Program Notes

Guest speaker: Marina Korsakova

Today’s podcast features the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Dr. Marina Korsakova. Marina is a professional pianist and scholar in music cognition. Her research is focused on emotional responses to music and on the perception of melodic transformation. Currently, Marina teaches Music Cognition at Touro College. She performs regularly as a member of Union City Chamber Players, and she is an author of books and scientific papers. Her latest book, “Music as Magical Journey: A Story of Tonal Gravity, Melodic Objects, and Motion in Tonal Space,” makes a friendly introduction into the science of music.

COMMENTS by Marina Korsakova
When giving my talk, I was not always clear about important points.
Below are some elucidations and corrections.

7:05 When saying a “low level of music perception” I meant the low level of consciousness, which is required for processing the melodic elements that make music.

10:35 Vibration of a string (and an air column) generates a very long tail of soft sounds - overtones. But the consonant quality of different sounds is defined by the relationships among their strongest overtones – those overtones that are in the beginning of the overtone series.

11:58 The pleasant quality of consonant melodic elements (as compared to the dissonant) can be explained by the lesser cost of neuronal energy for their auditory processing. The economy happens thanks to the redundancy of important spectral information for the consonant sounds. Here we are dealing with the law of laziness: the less efforts for processing, the more pleasant an element of perception.

12:50 Music can have different layers of perception. Enjoyment with some of the layers may require an expert understanding, though the essence of emotional communication in music is available for everybody. It is the perception of music’s building material—the melodic elements—that does not require any intellectual efforts. We perceive melodic matter intuitively.

19:40 Everything around us and we ourselves are made of interactions of different force fields. Today we know four fundamental forces of nature: the gravitational force, strong interaction, electromagnetic force, and weak force.

22:40 “Sharing on the top” meant that music and psychotropic drugs might share the same neural substrate.

25:24 Our study found that people we no musical training can have fine understanding of the exquisite details of tonal field and even of musical styles. That data was illustrated with graphs (pictures).

27:05 Music can be explained as artful arrangement of levels of tonal energy along the arrow of time

Marina Korsakova’s Website
The Universe of Music By Marina Korsakova-Kreyn
The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness by Lorenzo Hagerty (HTML format)

The Psychedelic Society of Ireland (first announcement)

The Women’s Visionary Congress

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23

And today we’re going to return to the playa at the 2014 Burning Man Festival

00:00:29

and sit in on the Planque Norte lecture that was given by the musician and philosopher,

00:00:35

Dr. Marina Korsakova.

00:00:37

Marina received her musical education in Russia,

00:00:40

where she began teaching piano at the age of 16 while still a student at music college.

00:00:46

Then she also trained as a concert pianist in Russia and upon graduation became a staff pianist

00:00:52

at a conservatory there. After immigrating to the U.S., Marina studied cognition and neuroscience

00:00:59

at the School of Behavior and Brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas,

00:01:05

where she earned a Ph.D. in music perception.

00:01:09

Now, here in the salon, we’re graced with many musicians,

00:01:11

but even those of us who aren’t musicians, I think, will find Marina’s talk fascinating,

00:01:16

as she discusses something that I have to admit I never thought about before.

00:01:20

And my guess is that you’re also going to find these concepts worth a little contemplation.

00:01:25

So now let’s join Marina in the big tent at Camp Soft Landing

00:01:30

as she considers the magical ways in which music supports human life on this planet.

00:01:36

And I was trained as a cognitive scientist in the United States.

00:01:42

So my interest in music started

00:01:46

the most natural way,

00:01:49

as a love for music.

00:01:51

Then I became interested in philosophy,

00:01:52

and I ended up doing empirical studies,

00:01:56

so I’m an applied philosopher.

00:02:00

People talk about the psychedelic experience.

00:02:03

I noticed, so I’m not going to be an exception.

00:02:08

It’s my first burn.

00:02:11

Last year was my second burn.

00:02:13

Last year it was my first burn, and I also tried it for the first time in my life.

00:02:18

Magic Mushroom.

00:02:19

I had no idea it’s the name, Magic Mushroom.

00:02:21

I gave it to myself, but it happened to be.

00:02:24

And I had a very rich experience

00:02:27

and I’m very thankful for that

00:02:29

and it was very interesting

00:02:31

but I’m

00:02:33

only going to mention what happened

00:02:35

at the end

00:02:36

when I

00:02:39

received a very interesting knowledge

00:02:41

I realized that

00:02:43

all our planet is just a living seed

00:02:47

which has already accumulated a lot of information about life. Actually, the whole evolution,

00:02:54

it’s a process of accumulation of information and creating the better and better mechanisms

00:02:59

of accumulating and transferring information. And And at that moment I started thinking how we are going to save this information

00:03:08

apart from living beings. For example, this planet wants to deliver

00:03:12

this knowledge to some other places in this vast universe.

00:03:17

And I had these images of some bionic

00:03:20

mechanisms. And I thought, yes, we can

00:03:23

code a lot of technical information, but how we can

00:03:27

inform about ourselves, who we are, about our characters,

00:03:33

about our mood, about our

00:03:36

happiness and sadness. And then I realized that we

00:03:40

already have this device. It’s music. This is the

00:03:44

most efficient and most primitive device

00:03:48

to code the complex information, our humanness.

