• 31 "...the imagination of playing can be almost as efficacious as the physical actuality."
• 33 Beethoven "Deliberate, conscious, voluntary mental imagery involves not only auditory and motor cortex, but regions of the frontal cortex involved in choosing and planning. Such deliberate mental imagery is clearly crucial to professional musicians -- it saved the creative life and sanity of Beethoven after he had gone deaf and could no longer hear any music other than that in his mind."
• 35 Bursting into song (me and Josh) "Such replayings, curiously, seem to be almost as satisfying as listening to the actual music, and these involuntary concerts are rarely intrusive or uncontrollable (although they have the potential to be so)."
• 37 Interesting... "But why this incessant search fro meaning or interpretation? It is not clear that nay art cries out for this and, of all the arts, music surely the least -- for while it is the most closely tied to the emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representation whatever... Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenerness, poignancy, and beauty... But it does not have to have any have to have any 'meaning' whatever."
• 47 We like repetition "...we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it."
• 57 footnote read Peter Ostwald's Schumann: Music and Madness
• 82 "Miller and Crosby observed that a year later the hallucinations were unchanged, adding that their patient had 'adjusted well to her hallucinations and views them as a "cross" she must bear.' Yet 'bearing a cross' may not carry a wholly negative connotation; it can also be a sign of favor, of election."
• 86 "...Every psychoanalyst knows that in every symptom (and this is a symptom), behind every defense is a wish.... The songs that come to the surface ... carry urges, hopes, wishes. Romantic, sexual, moral, aggressive wishes, as well as urges for action and mastery..... Complain as I will, the song is welcome, at least partially so."
• 92 Ability does not always match desire "Most of us can hope that there may be some harmony, some alignment, between our desires and our powers and our opportunities..." (this is not always the case)
• 94 Training vs. innate predisposition: when does musical training start and how does it effect the brain?
• 95 MIT developed Guitar Hero to incorporate music in more people's lives
• 106 "Without these basic building blocks, there can be no sense of a tonal center or key, no sense of scale or melody or harmony -- any more than, in a spoken language, one can have words without syllables."
• 113 unable to distinguish different parts, "...four thin, sharp laser beams, beaming to four different directions." <a quartet. An orchestra would be 20 "lasers"
• 116 Habits: learning one way >> VERY hard to change; a man with no sight for most of his life had surgery that made him able to see; when shaving he could recognize himself in the mirror but soon the visual image of his face would turn into unrecognizable fragments and he would close his eyes and shave by touch
• 119
• 120 Read The Oxford Companion to Music (and _Arabian Nights_)
• 122 Perfect pitch = blessing and curse
• 137 pitch distortions (Jacob)
• 142 Hardcore mind over matter "...through intensive musical activity, attention, and will, Jacob's brain has literally reshaped itself."
• 152 Phonographic memory "As some people may be said to have a photographic memory, Martin had a phonographic one."
• 159 No instant savantism "Being a savant is a way of life, a while organization of personality, even though it may be built on a single mechanism or skill."
• 162 Very true for me at least (footnote) "He would always say that he could hear music better when his eyes were closed -- he could exclude visual sensations and immerse himself fully in an auditory world."
• 164 Pure poetry "The first concert hall I ever entered, when I was eight years old, meant more to me in the space of a minute than all the fabled kingdoms.... Going into the hall was the first step in a love story. The tuning of the instruments was my engagement.... I wept with gratitude every time the orchestra began to sing. A world of sounds for a blind man, what sudden grace!... For a blind person music is nourishment.... He needs to receive it, to have it administered at intervals like food.... Music was made for blind people." -Jacques Lusseyran And There Was Light
• 173 Tastes and colors: how people always associate music with the like
• 182 Extreme synesthesia: "I saw music too much to be able to speak its language." -Jacques Lusseyran (after losing his sight)
• 183 Differences between born with synesthesia and acquiring it later

Clive and Deborah

• 193-194 Strangely beautiful and agonizing. A couple deeply in love, the husband has severe short term memory loss but within a few minutes the same looks of happiness to see her and delight and joy at the things she's done for him are "both maddening and flattering."
• 198 With severe amnesia music is remembered once started.
• 198 (same couple Clive and Deborah) What's your name? "Deborah wrote of how he could not remember her name, 'but one day someone asked him to say his full name, and he said, "Clive David Deborah Wearing -- funny name that. I don't know why my parents called me that."'"
• 202 "with no knowledge of where he was or what had happened to him. To catch sight of me was always a massive relief -- to know that he was not alone, that I still cared, that I loved him, that I was there. Clive was terrified all the time. But I was his life, I was his lifeline. Every time he saw me, he would run to me, fall on me, sobbing, clinging."

Clive did not recognize others as he did Deborah. "...emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood."

• 204 "Clive could sit down at the organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Suddenly we had a place to be together, where we could create our own world away from the ward." My favorite snip-it from that is "...our own world away from the ward."
• 206 Two different memories
  • Episodic memory: conscious
  • Procedural memory: unconscious
• 218 Read A.R. Luria's Traumatic Aphasia and Restoration of Function After Brain Injury
• 227 Music can be treatment
• 265 Practicing too much is possible :) Known as musician's dystonia where your fingers stop working the way you want them to
• 315 When lacking in one area the brain compensates and puts its energy into another area "But the strange change did not last; it diminished, Jacome wrote, 'in parallel with very good recovery of verbal skills.' These findins, he felt, 'seem to support the greater role of the non-dominant hemisphere in music, somehow normally dormant and "released" by dominant hemisphere damage.'"
• 331 Anatomy is destiny vs. destiny is written in our genes "Freud once wrote, 'Anatomy is destiny.' Now we tend to think that destiny is written in our genes." when looking at how "a particular genetic endowment can shape the anatomy of a brain and how this, in turn, will shape particular cognitive strengths and weaknesses, personality traits, and perhaps even creativity."
• 337 "Music of the right kind can serve to orient and anchor a patient when almost nothing can." (in regards to Alzheimer's)
• 339 Everything fades except music "He has no idea what he did for a living, where he is living now, or what he did ten minutes ago. Almost every memory is gone. Except for music.... The evening he performed, he had no idea how to tie a tie... he got lost on the way to the stage -- but the performance? Perfect.... He performed beautifully and remembered all the parts and words."
• 339 Read Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic "When I asked Mr. Geist how he was, he replied, pleasantly, 'I think I am in good health.' This reminded me of how Ralph Waldo Emerson, after he became severely demented, would answer such questions by saying, 'Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.'"
• 347 Aye, here lies the rub

"One does not need to have any formal knowledge of music--nor, indeed, to be particularly 'musical'--to enjoy music and to respond to it at the deepest levels. Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed. Its very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized in daily life: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words of an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it. But to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to other, at least for a while."