2018: My year—of books—in review

I was inspired to start sharing a list of what I've read from Jill Dolan, a teacher who shaped my writing and how I see the world and engage with it. I thought I'd share those reads, here. Some of them were published in 2018, and most of them are (age-)old. Perhaps some will resonate with you in your search for books to kick off the new year. (Listed in the order that I read them.)

On the Medical Profession (Middlemarch, George Eliot)

...he carried to his studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and the art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good. Lydgate's nature demanding this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the abstractions of special study. 

He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the averages, and in the meantime have the pleasure of making an advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients. But he did not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common. He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link in the chain of discovery. 

'If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,' he thought, 'I might have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always in blinkers. I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbours. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too...'

He was saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and his belief that human life might be made better.

From the Literary Vesicle: Body and Soul by Frank Conroy

Body and Soul was written by a true musician. It is about a gifted young pianist's journey through music, through life, through maturity, through the professional music world and music business. It gets at the heart of what music making means, and puts into words the those inexpressible, wonderful, magical moments of music making.

The story is a fictionally rich and beautiful one.  But I'm actually not going to write about the plot (here's a nice plot synopsis). I'm going write about the parts that resonated to me, parts that express some experiences of music making that I've never known how to express. The music making that goes beyond the body--that is what music is all about, and this book gets across that wonderfully. Here's a rather lengthy passage, but I'm going to quote it in it's entirety, because it's my favorite from the whole book, and it's absolutely true. This is a dialogue between the piano teacher (Fredericks) and the student (Claude), in which the piano teacher has just told his student that there is an attraction, like magnetism, between two pieces of glass that were given to him:

When, after a moment, the orbits of the two pieces of glass brought them near each other, Claude both saw and felt his ball move slightly out of its orbit toward the other one. It was quite distinct. A little jump.
"You see?" Fredericks said. "You held perfectly still?"
"Yes." Claude was amazed. "Magic. Is it magic?"
Fredericks took the glass balls and put them back in his desk. "Some people would have you believe so, but it isn't. It only feels like magic."
"Well, what is it, then? What made it do that?"
"You did."
"No, I didn't move. Not one bit. Anyway, I could feel it. I could feel a little tug when it jumped."
"You believed the pieces of glass were attracted to each other."
"Well, you said they, I mean, I didn't actually know whether--"
"Listen to me, Claude," Fredericks said. "This is important. It's because you believed."
"But that's like magic. You said--"
"I said you did it. You did it without knowing it. Tiny micro-movements in the pad of your thumb and the pad of your forefinger. Infinitesimally small movements below your level of physical awareness, magnified because of the length of the string, making the ball jump."
...

"I've just shown you that your fingers can do more than what you physically feel them doing." He made a little arc in the air with his hand. "The other side of the wall."
Claude thought about it. "Yes, but how? How do you do it?"
Fredericks got up from the desk and stood directly in front of the boy. "You must imagine the music in your head. Imagine it shaped and balanced the way you want it. Get it in your head and then believe in it. Concentrate, believe, and your fingers will do it."
"My God," Claude whispered.
"Anything you can imagine clearly, you can play. That's the great secret."
So, it goes beyond the body," Claude said.
"Exactly."  (Body and Soul, p. 117-119)

The power of belief is magical, but not surprising. Psychology knows this well. The powers of the placebo effect are well-known. Just a couple of weeks ago, our health psychology professor showed us a video on the power of the placebo surgery. Patients underwent a sham surgery for knee pain. In other words, they underwent surgery without the actual surgical procedure, in which incisions were made, but no actual knee surgery was performed. After the "surgery," there was overwhelming improvement. Patients testified how the pain that had impeded their whole lives was gone, and they could go back living normally. Yet they never had an actual surgery, the improvement was all in their head. "So, it goes beyond the body." Here is the video our professor had shown us:

Placebo Surgery

 

Well, reading this, believing seems so simple. But it's not. Yet this it is the key that makes all the difference. Focusing on the music, not on your playing of it. But there's something further than just imagining the sound, you have to imagine the image, the scene, the thing you want to portray with the sound--what story you want to share with the audience. And from there, things take off.