00:03:53

There is nothing more primitive as encoding device

00:03:57

and now more sophisticated as coding who we are,

00:04:02

our life, our thinking.

00:04:04

as coding who we are, our life, our thinking.

00:04:11

I will touch a little bit on ways our brain operates,

00:04:15

on what levels, and how much emotional,

00:04:19

it’s emotional life, our lives.

00:04:24

But I want now to concentrate on the way music encodes and transfers information.

00:04:28

So it’s very easy for me to say that magic is music,

00:04:33

despite the fact that I was studying science of music,

00:04:37

and I have a very materialistic background.

00:04:40

I’m an applied philosopher, and I do believe that we can learn a lot.

00:04:45

And I’m saying it’s magic because

00:04:47

it’s so complex that perhaps you would

00:04:50

never know the complexity

00:04:51

so it’s magic for us. We will never know

00:04:54

we will never reach

00:04:56

final frontier because it’s so complex.

00:05:00

Music is really very strange

00:05:02

way of communication.

00:05:04

There is no familiar images.

00:05:07

We recognize nothing.

00:05:09

We cannot touch anything.

00:05:11

There is no certainty like we have in linguistic language.

00:05:15

We can name things with language.

00:05:18

In music, there is nothing.

00:05:20

There is nothing to translate to other languages.

00:05:23

We just listen to music, and somehow we become affected by that.

00:05:31

We sense something, not just feelings.

00:05:35

It’s not just emotional state.

00:05:38

Music has the incredible ability to deliver what Vladimir Nabokov called

00:05:44

the contour of thought.

00:05:46

It is sense ideas, so they are very complex things.

00:05:50

But despite this complexity,

00:05:54

basically everybody, with very few exceptions,

00:05:57

is able to understand music.

00:06:00

Some philosophers of music,

00:06:02

those who write very difficult books for reading, they think that in order to really of music, those who write very difficult books for reading,

00:06:06

they think that in order to really understand music, people have to study, to be trained.

00:06:11

Let me tell you, as a practitioner, as a pianist and scientist,

00:06:17

we all are born experts in music.

00:06:20

We all understand music.

00:06:22

And this is what my own studies show.

00:06:26

music. We all understand music. And this is what my own studies show. The people with zero musical training know everything about the space of music. Moreover, they react to

00:06:33

music as pro when you look into this data. Why? Why music is available to people of high intellect,

00:06:47

but also to people with great cognitive problems,

00:06:50

like people with Alzheimer’s,

00:06:52

and there’s even case study of kids

00:06:55

born with congenital encephaly,

00:06:58

they don’t have cortex,

00:07:00

and they still are able to recognize melodies.

00:07:03

So something in music happens on a very low level of perception,

00:07:08

incredibly low level.

00:07:12

So in order to understand music,

00:07:15

perhaps we need to look what it’s made of.

00:07:19

The note’s made of sound.

00:07:21

It’s basically sound in time.

00:07:23

And there are two main dimensions in music.

00:07:25

It’s sound, or we call it tonal space,

00:07:29

because there are tones, not just some random sounds,

00:07:34

but it’s a very interesting organization of sounds.

00:07:37

And time.

00:07:38

And I’m mostly going to talk about tonal space.

00:07:42

So we are part of nature.

00:07:47

And we should look how nature makes music inside us.

00:07:53

First we need to look into the physics of sound.

00:07:56

So those for you who already know the physics,

00:07:59

so forgive me, I’m going to talk about that.

00:08:03

But those for you who don’t know,

00:08:07

it’s really interesting that any natural sound

00:08:09

that we feel

00:08:11

as a particle, it’s actually

00:08:13

a hidden chord

00:08:14

and when we listen to

00:08:17

a melody and when we notate a melody

00:08:19

we notate it by particles

00:08:21

by notes and then when we

00:08:23

sing any song we sing it by notes. And when we sing any song,

00:08:25

we sing it by notes, like particles.

00:08:28

But in truth, any sound,

00:08:32

naturally produced sound,

00:08:33

has the hidden dimension.

00:08:36

And this hidden dimension overtones.

00:08:38

This is what makes music, actually.

00:08:41

This is what music relies on.

00:08:44

So generally, people cannot hear this hidden dimension.

00:08:48

You hear a sound, okay, just a sound. But it seems that our brain

00:08:51

pretty well recognizes this dimension. And it’s

00:08:55

very easy to understand why. When we listen

00:08:59

to music, sometimes it sounds

00:09:03

dissonant, something which is not agreeable, and sometimes it sounds

00:09:08

very harmonious, consonant. So music is made of dissonant and consonant sounds. And it

00:09:19

seems that they are consonant for us because it’s easier for our brain to process.

00:09:26

I call it the law of laziness.

00:09:29

It’s not about the musical composition.

00:09:32

It’s only about the element of music.

00:09:35

So here the hidden dimension of overtones comes to fore.

00:09:39

So if you look, for example,

00:09:41

if you listen to two people singing together,

00:09:43

let’s say you listen to grandpa and the grandchild singing together. So one, same song. So one song with low voice

00:09:51

and child would sing with a teeny voice. So they would sing it most likely in octave.

00:09:58

Or if you have a group of people and the child accompanied, they had a good time, they started

00:10:03

singing like women and men.

00:10:05

Again, most likely they sing in octave.

