EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience

I uploaded the first edition of the document over a decade ago. This is now the 14th edition, which I've spruced up a bit. You can download it from Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_14.

I've added a new preface, which I've reproduced below the asterisks.

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Prefatory Note: On the Phenomenology of Musical Experience

I’ve been a musician for most of my life. Early on I read Jean-Baptist Arban say, of music, “There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them” (see p. 34 below). I sure liked the sound of that. But what did it mean? Somewhat later I read musicians talking about how, on this or that occasion, the music “played itself.” What could that possibly mean? At some point I came to experience the second, that is to say, I experienced something to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. And I think I know what Arban had in mind. That is to say, I have heard playing to which that phrase could reasonably be applied. I may even have done some myself.

And so, back in the mid-1990s, I started assembling accounts about, well, musical experiences that caught my attention. I wrote brief descriptions of some of my own experiences and collected anecdotes about the experiences of others from various sources, magazine stories, interviews, books, and, more recently, online articles. I put the first edition of this document online about ten years ago and have then updated it when I came across more anecdotes.

I’ve never established explicit criteria for these anecdotes, for that would contradict my fundamental reason for creating this collection in the first place. I am simply on the lookout for interesting things that happen to musicians – also listeners, but mostly musicians themselves – while performing. The idea is to get a large and diverse set of accounts in one place so that we can look at it and ask: What’s going on?

That is to say, there is a sense in which I do not know what these musicians are talking about. The experiences are often hard to describe, we don’t talk about them, and there so there is no standard vocabulary. And yet I feel that these phenomena are the life of music. And so I’ve gathered these anecdotes together into a single document and offer it to anyone who is curious. One day, I assume, or at any rate I hope, one day someone will begin to make sense out of it all. My job is simply to provide something to make sense of.

What happened? And by that I do not mean a deep question about underlying causes and significance. No, I’m asking a simple question about phenomenology: What kinds of experiences are there? Under what circumstances did they occur? How common are they? How do we classify them?

Finally I note that I have never undertaken a systematic search for such anecdotes. The ones I have gathered here are simply ones that I’ve come across in the ordinary business of thinking and investigating. I have no idea what a systematic search of either the web of the archives would turn up, much less systematic interviews of a wide range of people, musicians and non-musicians alike. Needless to say, we desperately need an extensive and systematic effort to collect such stories.

* * * * *

This document is in five parts. The first contains various experiences I’ve had as a musician. These are my windows into how emotion & magic arise in musical performance. Many of these experiences are of a kind sometimes known as altered states of consciousness (ASCs). I list these first, not because I think they are somehow special. How could I possibly know that? I list them first simply because I am able to describe them more completely than the anecdotes I have collected from others. With these, I know what I’m talking about. They span my musical life from my middle school years into the current millennium.

The second part contains a few statements by listeners. The third part collects a few anecdotes from musicians I know. The fourth part is a list of passages by various performers that I’ve collected from various sources over the years. I’ve come across these anecdotes in the normal course of my reading. There has never been a period when I specifically looked for such anecdotes, but I’ve read about music and musicians all my life. These stories do not represent a systematric effort to collect such stories.

Finally, I offer a typology of sexual experiences that, Leola, a sex educator and healer, has developed. The typology applies to musical experiences as well. The stories in this collection are mostly about restorative and transformational music, to use her terms.

What’s new with the 14th Edition

That third part, anecdotes from musicians I know, that’s what’s new to the collection, and they’re what prompted me to expand my original preface. At some point I may go through the whole collection and classify them according to the typology in the fourth part. That would be a good way to begin making sense of these various anecdotes. I’m sure various issues would turn up in that process: Some experiences won’t fit one of the categories; others may fit in two or even three; it may be impossible to tell in some other cases. But that’s more than I want to undertake at this time.

About the mandala on the cover

I uploaded the 13th edition to ChatGPT and asked it to create an image suitable for use on the cover. I put that through several iterations before I decided that perhaps a mandala would be more suitable. The final image is based on the fourth mandala ChatGPT created. I uploaded it to Photoshop, played with the color a bit, and added the lens flare effect.

An esoteric account of ego loss during a musical performance

For about a decade now I’ve been publishing a document entitled, EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE. That document was created on October 16, 2015. It consists of anecdotes about ‘strange’ things that have happened to musicians while performing, but I also have a few anecdotes about things happening to people while listening. As I can across another anecdote or three, I’d add them to the document, which has now undergone 12 revisions since I first created it. I created Version 13 on April 14, 2025.

For 60 years...

But the activity, collecting anecdotes about ‘strange’ musical experiences is much older than that. I have three files on my computer that date back to 1995. One is entitled “My Music Exper.” It contains detailed notes about some of my own experiences. Another file: “Peaks & ASCs.” [ASC = altered states of consciousness.] That’s anecdotes about other people’s experiences that I found in various places. The third file, “Music ASCs, mine & others,” consolidates the first two.

