That Ringing in My Ears

A little while ago I realized that my cellphone ring was taking over my brain. It may be that I'm just overly sensitive to music, but I've come to the conclusion that the whole melodies-as-ringtones thing wasn't the greatest idea in the world. At least not for me and my phone.

First, I found myself occasionally noticing musical notes that matched the beginning of one of the melodies my phone uses. I don't have perfect pitch, but I apparently have enough pitch memory to set off associations sometimes. This resulted in periodic, split-second jolts of "oh-my-phone-is-ringing-oh-no-it's-not!" at the beginning of random songs, other people's cell phone rings, etc.

After that, I started being more aware of the part of my brain that's always scanning for my specific ring tone. If I left the TV on and go into another room, something was still picking up faint individual notes from the commercials and promoting them to brief moments of attention, in case they turned out to be from my phone. (Interestingly, though, regular music I was deliberately playing didn't have the same effect, perhaps because I was already consciously following a known melody.) Sometimes I would carry my phone with me from room to room, even though I knew I could hear it fine if it actually rang in another room, just to shut up that part of my mind that's out scouting for it.

Anyway, this all finally got annoying enough that I went and changed everything on my phone to real, honest-to-goodness ringing sounds, like a proper phone. And I must say it's been kind of a relief. My phone doesn't ring often enough to re-train me very quickly, but it doesn't have to. I know it won't be playing a melody at me when it does ring, so the musical part of my brain can relax and go back to it's normal job. Ahhhhh....

Your Brain On Music

I just finished This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. If you're at all interested in music and/or brains it's a fascinating read. I found a lot of concepts that I was familiar with from my cog. psy. classes in college, but it was fun seeing them applied so directly to our perception and experience of music. The book actually made me want to just sit down and really listen to music more than anything else, rather than just having it playing in the background like I usually do. But it also made me want to get back on track again with things like playing, composing, and developing my ear.

Particularly interesting to me was the information about perfect pitch. A number of studies have shown evidence that many people, even non-musicians, are able to store absolute pitch information in memory. E.g. they could be trained to recognize or sing back an assigned note that they learned. In other cases, when asked to sing a favorite popular song, they would do so in the right key without any prompting (or even awareness that they were doing so). My guess is that if we taught babies to recognize notes the way we teach them to recognize colors, a great many more people would have perfect pitch. It seems to be built into the brain, but most people just don't know how to use it or develop it. Granted, the people who seem to have it "automatically" make it seem inaccessible to the rest of us, but I think that's just a natural misinterpretation of ordinary person-to-person variability.

Another interesting concept regards what it takes to become an "expert" level musician. It seems that amount of practice time really is the biggest factor in becoming really good at something, even more so than perceived talent. Ten thousand hours is the usual amount of time you have to put in to really reach that top tier of world-class experts. And that same number seems to apply not only to music but to everything else that has been studied in this context: playing chess, figure skating, fiction writing, and more. Unfortunately, 10,000 hours is about 3 hours a day for 10 years. Sigh. But I guess that's why we're not all the best musicians in the world.

I was also amused at how well Levitin "predicted" the existence of Last.fm... a few years after its creation. Personalized radio stations mixing stuff you like with new recommendations to try? Yep, got that. :-)

For Your Brain

Keep Your Brain Alive, by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin, is a fun little book of easy things to do to keep your brain happy and healthy. I like how it takes the view (supported by scientific-looking footnotes) that brain cells are not irretrievably lost as you age. Rather, you can keep your brain actively growing throughout life, if you give it the right kind of stuff to work with.

"Neurobic" exercises aren't about doing mental puzzles, like Sudoku or whatever, though those are good, too. They focus more on the act of learning, since that's what gets neurons to forge more connections and stay healthier. But since we don't all have the time to go out and be a full-time student, these exercises break learning down into its most basic elements: associations. You can play around with lots of associations in your daily life with very little time commitment, and it'll help keep your brain energized and happy.