00:10:08

And octave is recognized around the globe as the same sound.

00:10:14

So now let’s look into the harmonic series of any sound.

00:10:19

So when, for example, we activate a string, The string looks fuzzy because it vibrates.

00:10:27

And it vibrates, it means it divides.

00:10:30

On two, three, four, five, six, it happens immediately.

00:10:33

And with each division, it produces a tiny, tiny subsound,

00:10:38

overtone or harmonic.

00:10:40

So you touch a string, it looks fuzzy,

00:10:43

and at that moment

00:10:45

it produces this

00:10:46

this tail of

00:10:48

overtones

00:10:49

the very first

00:10:52

overtone in this series, it’s active

00:10:55

so this interval

00:10:57

which is the same interval

00:10:58

for everybody, same note around the globe

00:11:01

so it seems it’s really

00:11:02

easy for brain to process

00:11:04

the next overtone gives us the interval of fifth or quinta around the globe. So it seems it’s really easy for brain to process.

00:11:08

The next overtone gives us the interval of fifth or quinta. Next one gives interval of

00:11:12

fourth or quarta. And those three intervals,

00:11:16

octave, fifth, and fourth, they are called Pythagorean

00:11:20

intervals. And they are known from antiquity

00:11:23

as consonant interval.

00:11:26

They’re easiest to process.

00:11:28

So what happens when you have two sounds, that sound that we perceive as an octave or fifth,

00:11:34

it means that the beginning of their tails overlap.

00:11:39

They share a lot of spectral information.

00:11:43

There is redundancy on the formation.

00:11:45

It’s easier for our brain to process.

00:11:47

It requires less neuronal energy.

00:11:52

So we have now in music levels of neuronal, of cost of energy.

00:11:58

So basically when you listen to music,

00:12:00

you listen to distribution of energy levels for our brain. What is easy

00:12:06

to process, it sounds consonant and agreeable. What is more difficult to listen, dissonances,

00:12:11

more energy. It’s a gradient of neuronal cost of processing. This is why music is so easy

00:12:20

to understand, because it’s built from elements which is very subconscious.

00:12:26

We don’t need to think about it.

00:12:28

It’s all

00:12:29

precognitive.

00:12:31

And this is why

00:12:34

Gottfried von

00:12:35

Leibniz called music

00:12:37

unconscious calculation by the mind

00:12:39

who doesn’t know that it’s calculating.

00:12:42

So when we listen to music, we don’t need

00:12:43

to concentrate. It all happens calculating. So when we listen to music, we don’t need to concentrate. It all happens

00:12:45

spontaneously.

00:12:47

So when we listen to

00:12:49

our favorite compositions,

00:12:52

we listen to

00:12:53

artful configuration of

00:12:55

energy levels

00:12:57

structured along time,

00:12:59

arranged along the arrow of time.

00:13:03

This is why

00:13:04

it’s so easy to process.

00:13:06

What is also incredibly interesting in music,

00:13:09

and this is why I think music is the window to cognition,

00:13:13

is how musical sounds are organized between themselves.

00:13:19

For us to extract any information from the world,

00:13:25

we need to have a system of reference.

00:13:27

For example, in our three-dimensional world,

00:13:31

we subconsciously perceive it in the Cartesian coordinates.

00:13:37

We don’t think about that.

00:13:39

We just know it.

00:13:40

There are three coordinates and also a gravitational field.

00:13:44

And our brain

00:13:45

doesn’t need to think about it

00:13:47

it happens on purely intuitive level

00:13:49

could you imagine

00:13:51

that musical matter

00:13:53

organized like gravitational field

00:13:56

if you play

00:13:59

a scale

00:14:00

musical scale

00:14:03

let’s say

00:14:03

C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C

00:14:07

if you play it

00:14:08

imagine that you sing

00:14:10

Happy Birthday to you

00:14:12

so you sing it almost till the end

00:14:14

and then you sing

00:14:16

to you

00:14:17

imagine you stopped on

00:14:21

two

00:14:21

it would sound very unstable

00:14:24

Happy Birthday to Imagine you stopped on two. It would sound very unstable.

00:14:27

Hey, people, day two.

00:14:30

It wants to go on you.

00:14:36

So the two has potential energy, and you has zero potential energy.

00:14:42

So we perceive it as tense, and then we perceive it as relaxed.

00:14:47

So on one side, we have neuronal cost of processing,

00:14:52

but on the level of perception, immediate perception,

00:14:59

we have tension or instability and release, stability.

00:15:02

Is it clear?

00:15:04

Okay.

00:15:06

So when we listen to music,

00:15:08

it’s stability, instability.

00:15:11

It’s phenomenal gravitational field.

00:15:13

It’s the simplest way to encode information.

00:15:19

Another interesting thing about music

00:15:21

that it’s cyclical.

00:15:26

They have just seven tones. It’s tremendous

00:15:28

parsimony.

00:15:29

Parsimony.

00:15:34

Nothing else has such

00:15:36

a small number of basic elements.

00:15:38

They have seven

00:15:39

diatonic tones and

00:15:41

five chromatic tones. So just

00:15:43

twelve tones. And out of those 12 tones, we build all the incredible richness of music.

00:15:52

Why I believe that music can help us to understand cognition, human cognition.