But I’ve been at this much longer than 30 years. The oldest of my experiences dates back to my tween years, over six decades ago. I would experience momentary states of lightheadedness while playing high notes on the trumpet. I had no idea what was gone. The experiences were pleasant, but I feared that something was wrong with me. Maybe I had cancer?!! But the experiences stopped and I thought no more of them until I learned some years later that those moments probably reflect restricted blood flow to the brain caused by the strain of playing high notes. Tension in the neck muscles pinched blood vessels. So, nothing to worry about. I wish I’d have known that back then. [If you go to YouTube and search on “trumpeters fainting” you’ll get some clips of the phenomenon.]

Ego loss

As altered states go, then, that one seems of relatively little consequence. But they weren’t all like that. In 1971 or so I had an experience that shook me to the core. Here’s how I describe it:

During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.

On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.

That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memories faded & the ambivalence too. I’m playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.

Had I remained relaxed, I suspect that state would have been SUSTAINED.

How often does that happen to musicians? I don’t know, no one does. I’ve collected a number of anecdotes where something like that seems to be happening, but I can’t be sure. There’s no way of telling whether WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM is the same as WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. We don’t talk about such things, much less attempt to describe them carefully and attempt to understand and explain them.

At the time – peak counterculture – me and my friends were very interested in these kinds of experiences. So I’d read about such things. I knew it was some kind of mystical experience, but beyond that, nada.

How common are such experiences?

And even beyond that, I know that such experiences are more common than we realize. Many people have such experiences, but don’t know what to make of them. How do I know this to be so? Well, yes, sure, I’ve read that it is so, though I can’t offer citations at the moment. But it’s more than that.

Some decades ago I was teaching composition at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. I had my students work from a collection of classic readings on a variety of topics. One reading was a chapter from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. I forget just which chapter. In any event, on a whim, I asked the class how many had had a mystical experience (as discussed by James). I’d say – this happened a long time ago – over two thirds of the students raised their hands. I was stunned. I had expected maybe two or three out of a class of 20 or so students.

So I gave them the option of writing about their experience. Many of them took the option. I’d judge that, say, half those who had written didn’t have a mystical experience as James had described, but the others did. That means that some significant number of my students – say five or six – had had an experience of a type about which mainstream American culture has nothing to say. They are thus on their own trying to understand what had happened to them. I do not think this is a good situation.

As Claude put it to me in a recent conversation:

The predicament you identify is significant: when people have profound experiences that fall outside the dominant cultural narrative, they're left without context or community to help integrate these experiences meaningfully. Without frameworks to understand what’s happened, people might:

1. Question their mental health or rationality
2. Keep these formative experiences private out of fear of judgment
3. Miss opportunities to develop these aspects of human experience
4. Feel isolated in what could otherwise be a connecting experience

Modern Western culture tends to compartmentalize these experiences into either religious contexts (where they’re often narrowly defined) or dismiss them entirely. The middle ground—treating mystical experiences as normal human phenomena worthy of thoughtful engagement without requiring specific religious frameworks—is largely absent.

Creating such a middle ground, that’s one the things I’m up to, as are others.

To that end, I want to offer an esoteric account of that experience. That is to say, an account within a conceptual framework that studies such things, and has done so for years. That framework is that provided by Hinduism and Buddhism. While I know about bit about those religions, and the associated philosophical traditions, ChatGPT knows more. So I consulted it. First I ask it about a general class of transcendent experiences, then I focus on that one musical experience of mine.

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An esoteric account of an old experience

Explain these terms for me: Satari, Nirvana, Moksha.

Gladly. These are profound and nuanced terms, each emerging from distinct but overlapping Indian philosophical and religious traditions. While they all relate to liberation, transcendence, or spiritual fulfillment, they differ in emphasis, metaphysical framework, and cultural origin.

1. Moksha (Sanskrit: मोक्ष)

Tradition: Hinduism, Jainism, also some forms of Sikhism
Literal meaning: Release, liberation, freedom

Essence:

• Moksha is freedom from samsara—the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
• It is achieved through self-realization: recognizing the eternal Self (Atman) as one with Brahman (the ultimate reality).
• This realization dissolves karma, ignorance (avidya), and attachment.

Characteristics:

• Moksha is a positive transcendence—the soul remains, but in union with the divine.
• It is often described as blissful, eternal, and formless, but not annihilation.
• Paths to moksha include Jnana Yoga (wisdom), Bhakti Yoga (devotion), and Karma Yoga (selfless action).

Think of moksha as enlightenment with continuity—the soul wakes up and returns to its source.

2. Nirvana (Sanskrit: निर्वाण, Pali: Nibbāna)

Tradition: Buddhism (and to a lesser extent Jainism)
Literal meaning: Extinguishing, blowing out (like a flame)

Essence:

• Nirvana is the cessation of craving, aversion, and delusion—the forces that generate karma and suffering.
• It results in freedom from samsara, but through the extinction of the self as we conventionally know it.
• There is no eternal soul (Atman) in Buddhism—so Nirvana is not a reunion, but a release into non-clinging awareness.
• Characteristics:
• Sometimes described as unconditioned, timeless, beyond thought.
• It is not a “place” but a state of being beyond becoming.
• Often misunderstood as nihilism, but in Buddhist thought it is a liberating peace beyond duality.

