Mind and music :)

Its late in the night. I am waiting for my bus at the bus stop, tired, completely jaded, may be even a bit frustrated.....I reach my bag for the music player. The music begins to flow, into my ears, into my nerves, into my soul.....the same three songs spin again and again, as they have many a time before, soothing my soul, comforting my nerves. As the music plays on, i feel the warmth and brightness of sun, the flakes of snow melting on my skin, the pampering of the breeze.....in my thoughts, i walk with familiar faces in familiar places. i smile, i cry.....i think the thoughts. i walk with a spring in my step, almost dancing. i am in a different place, i am in different places.....these virtual trips to wherever are sponsored courtesy these few songs.....yet again, i travel through time and space: the music, my wings.....

Snap! the music player is off-i am "myself" again, back in the real world.....much soothed and ready to go!
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Music does it, to me, to everyone. Very true to my name, eh ;). It has got the power to touch the innermost core of human mind. Remember this story, about music? There are many more such stories. Dr. Oliver Sacks has narrated many more stories Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

I am really looking forward to reading this one. Dr. Sacks' writings are about human mind and hope, and this one blends a favorite along, music. Check out the following video: Dr. Sacks talks about Music and Parkinsonism:



and this one: "A bolt from the blue", a story about his friend, who developed a passion for music after being struck by lightening!




There are more videos on Musicophilia.com.

And i know, i love me some floating on the cloud of music :).

Away from oneself :)

Oh! This is not some sad poetic reference for me being away from the diary for quite some time :). And you'd rather not get me started on that! There's already plenty of "i am lazy"' "i post only when i really feel like" stuff in the earlier posts ;). This one is about taking a real trip out of your own self and floating free :-D. Brought to my inbox courtesy dear buddy MD.

Few days back MD mailed to me about a cpl. of articles published in Science, about out of body experiences. We have all heard stories of people claiming that they had an out of body experience. Till recently such experiences were thought be either figments of someone's imagination or a result of treating yourself with hallucinogenic chemicals! However, things have been changing. Rick Strassmann proposes that in natural states, body's own hallucinogens such as DMT can trick one into an out of the body experience. And finally, there are these papers now, which describe how, without even taking any help from endogenous or exogenous hallucinogens, you can trick your mind/brain axis into having an out of the body experience! Finally, a more scientific and humane look! The authors basically have aimed at "disrupting the spatial unity between self and body" to quote them.

Read more about it here.

The experiments involved use of head-mounted video displays and manipulated the sense of touch to create such an experience. The subjects were made to see their own backs using the video displays and by manipulating the touch, they were made to feel out of the body!

For one of the studies, a team led by Bigna Lenggenhager and Olaf Blanke, both of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, asked people to stand in front of a camera while wearing video-display goggles. In one experiment, subjects saw the camera's view of their own back, computer-enhanced to create a three-dimensional "virtual own body." When the subjects' backs were stroked with a highlighter pen at the same time they saw their virtual back being stroked, they reported that the sensation seemed to be caused by the highlighter on their virtual back, making them feel as if the virtual body was in fact their own body.

Adopting a similar strategy to attempt to induce out-of-body experiences, Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, asked men and women to sit in a chair and don a video headset connected to two cameras that provided a stereoscopic view of their backs. As a subject viewed his or her own back from behind, Ehrsson used two plastic rods to simultaneously stroke the subject's chest and a location behind the subject's back. Although people felt the rubbing on their chest, in the headset they could only see Ehrsson's arm moving behind their back, reinforcing the sense that they were sitting at a location behind their actual body. The experience often elicited surprised giggles, says Ehrsson, who has tried it out himself. "You really feel that you are sitting in a different place in the room and you're looking at this thing in front of you that looks like yourself and you know it's yourself but it doesn't feel like yourself," he says. "It's almost like you're looking at a dummy." Nearly all subjects reported similar impressions on a questionnaire.

Brilliant, really! These studies remind me of the famous experiments by V. S. Ramachandran, who used mirror-image experiments with body-image, when he tricked the mind of the patients to cure phantom limb pain and tried the same for mirror agnosia and made the patients feel that the object they were asked to grab was within the mirror!

He remembered music and love.....

This is the story of man who, while forgetting most of the things due to his amnesia, remembered two things: Music and Love.....A WNYC mp3 on the life story of Mr. Clive Wearing, narrated by Debrah Wearing (his wife) and Dr. Oilver Sacks.



The whole story is amazing.....I have a feeling that this is gonna' be a part of his forthcoming book "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain".

Tickling: self vs. non-self :)

Jay Leno might think that its really ridiculous for a John Hopkins team to study why one can not tickle oneself, while there are bigger health reltaed issues facing man-kind. But this one got me thinking.....after all, its tactile impulse that the neurons receive. How does the brain figure out that it is self tickling and thus there is no need to jump etc ;). Our brain is smart, wired so, that we don't jump each time there is a self tactile pressure. When one tries to self tickle, the brain knows where and how the tactile impulse is moving, because its your own fingers generating that impulse. But for non-self tickling, its always a suspense! The brain can not track whats going to happen next, an alarm is set off and there you are, tickle tickle, giggle giggle :).

Apparently its our cerebellum that can distinguisgh between expected (self) and un-expected sensations (Original research article). Upon self-tickling, the cerebellum can signal somatosensory cortex of the brain on what sensation to expect, and this dampens the tickling sensation. Also, to quote from Robert Provine's article:

Tickle, an ancient laughter stimulus, is a means of communication between preverbal infants and mothers, and between friends, family, and lovers. Because you cannot tickle yourself, tickle involves a neurological self/nonself discrimination, providing the most primitive social scenario.