00:16:01

My very first study was in perception of melodies.

00:16:04

my very first study was in perception of melodies.

00:16:07

And as a performer,

00:16:13

I was always fascinated by abilities of performers to think about musical compositions beyond time.

00:16:18

If it’s something very complex like sonata form or fugue,

00:16:21

at some point you feel it as a structure.

00:16:26

And it seems it’s quite routine

00:16:29

because we know that Mozart,

00:16:32

once he thought that he felt all symphonies

00:16:35

as an apple on his palm.

00:16:37

So there is something about music

00:16:40

that’s interesting,

00:16:41

that you think about temporal structures

00:16:43

as almost material structures.

00:16:47

And we also have very interesting things in music,

00:16:51

almost like spatial.

00:16:54

For example, a melody can be bent,

00:16:58

it can be mirrored, it can be enlarged,

00:17:01

it can be diminished,

00:17:03

almost like the three-dimensional objects.

00:17:07

So I had this idea,

00:17:10

what if for people who do music,

00:17:14

music perception, and in general music perception,

00:17:17

it’s like orientation in some special space,

00:17:19

which is almost like our orientation in three-dimensional space.

00:17:24

And I had this other idea that evolution is generally very economical.

00:17:30

The music is not actually so, you know, incredibly important for our survival.

00:17:38

What if music uses some parts of the brain

00:17:41

which were designed and financed for something really important for survival.

00:17:48

And I thought, what if it’s all related to visual-spatial reasoning?

00:17:53

And there are some interesting facts about musicians,

00:17:56

that musicians process visual-spatial information differently than non-musicians,

00:18:01

that some very hard-trained musicians,

00:18:06

they have greater volume of gray matter in parts of the brain

00:18:11

which are important for visual-spatial processing.

00:18:15

So I decided to run a study, a behavioral study,

00:18:18

when I asked people to do tasks on visual-spatial congruency

00:18:22

of three-dimensional objects and tasks on melodic congruency of three-dimensional objects,

00:18:29

and task on melodic congruency with couples of melodies.

00:18:33

All melodies were from compositions by Jürgen Sebastian Bach.

00:18:35

And I found a very nice correlation.

00:18:40

And at that point, I proposed this hypothesis that in music perception, on certain level,

00:18:48

for our brain, it’s almost like spatial information.

00:18:50

It’s transcendent self-modality.

00:18:57

The modality is not lost, but for our brain, it’s become almost like objects.

00:18:59

Or maybe it’s even more interesting.

00:19:03

What is on certain levels of our perception?

00:19:05

There is no objects anymore.

00:19:10

It’s just understanding of configuration of elements.

00:19:14

Everything what is around us,

00:19:15

and we ourselves,

00:19:21

it’s just interaction of force fields,

00:19:22

of various force fields. So our brain, this incredible analyzer,

00:19:28

processes this information.

00:19:32

And then we see colors, forms,

00:19:34

and this translation is beautiful, this world.

00:19:38

But at the heart of everything around us

00:19:41

and we ourselves, it’s a force field.

00:19:44

It’s a dynamic field.

00:19:46

We know there are just four forces.

00:19:49

And so most likely our brain on the top is not interested in modality anymore

00:19:56

because modality was already processed.

00:19:58

But integration on the level of gestalt.

00:20:01

on the level of gestalt.

00:20:06

In this case, music, because it gives us the instance of macro force field,

00:20:13

like processing, macro processing in the force field,

00:20:16

maybe gives us, can give us very interesting information

00:20:20

about how we process visual world.

00:20:23

And right now, we’re trying to find mathematicians

00:20:25

who can formalize, give mathematical model

00:20:30

to three-dimensional processing.

00:20:33

We don’t know what kind of mathematics is needed.

00:20:37

It’s Hamiltonian math, quaternions,

00:20:39

and beyond that, octonions.

00:20:43

I think I already told you

00:20:45

why music is available for everybody.

00:20:49

Because of the simplicity of processing.

00:20:54

And I just want to give you some more information

00:20:57

from behavioral studies.

00:21:00

Until recently, we knew that already two, four-month-old babies recognize consonances and dissonances.

00:21:09

A very recent study showed that three-day-olds have different brain activation for consonances and dissonances.

00:21:17

Another interesting thing about music is how it affects us.

00:21:24

It gives us pleasure.

00:21:28

It activates the same biological reward center

00:21:33

which is activated by food, sex, and drugs.

00:21:40

And now we have music.

00:21:42

This is why I have a suspicion that

00:21:47

when people really love music and do music,

00:21:55

at some point they access the same fields,

00:22:01

the same levels,

00:22:03

which are accessed

00:22:05

during psychedelic, psychotropic

00:22:07

experience. Just in psychotropic

00:22:09

experience, it

00:22:11

happens as a shortcut

00:22:12

while in

00:22:14

serious

00:22:17

musical training, in

00:22:19

going into musical structures

00:22:21

and feeling all the details,

00:22:24

the same transcendence happens basically through very laborious processes.

00:22:29

But it’s very possible that music and psychotropic drugs,

00:22:34

they share something on the top.

00:22:39

And the previous lecturer, he mentioned synesthesia.

00:22:47

And now I want to tell about my other studies,

00:22:50

which gives me more ground to say that we all are gifted for music.