To make new associations, try finding things that use different parts of your brain and connecting them. Writing or brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand is a good one. (My right hand actually twitches, trying to get in on the action, when I write with my left, which shows how strong an association I'm working against.) Mixing and matching senses is another handy way to find neurobic things to do. If you try showering with your eyes closed, you'll start adding new little wires in your brain connecting your sense of touch to the process of finding the shampoo, which had previously just been a visual task. If you always start your day with the smell of coffee, spend a week with something else to get you going, preferably something with an equally strong smell or taste.

Another key concept is to find mindless routines and change them up so they engage your attention again. For example, after a few weeks at a new job, you probably stop noticing your commute. So experiment with different routes, or different modes of transportation for a while. If you buy the same things from the supermarket every week, go to a farmer's market instead, and decide on-the-fly what to get. Any thing you can do to turn something "mindless" into something "mindful" helps.

I want to give props to the illustrator, David Suter, here, too. The book is full of his great little drawings that play with visual similarities and connections in a lot of really interesting ways. The perfect style for the subject matter.

On Dizziness

It's been quite a while since I've gotten really, properly dizzy. Too much waltzing really makes you less susceptible to it. FNW last night was fun, though. First of all, Richard played a hyperspeed waltz that was actually hyperspeed, rather than the merely fast stuff that usually goes under that heading. Dancing with Annaka, it takes a lot to make it feel like we're really pushing our speed, but this one was fun. Something like 240 bpm? I can't remember exactly. It was a legitimate challenge, though, which was fun (but still doable). And it gave me a little bit of a dizzy wobble (that's fun to say) coming out of it, but not too much.

I got my real dizziness on a polka, though (and again, with the indefatigable Annaka). It was a fastish polka, and somewhere midway through it, I guess I just started feeling like pivots were more fun or easier than actual polka steps. So we did nearly the last half of the song entirely in pivots, which probably got us two or three time around the room. Steering actually worked reasonably well. I could distinguish different colored blurs in my field of vision, representing open floor, other dancers, and walls, and we usually seemed to have enough of the first to be able to aim for it and avoid the second and third. And taking that very macro sort of view is probably what kept me from getting too dizzy while we were actually dancing. (If I hadn't had to steer, of course, there would have been no problem.) It was after we stopped that things got really crazy.

Somewhere in one of my cognitive psych classes, I learned about what happens if you get glasses or contact lenses that flip your field of vision upside down. If you wear them long enough (I forget how long) your brain actually flips the image back for you, so it can make better sense of what it's seeing. The problem then is when you take the lenses off, but your brain is still doing the flippy thing. Then you're seeing things upside down all by yourself, which, I have to imagine, could be a bit creepy. Well, when you spend a full minute or so just pivoting and then stop, you get a similar effect. I think my brain was automatically counter-spinning what I was seeing to some extent, to try to get the visual signals into a form it could parse. So when we stopped, it was still trying to compensate, which makes the room appear to spin even while your body is holding still, which creates the cognitive dissonance that makes you dizzy. Wheeee!

And from there, of course, there's not much to do except enjoy it. :-)

Be Ridiculous

How to Exercise an Open Mind: "Simply put, all one needs to grow his or her brain is to do unique, random, different, and ridiculous things as often as possible."

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Calming the Talker

Most people are probably familiar with the problem of trying to fall asleep when your mind just won't shut up. Sometimes you're just reciting worries in your head, or sometimes there's a part of you that just seems to want to hear itself talk, tired though you may be. Another manifestation I get a lot is a continuous loop of dance music, with pieces of choreographies coalescing and dissolving along with it. In fact, I can already see the one that's headed for me tonight. I've had Manhattan Transfer singing "Trickle Trickle" in my head ever since this afternoon, and there are just too many fun swing things you can do to the "— Trickle Trickle, — Splash Splash" part of the chorus. This just has long night written all over it.

Luckily, in class tonight we learned a technique for dealing with this kind of thing. It's called articulatory suppression, or as Dr. LaBerge puts it: "calming the talker." The first thing you do is to pick any random word, let's say "green." Now start repeating it over and over, but vary the rhythm: "green... green... green green greeeeeeeen... green......... green" etc. The variation is important because what you're doing is overriding the talking part of your brain with something else, but if it gets too monotonous then you can just start talking (thinking) over it. So it needs to keep changing, while still being pretty simple, which is why there's just one word. As you may imagine, this gets pretty dull after a few minutes, but that's exactly what we want. Because if you're laying in bed in the dark with your eyes closed, and you're tired, and you're getting bored, you'll probably drop off pretty quick.