Its interesting how our brain is wired to distinguish between self and non-self: and isn't that the first line of defense.

Reign over me.....

This Friday i went for a movie-my first movie in a theater this year, and the first one after MD left for Europe.....We always wanted to see a movie in the CREST theater, which usually screen good indie movies and has a nice decor.....but somehow couldn't make it! But finally, i got to see a movie in this glittering theater.....

An old photo of CREST theater

By now, you all must be knowing what this movie "Reign over me" is all about. About someone having gone through a loss, leading to a total disconnect from the world around. About tragedy invoking denial.....and denial it is.....a strong one at that. Charlie Fineman shuts all the doors on any thoughts from his past, after a tragedy (or rather the tragedy).....He's living in a cocoon, if living is a suitable word here. With the ear-phones on perpetually, he moves about the streets of NewYork City on his trolley scooter, plays video games like there's no tomorrow, does few things obsessively and tries to escape by watching Mel Brooks flicks. All in a hope, that he can escape-a hope that makes him shun anyone who has anything to do with his past. His flight response, his denial is so over-powering that he refuses to recognize any kind of loss, be it his own, or a friend's. Yes, after years of living in a cocoon, he does find someone he opens upto-solely because the person doesn't have much clue about his past.....

There's no Adam Sandler in this movie-i only saw Charlie.....i am not willing to believe that Charlie is not real. He's very much there, there are many Charlies in this world..... His eyes don't meet yours, he mumbles a lot, he's as blank as empty space.....and the fact that i was watching this movie with someone who lost a dear one in the same tragedy in real life, and the familiar looking places from New York City, which very often made the backdrop, didn't make it any easier......i am notorious for shedding tears while watching movie-i even cry during penguin flicks-but this was something different.....something hit me real hard-its hard to explain what it could be.....especially in a particular incident when Charlie's friend suffers a loss, and all Charlie says is , "lets get breakfast", followed by some more gibbrish.....how hollow and drained can anyone get in pain..... but i have to remind myself that this is just a movie.....

Charlie, the near reality and the rest of the movie.....and i guess i should talk more about the latter. Don Cheadle, who plays Charlie's friend, and a dentist, is good and Liv Tyler (the shrink) quite OK. But the movie does have a perpetual irritant.....the character of the dentist's patient-she's really irritating.....But the movie owes a lot to Charlie. They say its Adam Sandler-the same guy who does movies like "Click", i say the movie has only Charlie, a real, believable person.....and any comments on him being a cross of Bob Dylan (for looks) and Rain man (for personality) are not well taken! Mike Binder, the director does a fair job in building Charlie' character, though the movie could have done away with some irritants.....You can read his interview here.

Go, meet Charlie-this is one more story to tell us about the tricks mind plays on us.

Reading Sybil.....

I finished reading "Sybil"-a book by Flora Rheta Schreiber, last week. This book had been on to-read list for years.....but having read the reviews, i could never summon enough courage to read it. I finally did, early this year.....

The book is about a girl Sybil Isabel Dorsett, who suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder-based on the life of a real person-Shirley Ardell Mason. Multiple Personality Disorder is a condition where you have a conscious waking self and the other alternate selves who rise from the subconscious/unconscious mind.....and the waking self has no clue of their existence.

Sybil, who first dissociated into her waking self and an alternate self at a young age of 2-3 years, had no less than 16 selves of different ages who inhabited her being.....two of them being males! This is touted to be the most complex of such cases. Sybil found herself united into one whole being in her 40s, after she went through a whole series of psychoanalyses-some based in hypnosis and sodium pentothal (the truth injection).....Her dissociations apparently originated as a defense to protect herself from the childhood abuse.....and that, to me, was the toughest part of the book.....the other possible cause being the conflicting religious values she faced.

In the book you meet Sybil and 16 selves, her parents, her room-mate Teddy Reeves, her psychiatrist Dr. Cornelia Wibur and even the author of the book. Her 16 beings are different from each other.....the volatile Peggy(s), the French sophisticate Vicky, the baby like Ruthie, Vanessa, Marcia, Helen, Marjorie, Nancy, Mary, the guys Mike and SID (after Sybil's initials), the un-named blonde and Sybil, as her waking self. Each with different desires and skills, each a fragment of what were to be the whole Sybil. Sybil was a really good artist.....some of her sketches are provided in the book-different selves preferred different style of painting.....some of her works can be viewed in this link.

There has been some controversy on whether Sybil was a multiple personality or an extreme case of hysteria. It is said that Dr. Cornelia Wilbur delibrately induced personalities in her patient during hypnosis.....and that it had something to do with the book deal. More details on this controversy can be read here. Shirley A. Mason, Cornelia Wilbur and Flora Rheta Schreiber are no more in this world to share the truth.....Apparently, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur's archives and notes were to be opened in 2005. May be that would bring some facts to light.

The book scores, whether as a work of pure fact or part fact-part fiction, am not sure. If its fact, then its one of the most complicated tales of human psychology and if fiction, then its imaginative! The book is reptitive at times, but only to underscore Sybil's trials and tribulations. The description of her selves is rather vivid and you connect and empathise with each of them.....and you are sure to miss them after the book is over. The pages dedicated to childhood abuse are graphic.....very painful, and i admit, i skipped through those partly.....it was too difficult to take.

Sybil gleefully enjoys her days being all for herself, after all her selves have been united.....on how she can do simple things all by herself, without another person from within taking over her.....

And in this respect, it gives a message similar to many of Oliver Sacks' works- We have a lot in life to be thankful for.....simple things that we don't even think about.....Like being one with ourselves.....