00:22:57

So don’t trust people who say, oh, it’s too late, or no, I’m not.

00:23:02

Or some people say about themselves, I’m not gifted at all.

00:23:05

This is not true. Everybody is gifted.

00:23:09

And

00:23:09

my second

00:23:11

large study was

00:23:13

about

00:23:15

tonal field of music.

00:23:18

So this gravitational field that I

00:23:20

mentioned, which is related

00:23:21

to the cost of processing,

00:23:24

and our feeling that

00:23:25

this is stable and that’s

00:23:27

stable.

00:23:30

So I explored

00:23:32

people’s feelings about

00:23:33

all possible distances

00:23:35

in the space

00:23:37

of music. And as I already told you,

00:23:40

we have very few basic

00:23:42

elements and we have just

00:23:43

12 tonal distances.

00:23:46

So all the richness of music is made just of 12 distances.

00:23:51

So I explored how people react to those distances.

00:23:54

It was not exactly like what you feel about this distance.

00:23:58

It was a little bit more sophisticated.

00:24:02

But the final result was how people feel about moving internal field. And what I found with my study, that basically we are all kind of closeted synesthetes. I measured people’s responses with so-called semantic differential

00:24:25

it sounds very sophisticated

00:24:26

it’s just bipolar adjective scales

00:24:29

like happy, sad, warm, cold, bright, dark

00:24:33

and people answered about what they felt

00:24:36

about distance by putting a mark

00:24:39

they had no idea what I was measuring

00:24:41

I would just ask them to put what they felt

00:24:44

about the end of each musical phrase.

00:24:48

And what I found when I looked into data,

00:24:52

and I was very pessimistic when I started this study.

00:24:56

I thought that I would never extract any information.

00:24:58

It was too much.

00:24:59

But when I looked into the data,

00:25:02

it was stunning.

00:25:04

I had this large group of people at the

00:25:07

University of Texas at Dallas multi ethnic from everywhere from Italy’s from

00:25:13

Asia from Eastern Europe from South America from everywhere very motley

00:25:19

ethnically group and when I looked into this picture, it was like a textbook in harmony and music theory.

00:25:28

People with no music education, they’re very well in recognizing

00:25:31

how music works. Moreover,

00:25:36

the byproducts of this study was even more stunning.

00:25:40

They recognized musical styles. It was very

00:25:44

sophisticated recognition. They recognized first styles. It was a very sophisticated recognition.

00:25:45

They recognized first teenage school, Mozart and Haydn,

00:25:49

and they recognized Romancex, so they differentiated them.

00:25:53

They even recognized that Franz Schubert was a transitional figure.

00:25:58

They had no idea what I played for them.

00:26:01

Some of them perhaps did not even know those names of those composers.

00:26:06

But my

00:26:07

what I want to say again

00:26:09

that music is a very generous art.

00:26:13

It’s available

00:26:14

for everybody.

00:26:16

Because of the simplicity

00:26:18

of

00:26:18

its

00:26:20

transfer of information.

00:26:23

Now I want to go back to the beginning of my talk.

00:26:27

We have already this incredible device

00:26:30

of coding who we are as humans,

00:26:35

what we are made of,

00:26:38

what our dreams,

00:26:40

what our moods,

00:26:43

what our feelings.

00:26:45

It’s very intimate information,

00:26:47

and we resonate very easily with what music talks to us.

00:26:54

And, of course, the most talented people

00:26:57

have the ability to address the greater number of people.

00:27:01

They have this ability to structure those levels of energy

00:27:07

in such a way that large group of people

00:27:11

receives the same emotional information.

00:27:19

Why don’t you ask me questions?

00:27:21

Because I gave you several directions.

00:27:26

And if you need some clarification, you can press it.

00:27:29

Yes.

00:27:30

Okay.

00:27:32

So I’m talking about music, which basically dominates the world today.

00:27:41

There have been different organizations of Donal Field.

00:27:46

However, even in the place there is no music, there is no chords like Australia, Aboriginal

00:27:53

world.

00:27:54

They still recognize octave.

00:27:57

We still have three day old babies that recognize dissonant and consonant.

00:28:03

This is what music made of. This is what music is made of.

00:28:06

This is my point.

00:28:07

We are born experts in music.

00:28:13

It’s already given to us.

00:28:15

Moreover, for example, for our auditory system,

00:28:17

when we are born, we need to see.

00:28:20

We need to see during our first months of life.

00:28:24

It’s not the case with music.

00:28:26

The auditory system is basically ready

00:28:29

at the end of second trimester before they are born.

00:28:32

This is why we now know that

00:28:35

we actually can do experiments with pre-born.

00:28:40

There was a very smart study in Paris

00:28:44

when they asked pregnant women to listen during the last month of pregnancy to the same melody every day.

00:28:52

And then when their babies were one month old, they played different melodies.

00:28:56

And only for this particular melody, babies had certain changes in heartbeat, which was significant.

00:29:04

Synesthesia, no.

00:29:06

No, but what I want to tell you that

00:29:07

judging from my study,

00:29:11

they are all closeted synesthetes

00:29:13

because the data which I extracted

00:29:15

with quasi-synesthetic scales

00:29:19

like warm, cold, bright, dark, and others,

00:29:23

it showed me information.

00:29:25

It showed me the picture, the data.

00:29:27

It was like a textbook in music theory.

