Music- is there anything it can't do...?

 

     Music has the ability to calm our brains, our hearts, our nerves.  We tend to like music that reminds us of something we've heard before, but not too much.  We like music that strikes the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity, simplicity and complexity, and between predictability and surprise.  The job of the composer, and of the musicians who interpret the composition, is to hit these in just the right balance.  The trick of it is that the sweet spot is not the same for all of us, and often not even the same from day-to-day.  Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it.  If our defenses are up—as they can be in clinical, therapeutic environments—it may simply not work.  Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of the deepest memories and deepest feelings of our lives, and in the progress, help us through almost anything.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

the complex interplay.................

 

The brain is the most complex biological assembly we know of.  Its 80 billion neurons—nerve cells—communicate with each other to make trillions of connections, more that the number of particles in the known universe.  These connections give rise to the sum of our experiences:  all of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs; our emotions, changing moods, memory, even our heart rate and the contents of our dreams.  How does this funny-looking, folded-in-on-itself, three-pound tangle of wires and blood vessels do all this, as well as orchestrate the complex interplay between emotion, memory, sound and healing that comes from music?  And how does it allow us to remember music that we like, make playlists, and party likes it 1999?

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

the effects of the effects.....................

 

     In 1963, the UC Santa Barbara ecologist and economist Garrett Hardin proposed his First Law of Ecology: "You can never merely do one thing."  We operate in a world of multiple, overlapping connections, like a web, with many significant, yet obscure and unpredictable, relationships.  He developed second-order thinking into a tool, showing that if you don't consider "the effects of the effects," you can't really claim to be doing any thinking at all.

-Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models

Just back............................

 

..............from spending a week in South Carolina with friends of 55 years.  Highly recommended.

connections.......................

 

We are social beings, designed to live, work, and thrive within a community.  Our greatest joys, deepest sorrows, and most significant achievements gain meaning through our connections with others.

     As you contemplate your own path, remember this: You were made for connection.  You were made to be part of a team—whether it's a family by blood, a family by choice, or both.  You were made to support and be supported, to love and be loved, to challenge and be challenged. 

      You were made to build a team that lifts you up, celebrates your victories, and helps you become the best version of yourself.  A team that keeps you grounded and helps you navigate life's complexities.

     You were made to be part of something bigger than yourself—a family, a community, a legacy that extends beyond your individual achievements.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For

Now that you mention it.....................

 

....the old AOL dial-up connection made an awful noise:

thanks Kurt

Connections...................

 

To love something, first you have to connect with it.
Give it your full attention.
Deliberately appreciate it.
Try this with places, art, and sounds.
Try this with activities and ideas.
Try this with yourself.

-Derek Sivers, How To Live: 27 conflicting answers with one weird conclusion

compulsive................

 

First Facebook, then the iPhone compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

     The result is a society left reeling by unintended consequences.  We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidentally degrading our humanity.

-Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Eric Baker...................

...............offers four paths to peak happiness:

 But in a field of study like psychology where things are often blurry, it seems fair to say there is one necessary condition for extreme happiness…

Connecting with people you love.

Dots...........................

 

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

-Steve Jobs, as quoted here

connections................

      By being truly alone I had seen how deeply reliant I am on human ties and in ways that were unexpected.  It was not simply a matter of having company to pass the time, or backup in case of emergency.  During the expedition, I found that the absence of others had shaped my behaviour, my thoughts, my actions, my reasoning.  I had seen for myself that it is human relationships that bind us to places, time, and purpose, human relationships that make us who we are as individuals and that our contentment, and our happiness, depend on those precious human connections.

-Felicity Aston, Alone In Antarctica

a loose connection...............

 They were convinced that what stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life—or our failing to have a philosophy at all.  It is true that our government and our society determine, to a considerable extent, our external circumstances, but the Stoics understood that there is at best a loose connection between our external circumstances and how happy we are.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

The technical term is "hallucinations"......

 I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.

Here’s how I got there: For a while I’ve been intensely exploring generative AI systems, creating both text and visual images almost daily, and I am increasingly struck by their similarity to dreams. The AIs seem to produce dream images and dream stories and dream answers. The technical term is “hallucinations” but I think they are close to dreams. I’ve come to suspect that this similarity between dreams and generative AI is not superficial, poetic, or coincidental. My unexpected hunch is that we’ll discover that the mechanism that generates dreams in our own heads will be the same (or very similar) to the ones that current neural net AI’s use to generate text and images.

-Kevin Kelly, from this post

Until one day.........................

      We might also eat our meals mindfully, slowly savoring each bite with appreciation.  Take a daily walk in nature, looking at everything entering our field of vision with gratitude and connection.  Take a moment to marvel at the feeling of our heartbeat and the movement of blood through our veins before sleep.

      The purpose of such exercises is not necessarily in the doing, just as the goal of meditation isn't in the meditating.  The purpose is to evolve the way we see the world when we're not engaged in these acts.  We are building the musculature of our psyche to more acutely tune it.  This is no much of what the work is about.

      Awareness needs constant refreshing.  If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again.

      Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.

-Rick Rubin,  The Creative Act:  A Way of Being

Connections.......................

 People who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives.

The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.

-as culled from here

the connection....................

 When people lose the connection between their actions and their consequences, they lose their hold on reality, and the further this goes the more it looks like madness.

-Robert Greene

Accelerated doesn't necessarily..................

 ..........................mean improved:

Adding more people to the internet has accelerated science, politics and every element of culture. The echos happen faster, the learning is exponential, and connected communities heat up and morph ever faster.

-Seth Godin, from here

We ignore our connection................

 ....................................to our own detriment.

About that advice..............

 So often productivity advice is limiting. Narrowing. Just pushing us harder to be more like a machine. But we need to expand our minds. And to remember that we’re not computers. (The closest we get to being a machine is that taking a nap often resolves mental issues the way rebooting your laptop resolves computer issues.)  Stop trying to be a machine and leverage your humanity to accomplish more. You may never be as efficient as Robocop or the Terminator but those two can’t solve a captcha and you can.   When we broaden our minds and connect with others it’s not just productivity that improves.   Life does.

-Eric Barker, from this post

The Sphinx and her riddle.............

     This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.  The Sphinx must solve her own riddle.  If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained by individual experience.  There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.  As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.  Of the universal mind each individual is one more incarnation.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay History