Some of the best records are the ones that really affect you the most - they're pure emotion and energy, and it's like you're in that person's brain. It's pretty cool.
My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
Once you're away from music, I realize that's as intrinsic to who I am as anything else. That's the part that takes me out of my brain.
I'd have to think about it, but I was listening to this Johnny Cash song today that Tom Waits wrote for him - I think that's the story. For some reason it's a thing that sticks in my brain. He's describing this scene where he sees all these almost biblical images happening kind of in this burrow where this biblical train runs through this yard.
That's just the way people's brains work. If you want to talk about something, you have to reduce it to a form that can be understood. That's one of the reasons I'm not good about boiling down music.
On a musical level, I do find it rewarding. It's not like I want to blow my brains out while I'm playing these songs from so long ago. I am still surprised by the way the songs are constructed - note choices, the way the arrangements are made, the way these songs are assembled. I'm still amazed at times.
Everybody dreams, but memory for dreams is famously elusive. Even Sigmund Freud, without the benefit of modern technology's electroencephalogram, or EEG, did not know that adult humans dream 90 minutes per night, and that newborns spend eight hours per day dreaming (out of their 16 hours of sleep). REM sleep helps grow the brain!
Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.
It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.
Our brains do not have to be fixed, they can be plastic.
After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part.
We don't have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains.
Meditators are shown to have thickening in parts of the brain structure that deal with attention, memory and sensory functions. This was found to be more noticeable in older, more practiced meditators than in younger adults which is interesting because this structure usually tends to get thinner as we age.
Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up.
When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.
If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle.
Two brains are better than one. You've twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge.
If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into.
Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.
I think my own bias is that there may be something wrong with the timing and the connectivity between regions rather than pointing to one particular spot in the brain.
There is no question there are differences between male and female brains. They are called sexual dimorphisms and you can point to different anatomical structures.
There are clear differences between and some- and there may be protective factors in a female brain.
The only thing going on is the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.
The book, I think, like the map before it, like the clock, created or help create a revolution in the human mind in the way our habits of mind and ultimately the way we use our brains.
The brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you're exercising, it's pulling - it's weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you're not exercising so much.
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