Mark Steinberg, first violinist of the Brentano String Quartet, and my coach for one semester of "Projects in Musical Performance" once said something that I remember dearly. He told us at our last lesson together before final concert (I was playing a piano duo--Schubert Allegro in A minor), "How many people around you can do what you are about to do? You are going to take all those people on a journey together, and only you can tell that story." That's what music is all about, affecting those around you. That's what life is about too--inspiring others.

A Hyper-Emotion Theory of Psychological Illness

An article appeared in the New York Times this month titled "Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate." It's a feel-good article about giving in to the whims of patients to improve their mood, encouraging music and painting and flower arranging in an emotion-focused atmosphere, proving significantly effective in treating disease. 

The article attests to the importance of considering the impact of emotion in treating psychological disorders, and it got me thinking about the hyper-emotion theory of psychological illness (A Hyper-Emotion Theory of Psychological Illness), a theory by Phil Johnson-Laird, Francesco Mancini, and Amelia Gangemi, postulating that psychological illness is not a result of faulty reasoning (as is the main tenet of cognitive therapy and Aaron Beck), but one of hyper-emotion, or inappropriately intense emotional reactions. In fact, the research finds that those with psychological illness are better at reasoning when the reasoning is related to their illness. Johnson-Laird describes the theory in his book, How We Reason:

[Cognitive therapists] stress that a closer questioning of patients yields thoughts revealing that the source of illnesses is in faulty inferences. But, according to the present theory, the patients' remarks do not elucidate the cause of the hyper-intensity of their emotions, but merely their thoughts about the precipitating object or situation yielding the emotion. Their reasoning is not the cause of their illness, but its consequence. Indeed, those of us with a propensity to mental illness reason better than control participants, though only on matter concerning the illness. (p.100)

The hyper-emotion theory certainly revolutionizes the way we think about cognitive therapy. Instead of treating how we think, should we be treating how we emotionally respond? And how would we go about doing so? Perhaps, as Johnson-Laird mentions in his book, through exposure therapy, which falls under the domain of behavioral therapy. So should cognitive therapy really be a form of behavioral therapy? Then again, cognitive therapy has strong research support (as does behavioral therapy), so how does the hyper-emotion theory address that? 

Just as an artistically synaptic side-note, Phil Johnson-Laird also does research on the psychology of music (see his music-related work here), which includes emotions and music, creativity and jazz improvisation, dissonance, twentieth-century music, computer music, and rhythm (we are currently working on a study of rhythm similarity).

From the Literary Vesicle: Welcome to Your Brain

The Literary Vesicle of the Artistic Synapse releases Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang.

Aamodt and Wang dispel popular myths about the brain, like "we only use ten percent of our brains," while at the same time creating a "user's guide" to the brain: practical knowledge about how the brain works and how to best take advantage of it's workings.

Sam Wang was, in fact, my Neuroscience module professor from Molecular Biology class. Many of the themes in the book were incorporated into his lectures, which made them very interesting and easy to understand. He is, needless to say, brilliant. Prof. Wang has also spoken publicly on all sorts of neuroscience-related issues, check out his videos at BigThink: http://bigthink.com/samwang. 

The Literary Vesicle's transmissions from the book:

• Brain activity in response to recognizing certain sounds changes based on experience. Our experience actually changes our ability to recognize sounds.
• Perfect pitch is "more common among people who speak tonal languages in which pitch is important for distinguishing words" (eg Chinese). 
• To hear better on your cell phone in a loud room, cover the mouthpiece.
• The chance of mental disorder is linked to a stress gene.
• Dopamine and serotonin is involved in the shaping of your personality.

What is the Literary Vesicle?

First of all, what is a vesicle? Synaptic vesicles are little pouches in the neuron that contain neurotransmitters. These pouches fuse with the neural membrane, releasing the neurotransmitters into the synapse (the gap between neurons) to transmit signals.

The Literary Vesicle is a vesicle of the Artistic Synapse that will release books into the Synapse (aka the book corner of the Synapse), and while doing so, take note of interesting and "artistic" transmissions from the books.