-term memory, and improving the working memory competences, which facilitate the online recombination of information, might explain the relationship between musical practice and [divergent thinking].

All of which bolsters something I've been saying for years; we need to be actively supporting art and music in schools.  Sadly, school boards much more often have the opposite mentality -- the esteemed "STEM" subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) are emphasized and thus funded, and the arts (sometimes derisively called "extras") are on the chopping block when money gets tight.

Which, of course, is all the time.  But wouldn't it be nice if the educational powers-that-be actually read the research, and acknowledged that music and art are every bit as important as STEM?

In any case, it's good to know that my struggling to learn piano might provide some other benefits besides making Debussy turn over in his grave.  Hell, at age 63, I'm thrilled to have any boosts to my cognition I can get.  And even if I'll never be able to play "Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum" like Lang Lang does, maybe the skills I learn from my piano lessons will spill over into other creative realms.  

After all, as Maya Angelou said, "You can't use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have."

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Purging memory

Last night I had a good bit of trouble sleeping.

This isn't all that uncommon.  I've had issues with insomnia ever since I was a teenager.  Sometimes the issue is physical restlessness; sometimes it's anxiety, either over something real or something imagined.

Last night, it's because my brain was shrieking, over and over, "FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, FELIZ NAVIDAD, PRÓSPERO AÑO Y FELICIDAD."

At least its timing was reasonably good, being that yesterday was Christmas.  What I wonder is why it couldn't choose a song that I don't hate.  I'm not one of those Bah-Humbug curmudgeons who dislikes all Christmas music; some of it I actually rather enjoy.

I'm of the opinion, however, that listening to "Feliz Navidad" over and over would have been ruled out as a torture device by Tómas de Torquemada on the basis of being too cruel.

Leaving aside my brain's questionable choice of which song to holler at me, a more interesting question is how to get rid of it once it's stuck there.  I've found that for me, the best thing is to replace it with something less objectionable, which in this case would have been just about anything.  There are a couple of pieces of sedate classical music and a slow Irish waltz or two that I can usually use to shove away whatever gawdawful song is on repeat in my skull, if I concentrate on running them mentally in a deliberate fashion.  It eventually worked, but it did take much longer than usual.

José Feliciano is nothing if not persistent.

The reason all of this comes up -- besides my Christmas-music-based bout of insomnia -- is some research out of a team from the University of Colorado - Boulder and the University of Texas - Austin that appeared in Nature Communications this month.  Entitled, "Changes to Information in Working Memory Depend on Distinct Removal Operations," by Hyojeong Kim, Harry Smolker, Louisa Smith, Marie Banich, and Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, this research shows that the kind of deliberate pushing away I use to purge bad music from my brain works in a lot of other situations as well -- and may have applications in boosting creativity and in relieving anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and PTSD.

What they did was to put a thought into their test subjects' heads -- a photograph of a face, a bowl of fruit, or an outdoor scene -- instructed them to think about it for four seconds, and then to deliberately stop thinking about it, all the while watching what happens to their neural systems using an fMRI machine.  Ceasing to think about something without replacing it with something else is remarkably hard; it brings to mind my dad's recommended cure for hiccups, which is to run around the house three times without thinking of an elephant.

The three different sorts of things they asked the subjects to try -- to replace the thought with something else, to clear all thoughts completely, or to suppress that one thought without replacing it -- all resulted in different patterns on the fMRI.  "Replace" and "clear" both worked fairly rapidly, but both left a trace of the original thought pattern behind -- a "ghost image," as the researchers called it.  "Suppress" took longer, and subjects described it as being more difficult, but once accomplished, the original pattern had faded completely.

"We found that if you really want a new idea to come into your mind, you need to deliberately force yourself to stop thinking about the old one," said study co-author Marie Banich, in a press release from the University of Colorado.

Co-author Jarrod Lewis-Peacock concurred.  "Once we’re done using that information to answer an email or address some problem, we need to let it go so it doesn’t clog up our mental resources to do the next thing."

[Image © Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons; used with permission]

This explains another phenomenon I've noted; that when I'm trying to think of something I've forgotten, or come up with a solution to a problem that's stumping me, it often helps if I deliberately set it aside.  Just a couple of days ago, I was working on my fiction work-in-progress, and found I'd written myself into a corner.  I'd created a situation that called for some as-yet-undreamed-of plot twist, or else rewriting a big section of it to eliminate the necessity (something I didn't want to do).  After basically beating it with a stick for an hour or two, I gave up in frustration, and went to clean up my garage.

And while working on this chore, and not thinking about my writing at all, a clever solution to the problem simply popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere.