00:29:30

So when we listen to music,

00:29:32

we react to tonal distances,

00:29:35

not only happy, sad.

00:29:36

We also feel that warm.

00:29:37

For example, if it’s a great distance,

00:29:41

we feel it colder and darker and less happy.

00:29:47

This is why it was so surprising

00:29:48

for me. And synesthesia,

00:29:50

it’s about 1 in 1,000

00:29:52

officially and 8 times more

00:29:54

frequent in women.

00:29:55

But this study,

00:29:58

this mind study

00:30:00

suggests that

00:30:01

perhaps there is different kind

00:30:04

of synesthesia or maybe music activates something very special,

00:30:07

something really very interesting.

00:30:10

Now let me talk about how we process it,

00:30:14

how our brain processes it.

00:30:17

Most likely, the sound is processed in our cochlea.

00:30:23

It begins there, in our middle ear.

00:30:29

And cochlea, nuclear.

00:30:31

But most interesting, in our middle brain, mesencephalon,

00:30:37

we have very interesting real estate,

00:30:40

which is responsible for our feeling of thirst, for awakening,

00:30:47

for most immediate needs.

00:30:54

And according to a great neuroscientist, Jacques Tancsep,

00:30:58

this is a place where we have virtual self.

00:31:09

In this virtual self, we have all the original information from inside and outside integrated first. So it’s like the very first integration of all information from environment inside and

00:31:15

outside. And I thought what kind of information is coming? What would be our very first reaction to environment?

00:31:26

Imagine that you touch something living.

00:31:29

What would happen?

00:31:30

The living would become tense.

00:31:33

And music is made of tension.

00:31:37

This is dissonant.

00:31:39

And relaxation.

00:31:41

It’s consonant.

00:31:43

So when we listen to music,

00:31:45

and it’s made of consonants and dissonants,

00:31:48

because if it’s all consonant, there is no motion in music.

00:31:52

We need dissonance because it gives feeling of motion.

00:31:56

So when it’s dissonant, we are tense.

00:31:59

When it’s consonant, we are relaxed.

00:32:02

And I thought, most likely this is where processing your music begins.

00:32:07

This is why it’s available for everybody.

00:32:09

And then there are two interesting paths.

00:32:15

The first path is to limbic system.

00:32:19

It’s our emotional brain.

00:32:22

And the information becomes with high, high resolution

00:32:25

going to cortical system.

00:32:27

And another interesting thing,

00:32:29

it’s most likely going to parietal lobe,

00:32:33

which is involved in visual spatial processing.

00:32:36

This is why I talked about this story

00:32:38

with melodies and three-dimensional objects.

00:32:42

That when we listen to music,

00:32:43

for us, we listen

00:32:45

almost like objects

00:32:48

in certain space.

00:32:50

It’s phenomenal space of tones

00:32:51

organized as gravitational

00:32:53

field. And it’s also

00:32:55

distribution of energy.

00:32:58

From my experience,

00:33:00

for example, doing Ayahuasca,

00:33:02

I remember those wild

00:33:04

rhythms.

00:33:10

And there was also something about, I realized that some of the music I listen,

00:33:14

it’s almost like foggy sound.

00:33:30

It’s like you are psychotropic. I’m trying to touch is not just it’s more than just listening.

00:33:32

There is a wonderful

00:33:34

researcher from Northwestern

00:33:36

and she studies

00:33:38

age compensatory mechanisms that

00:33:40

music helps to develop.

00:33:44

So I want to tell everybody,

00:33:47

this is kind of new information.

00:33:49

The study has just started.

00:33:52

You can start learning music at any age,

00:33:55

but you need to practice,

00:33:56

and it will create age-compensatory mechanisms.

00:34:00

So she told that you need to practice music to develop.

00:34:05

It’s like you cannot develop your muscles just watching TV.

00:34:11

So in this respect, the psychedelics, it gives you a shortcut.

00:34:16

You take psychedelics and you’re already there.

00:34:19

Your subconscious, it opens wide.

00:34:22

You begin your trip.

00:34:23

it opens wide. You begin your trip.

00:34:28

With high art, it happens just, the path is more laborious, more difficult.

00:34:33

But the experience is very strong.

00:34:38

Yeah, but you know what?

00:34:40

From my Ivas experience, she was not interested in music

00:34:44

at all. When I asked her, she was not interested in music at all when

00:34:45

I asked him she was not interested at all she answered to query two questions

00:34:51

and I asked her the first was both very difficult first the nature of people

00:34:57

nature of people today so it was very hard basically basically, reptiloid. This is hard.

00:35:13

And the second, it was her message that there should be no nuclear energy.

00:35:15

Everything should be stopped.

00:35:17

I asked her maybe for medical research.

00:35:18

No.

00:35:20

She was very direct.

00:35:24

There should be no uses of nuclear energy energy they should be stopped as soon as possible

00:35:27

yes

00:35:28

ok

00:35:29

so they only started with newly hatched

00:35:33

chicks

00:35:33

so chicks they liked

00:35:37

consonances better than dissonances

00:35:39

so the elements

00:35:41

are available

00:35:43

living

00:35:44

creatures but we have elements are available living creatures

00:35:45

but we have

00:35:48

we have language

00:35:50

we have math

00:35:52

and we have music

00:35:53

and what was interesting

00:35:54

that those things

00:35:57

the certain parts of our brain

00:36:00

it’s in the parietal lobe

00:36:02

which is involved in that

00:36:04

it’s abstract thinking.