I expect I'll be test driving this tonight, so we'll see how it goes.

Nighttime Daydreaming

I had another one of those nights last night where I had too much music on the brain to go to sleep. I recently started listening to a band called Fountains of Wayne, and these guys are really strong in the melody department. Real earworm material. I think one of their most popular songs is "Stacy's Mom," which is a little weird in that it's about a kid who's in love with his girlfriend's mom. But it's a really fun song, and just sticks in the brain like glue. Another one that I've completely fallen in love with is "Troubled Times." On the sillier side of things, they've got "I Want an Alien for Christmas."

So anyway, there I am: in bed, tired, trying to go to sleep. But my inner musician is just going crazy with these songs. Not only am I singing them, but I'm coming up with awesome guitar arrangements and killer solos and everything. It's amazing how good of a guitar player I am in my head, considering how little I play it in real life. I should really get the guitar out more and figure out how to do the whole singing and playing at once thing. I'm sort of scared to try, though. There's no way I could recreate the stuff from my imagination, and I don't have enough guitar skills to even console myself with. Oh well.

Dancing tonight. Yay! Unfortunately, some silly person scheduled the Swing Kids dance against the Friday Night Waltz AGAIN. Hmph. But better too many dances than too few.

Brain Capos

I was glancing through my journal from camp a year ago when I found something I came up with then that amused me. I had been explaining to my theory class some stuff about what theory actually is and I told them that if you learn a pattern like C - F - G - C, then you learn only one thing. But if you learn a pattern like I - IV - V - I, then you really learn 12 things, because now you can use that pattern in any key, not just C. So it's sort of like a capo for the brain. Hee hee. I just like the image of someone going "Uh oh! I need to play in C# -- better get out the capo!" and clamping some weird contraption onto their head instead of onto their guitar. I should have remembered that for this year's class.

I finally got around to downloading Faith Hill's song "Cry" last night. My first encounter with it was last week sometime, in an over-full car of people singing along with the radio. A happy sort of memory for a not-so-happy sort of song. But it's a good song. I think I identify with a lot, though not all, of it. More than I'm proud of, anyway.

But it's a good cross-step waltz, which is more to the point of what I had been meaning to write. I was trying to go to sleep last night and it just wouldn't leave me alone. It was just crying out for a choreography, and I finally had to get up and start writing down ideas just to get them out of my head. Then I spent another half hour or so, well after I should have been asleep, turning the light back on every few minutes to write something else down. I'm not sure that all the ideas are very good, though, and most of them wouldn't be very useful outside of a choreography (i.e. they'd be hard or impossible to lead and follow). But some could be interesting. Unfortunately, when I listened to the song again this morning, I found that I had been choreographing much more to my own interpretation of the music in my head than to the actual recording. Sigh.

I think I learned a bit about why my brain keeps me awake so often, though. How often does it get to just sit quietly and apply imagination to something with no distractions? Even as a relatively introverted sort of person, I don't just sit and think very much. I read, or I write, or I get distracted with other things. Journaling is often the closest I get, and even that has the distraction of trying to make coherent sentences and write them down. And even if I had sat down and deliberately tried to spend some time choreographing something last night before bed there's a good chance I would have just frozen, going "uh oh... now I'm supposed to be coming up with ideas." But in bed there's no distractions and no pressure so my brain goes out and has a field day. Even sometimes when I'm completely worn out and tired, I'll try to go to sleep and that one little bit will wake up and start ticking again. Very strange.

Ooh golly, my brain is fried right now. The swing workshop was good, but I think it was a bit much for me. It felt like we didn't learn a whole lot of actual stuff, but what we did was very difficult because we were trying to do it with this whole counter-balancing thing. So it was confusing and four hours of it after being tired from all the dancing last night was a bit much. But maybe it will all sort of settle down in my brain if I go take a nap now.