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.