00:36:07

And it seems

00:36:08

it’s human-specific.

00:36:12

So math, language,

00:36:14

and music.

00:36:15

They are all artificial

00:36:17

languages of communication.

00:36:20

But music is the most

00:36:21

primitive because when you think

00:36:23

what is the origin of it,

00:36:26

most likely, I’m basically sure.

00:36:31

So a long time ago, before we developed language, like today, for example, animals,

00:36:38

they communicate through sounds.

00:36:41

It’s called first signaling system.

00:36:44

If you’re happy,

00:36:46

if you have some desires, you produce

00:36:48

certain sound. But then

00:36:50

at certain point in evolution,

00:36:53

the sound production

00:36:54

be forcated. On one

00:36:56

side, it developed

00:36:58

into language when we assigned

00:37:00

certain sounds to certain

00:37:02

objects and actions and

00:37:04

qualities. And another

00:37:06

tongue

00:37:08

went to music.

00:37:09

The relationship between sounds.

00:37:12

Tonal space.

00:37:15

I’m sorry.

00:37:16

Your question was about universals.

00:37:19

Yeah.

00:37:19

Yeah.

00:37:21

Music? I didn’t know how

00:37:23

the auditory system is going to be formed

00:37:26

just for starters

00:37:29

neuronal system

00:37:33

perhaps

00:37:37

I never thought about that

00:37:39

but I did think about

00:37:43

about but what I did think about about

00:37:46

planet

00:37:48

and so this is what I started with

00:37:52

this mushroom tree, the image that it gave me

00:37:55

that the planet itself

00:37:58

it’s a living seed

00:38:00

and what is interesting, when you think about the

00:38:03

goal of evolution first I want

00:38:08

to say about what what is this goal evolution was explained by the Sheldon a French Jesuit

00:38:15

he calls it a mega point that evolution is directed toward greater greater perfection and union with God.

00:38:29

And I suggest a little bit different,

00:38:31

and I suggest letter mu,

00:38:33

which is in the middle of Greek alphabet.

00:38:35

I suggest mu principle,

00:38:38

that evolution is directed toward creating more and more complex and efficient devices

00:38:43

for accumulating and transfer of information.

00:38:46

We have living information from RNA, then DNA, and then we have the appearance of

00:38:56

humans. Now we have language, linguistic language, and we have greater and greater

00:39:02

ability to encode greater and greater amount of information.

00:39:07

What we have today, what is called as no sphere, N-O-O, sphere, which means the sphere of knowledge,

00:39:16

which basically creates for our planet, for this living seed, this chance to save what is already accumulated.

00:39:27

Living information and technology and whatever.

00:39:31

And we’re basically a vehicle for this goal of human beings.

00:39:36

The only problem is we are too aggressive toward nature.

00:39:43

We have to realize that we’re all

00:39:45

just the same. We are part of

00:39:48

the planet. The evolution

00:39:50

is evolution of life

00:39:52

and we all are life.

00:39:55

And so we have

00:39:56

to feel that we all are

00:39:58

basically collective. We all are independent

00:40:00

but we all are collective and

00:40:01

this is our goal. To save

00:40:04

the information, to save the information, to

00:40:05

save the life, so it would be delivered,

00:40:08

it would survive.

00:40:10

Some sounds have amazing

00:40:12

ability, just single sound,

00:40:14

certain frequencies.

00:40:15

Some rhythms have amazing abilities.

00:40:18

My presentation

00:40:19

was about music on a global level,

00:40:21

and they have melodies.

00:40:25

But I know

00:40:27

cases when just

00:40:29

single sounds were healing.

00:40:32

And I also have a friend

00:40:34

who

00:40:35

creates healing music,

00:40:37

rhythmic music. He’s just

00:40:39

a genius percussionist.

00:40:41

Nacho Arimani.

00:40:44

Yes, there are different aspects of sound

00:40:48

that could be healing.

00:40:50

For me, during Ayahuasca,

00:40:53

the presence of these melodies,

00:40:57

primeval melodies,

00:40:59

it was like going into the,

00:41:02

not only my childhood,

00:41:03

it was almost like going to childhood of humanity.

00:41:07

It was another way of reuniting with Mother Earth.

00:41:12

Okay, it’s a wonderful question.

00:41:16

There are several directions.

00:41:17

So first of all, artists,

00:41:20

they live on self-expression.

00:41:25

This is what’s important.

00:41:26

And then it all depends

00:41:27

how rich is in the world.

00:41:30

The richer is in the world,

00:41:32

the more demanding view for yourself,

00:41:34

the greater result.

00:41:36

About innovations,

00:41:38

I am for innovation.

00:41:41

But when it’s innovation of ignoramuses,

00:41:43

I am not very happy because

00:41:46

for example, Jürgen Sebastian Bach

00:41:48

his sons called him

00:41:50

old wig because he knew

00:41:52

all techniques so well

00:41:54

but when you start analyzing his compositions

00:41:56

there’s so many

00:41:59

things which he looked

00:42:01

ahead so much

00:42:02

in such a great distance

00:42:04

what happened that his incredible skills, they which he looked ahead so much, such a great distance,

00:42:07

what happened that his incredible skills,

00:42:12

they completely liberated his spirit.