This is far from the first time this sort of thing has happened to me, and the Kim et al. paper at least gives a first-order approximation as to how this occurs.  Pushing aside what you're thinking about, either consciously and deliberately or else (as in my garage-cleaning example) by replacing it with something unrelated, clears the cognitive thought patterns and gives your brain room to innovate.

Now, where exactly the creative solution comes from is another matter entirely.  I've described before how often my ideas for writing seem to originate from outside my own head.  I don't subscribe to a belief in any sort of Jungian collective unconscious, but sometimes it sure feels that way.

In any case, all of this gives us a lens into how to make our own thought processes more efficient -- in cases of clogged creativity as well as situations where errant thoughts are themselves causing problems, as in PTSD.  What the Kim et al. research suggests is that the first thing to work on is consciously purging the brain in order to create space for more positive and beneficial thoughts.

It's not necessarily easy, of course.  For example, my brain has finally stopped screaming "Feliz Navidad" at me, but has replaced it with "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow," which is only fractionally less annoying.  My considered opinion is that whoever wrote "Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, head-first into a snowbank.

Okay, so maybe I am a Bah-Humbug curmudgeon.  God bless us every one anyhow, I suppose.

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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Order of operations

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea, first codified in the 1930s by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, that a speaker's language affects his/her cognition and brain wiring.  It's still a controversial idea now, eighty-some-odd years later.  Some linguists buy it, often citing examples such as the languages of a couple of Siberian nomad groups that have no words for left, right, in front of, and behind -- they relate everything to cardinal directions.  (To them, my coffee cup is currently east of me, not to my left.)  Investigations into these speakers have suggested that they have trouble even comprehending left and right -- when linguist and anthropologist David Harrison went there and tried to explain the concept, it elicited puzzled laughter.  "You people are arrogant," they told Harrison.  "You orient the entire world relative to the position of your own body?  So when you turn around the entire world changes shape?  Ridiculous."

Other linguists are not so sanguine.  There is evidence to suggest that any concept could potentially be expressed in any language by any speaker, and the oddness of left and right to the Siberians doesn't reflect their brain wiring any more than my inability to understand multivariate statistics reflects mine.  If I were sufficiently motivated and worked hard enough, I could learn whatever I wanted, and so can they; just because concepts are unfamiliar to a group doesn't mean their brains are wired differently.

The pro-Sapir-Whorf group got a bit of a boost this week from the publication in Scientific Reports of a study by Federica Amici, Alex Sánchez-Amaro, Carla Sebastián-Enesco, Trix Cacchione, Matthias Allritz, Juan Salazar-Bonet, and Federico Rossano, of the Max Planck Institute, the University of Florida, and the University of California-San Diego, called, "The Word Order of Languages Predicts Native Speakers' Working Memory."  The gist of the experiment is that the researchers looked at differences in working memory between native speakers of languages that tended to put modifiers after the verbs or nouns they modify (the languages they chose in this category were Thai, Ndonga, Khmer, and Italian) and ones where the modifiers usually come in front (Sidaama, Khoekhoe, Korean, and Japanese).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

They recruited between twenty and thirty volunteers for each language, and  gave them tests of their working memory, and found a clear correlation.  Speakers of languages where modifiers precede the noun or verb tended to have better working memory than those who speak languages where the modifiers follow the verb.  The guess they have is that for the first group, you have to keep track of the modifiers without knowing what noun or verb they'll apply to; for the second, you find out the noun or verb first, and simply modify it as you go along.

The authors write:

As predicted, LB [left-branching, languages where the modifiers come first] and RB [right-branching, languages where the modifiers come afterwards] speakers were significantly different in their ability to recall initial and final stimuli, showing a clear link between branching direction and working memory (WM). In WM tasks, LB participants were better than RB participants at recalling initial stimuli (and RB were better at recalling final stimuli)...  These results confirm our hypothesis and suggest that sensitivity to branching direction predicts the way in which humans remember and/or process sequences of stimuli, as real-time sentence comprehension relies more heavily on retaining initial information in LB languages but not in RB languages.

Interesting results, and certainly worthy of further investigation.  My hunch is that it won't turn out to be this simple; it's hard to imagine that something as simple as word order in sentences could have a profound effect on something as complex as memory.  But the correlation is there, and surely deserves an explanation.  Another one I'm curious about is whether speakers of tonal languages, such as Thai and Mandarin, are more likely to have perfect pitch -- something that (if true) would also bolster Sapir-Whorf.

In any case, the Amici et al. paper is pretty fascinating, and further elucidates the interplay between our behavior and our neural wiring.  I look forward to more research on this topic -- and more evidence, one way or the other, regarding how language shapes our brains.

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Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets.  But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape.  If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them.  Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts.  One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.  It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

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