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 :).

Dreams and the duality of life.....

A cpl. of days back, Ms. Moon and i were chatting online and she happened to share a cpl. of her poems with me.....lovely writings! They really did strike a chord, because in many ways, they reflect my own thoughts too :). One of them talked about dreams.....dreaming with your eyes wide open.....and how they are equally wonderful, as the ones we see while sleeping.....may be even better! Atleast they don't leave us halfway through.....Dreaming at my own will, that sounds fantastic, even reassuring.....as i said, i am a dreamer :).

Its raining outside right now. Raining after a long long time.....The weather has changed so much since the bright and crisp morning.....and so have my feelings.....Swinging between hope and thoughtlessness, i have suddenly found my ground.....and i know, its okay to dream.....as i said, i am very much a dreamer.....i dream about reality.....

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That is an oxymoron.....Well, life presents you with lots of duality.....we just need to let go and accept this duality :).

Few days back, i was waiting at the bus-stop.....completely tired, and completely hopeless.....figuratively and literally.....i tried to cheer myself up by engaging in small talk with a cpl. of students who enquired about a bus schedule. They had been waiting for a long time. Finally their bus arrived.....they left, with a smile. Smiles are infectious, i smiled too :). And then, i noticed something.....A poor, homeless man was picking through the trash. That is an everyday thing, they sometimes pick out plastic bottles, cans etc, i thought. But this was different.....he picked out two huge plastic cups, almost filled and drank up the soda greedily.....as a tear rolled down my cheek, the homeless guy burst into a nervous laughter.....Was he happy? I don't know, i won't know.....but i learnt that life is all about living on.....i tucked my small worries and tensions into a tiny pocket in my mind.....my bus had arrived.....

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!

Wonderland and the old dreams.....

Few days back i finished this book "Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world", a very surreal book by Haruki Murakami, my first book by this author. The book is too true to the title, and i don't mean it in a negative sense at all. It narrates two stories, from two distinct worlds. On on hand you have the really modern, fast paced wonderland and the other one is, well, the end of the world! The wonderland story is all about information wars, the strange new ways of protecting information, which use the most sophisticated device of all times: the human unconscious mind.....this world is not as simple as it looks! While the story in the wonderland is all about mind, the end of the world allows its citizens in only on one condition: that you have to surrender your shadow, the mind! The shadow then wilts away at some point, and that makes you a true citizen of the end of the world.....and while the shadow awaits its end, you would read old dreams: the broken pieces of mind and memory.....which ones belonged to someone.....

Two stories, two worlds, one connect!

Two sides of the brain, working independently?

Two minds within one?

Sounds lovely? Yes, it does! And that precisely is the surreal feeling i enjoyed the book for. The narrative is psychedelic, almost like a feverish dream! The only distractions to me, were, some of the lead character's obsessions (you'll know what i meant, when you read the book!) and the really show piece like female characters! The book could do without them (but thats my opinion). But you can easily ignore all that, and just enjoy the journey into these two worlds.....

The book has some crazy sounding, but interesting thoughts on mind! The author surely is fascinated with human mind.

The book has no ending.....or does it? You decide what to call it.....to me, it was an image of the beginning.....

and i think of Alice in the Wonderland.....

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.