00:42:14

He could say whatever he want because his technique was so spectacular.

00:42:17

On the other hand, my favorite composer is Franz Schubert,

00:42:21

and his music is very simple.

00:42:24

It’s very soulful.

00:42:25

It sounds almost mundane.

00:42:27

So simple.

00:42:29

But at some point in his music,

00:42:31

from time to time,

00:42:33

something happens,

00:42:34

and I call it window to God.

00:42:36

Something happens,

00:42:38

and you’re just lost.

00:42:39

You enter different dimension.

00:42:42

Everything is very simple,

00:42:43

and he did not have any great education,

00:42:46

but I think

00:42:48

it’s

00:42:49

personality. You just ask

00:42:52

yourself what you can give to the world.

00:42:55

And

00:42:55

what is also very important for artists,

00:42:59

the greatest,

00:43:00

they feel themselves as channels.

00:43:03

They only channel

00:43:03

for what’s already around.

00:43:08

They’re creators, but yes, they’re creators,

00:43:10

but still their main role is to be a channel

00:43:14

for something greater than they are.

00:43:17

Thank you very much, Marina. I appreciate it.

00:43:19

Thank you.

00:43:28

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:43:31

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:43:36

I was pleased to hear Marina speak about synesthesia,

00:43:39

but I have to admit that it kind of made me ashamed of myself.

00:43:44

See, years ago in an ayahuasca circle that I was involved in There was this one guy who would go on and on about his synesthesia experiences during our ceremonies

00:43:50

Now, a few other people also mention it from time to time

00:43:54

But not to the degree that this guy did

00:43:56

Actually, I thought he was making it all up

00:43:59

However, after listening to Marina just now

00:44:02

I realized that he was probably telling the truth, which also makes me very happy that I never expressed my doubts about it to him or to anyone else.

00:44:10

But my face is red.

00:44:13

And naturally, I was happy to hear Marina include Teilhard’s concept of a noosphere in her talk.

00:44:19

As our old-timers here in the salon know, I published a book titled

00:44:23

The Spirit of the Internet,

00:44:30

Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness. Now, the second chapter in that book is titled The Internet and the Neuosphere, and since the entire book is now online in HTML format,

00:44:37

I’ll link to that chapter in today’s program notes, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

00:44:44

Another thought that Marina brought to my mind

00:44:46

came when she was talking about the perception of being in a particular space that can be brought

00:44:52

about by certain combinations of musical notes. Now, combine that thought with her speculation

00:44:58

about the realms of music and of the psychedelic experience having much in common. Now, this may not actually have any bearing on these thoughts, but in 1999, when I wrote

00:45:09

The Spirit of the Internet, I also wrote the following description of what I call entheospace.

00:45:16

Entheospace, the realm of divine mind, is actually the sense of place that one has at

00:45:23

times when an exploration of one’s inner landscape

00:45:25

leads to the realization that this is much more than just a fascinating landscape. It’s an entire

00:45:32

universe. At moments when this realization is so deeply interiorized as to be an essential part of

00:45:38

one’s being, one is said to be in, in theospace. When the focus of one’s consciousness is on in theospace,

00:45:46

one experiences a deeply seated sense of being infused with

00:45:49

and a part of divine mind.

00:45:53

Now, if you go back and re-listen to last week’s podcast

00:45:56

with Bernardo Castro,

00:45:57

you’ll hear him also talk about how real,

00:46:00

for lack of a better word,

00:46:02

everything seems when you are under the influence

00:46:04

of psychedelic substances. Again, we’re trying to put words around experiences that border on the

00:46:10

ineffable, but if you’ve ever been in entheospace, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

00:46:16

Now, getting back to Marina’s talk that we just listened to, since I’m not a musician myself,

00:46:22

I didn’t understand all of the technical details of what she was saying about ways in which certain combinations of sound affect the brain.

00:46:30

But as a geek, it seemed to me that this information could be of great interest to sound engineers who shape the music once the artists have made the initial recording.

00:46:40

But then I’m talking here of things about which I know next to nothing, so it’d probably be best to ignore what I just said now that I think about it.

00:46:50

Something that you may not want to ignore, however, at least if you live in Ireland,

00:46:54

is that Paddy Murphy is organizing the Irish Psychedelic Society.

00:46:58

And if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can find a link to his announcement on the program notes for today’s podcast.

00:47:05

And on that announcement, you’re also going to find a link to the Psychedelic Society in the UK.

00:47:12

Also, I’d like to let you know about the newly redesigned website for the Women’s Visionary Congress.

00:47:18

I’ll link to it in today’s program notes, but it’s easy to remember.

00:47:21

It’s simply visionarycongress.org.

00:47:24

They have a lot of really interesting information and resources there,

00:47:28

and the new website design is really beautiful.

00:47:31

My congratulations to whomever built it.

00:47:34

And on the front page of that site, you can learn about any upcoming events they have,

00:47:39

which includes their annual congress,

00:47:41

and that’s going to be held this coming june from the 19th through the 21st

00:47:45

and it’s going to take place in petaluma california and for now this is lorenzo

00:47:51

signing off from cyberdelic space be careful out there my friends Thank you.