Think of Nirvana as extinguishing the fire of identity and illusion—entering stillness without residue.

3. Satari (likely a variant of Satari in Sri Vaishnavism) Tradition: Hinduism (esp. Vaishnavism—devotion to Vishnu or his avatars like Rama and Krishna)

Literal/ritual meaning:

• Satari refers to a ceremonial crown or headdress associated with Vishnu.
• In temple rituals, the Satari is placed on the devotee’s head as a blessing.
• It contains a small representation of Vishnu’s feet—symbolizing humility, surrender, and grace.

Symbolic essence:

• Accepting the Satari means placing the divine will above the ego.
• It signifies complete devotional surrender (prapatti)—a core theme in Vaishnavism.
• The Satari ritual dramatizes the idea that moksha is granted by divine grace, not just effort.

Think of the Satari as a symbol of surrender, the crown of the ego bowed before the feet of the divine.

Embodied Transcendence

At about 0:43:

I hear about a lot of obligatory sex, and I hear about good enough sex, crazy sex, rough sex, passionate sex, and I hear about a lot of bad sex, but not this dissolving thing. Altered States. You know what I'm talking about. We've all experienced them in nature at the top of a mountain, or sitting at the edge of the water, walking through the woods, listening to music, playing music, dancing, drugs. Time and space dissolve. It's like the edges of the body seem to disappear, diffuse. It's that crazy Oneness thing. For me it begins to feel like this sweet cool rain that begins to expand through my veins, but it's also electric, which probably doesn't make sense but that's how it feels, and I experience it through my body.

At about 13:49:

I’ve got myself on a couple of dating portals, but partners that are interested in that kind of transcendent communion, they’re in short supply. I speak to men and women daily hopefully helping them relax their tensions so they can have just a small taste of what I know is possible. I miss that embodied Transcendence. But here’s what I think. I think the erotic was a portal for me, but the field is much bigger than that. The field includes all of reality: music and dance and sex and drugs and art and joy and bliss and grief and fear and birth and death. I’d like each of us to discover our own really unique and distinctive door into that field, so that we all of us can experience the reality, particularly in these times, of our profound communion and connection.

By way of calibration and reference, see the post  Recreational, Restorative, and Transformative experience in music and sex.

Iliza Shlesinger talks about her comedy

I've been watching a lot of Iliza Shlezinger these days. I like her work a great deal. Here's an interview she back in December of 2017.

Iliza Shlesinger hit comedy gold when she became the only woman and youngest comedian to be named NBC’s "Last Comic Standing" in 2008, and she’s been on the rise ever since. She has starred in several hit Netflix comedy specials and is the creator and star of "Forever 31" on Hulu and the late-night show "Truth & Iliza" on Freeform. On all platforms, she provides a mix of feminism, social commentary, on-point voices and characters, and a fresh take on the comedy scene.

Now, Shlesinger brings her signature wit to her new book, Girl Logic: The Genius and the Absurdity—we know it’ll be funny and insightful for both the men and women in the audience. Spend an evening with Iliza Shlesinger and get the inside scoop from one of comedy’s rising talents.

Near the end she's talking about relating to the audience during a performance (c. 58:59):

the more you do this like ten years in and more it becomes, I hate to say spiritual, but there is like a spiritual mathematics about it, you start to feel an energy, and you start to, this sounds just so hokey, but it's true, you start to feel like you ride this wave, and if you tap into it, like you and the audience are one, and you know if I raise my voice here, that's gonna get a better laugh than if I just stop, and it's it becomes very musical, and that you kind of just happened to that eventually

Jerry Seinfeld has said similar things, including the comparison with music. I can't point to a specific passage in an interview at the moment, but there's a remark at the end of this post that's moving in that direction.

Recreational, Restorative, and Transformative experience in music and sex

While cruising the web the other day I came across the website of Leola, Talk Tantra to Me, and found a blog post from June 18, 2023, entitled “The 4 types of Sex,” where she talks of reproductive, recreational, restorative, and transformational sex. I realized that, while the first category doesn’t apply to music, the other three obviously do. I then did what I find myself doing quite often these days, consulting a chatbot. I uploaded Leola’s typology to Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonata and asked Claude if three of her categories applied to music. Claude agreed that they did. I then uploaded an earlier version of this document to Claude and asked Claude to review it against those categories. Claude did so.

So, I present that material below. First, I’ll give you Leola’s typology. Then I quote a passage from an essay by my teacher and colleague, the late David Hays, in which he talks about the restorative effect of watching performances by the New York City Ballet. Last, I present my conversation with Claude.

I have attached the information in this post to my compilation: EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE. Download it here: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_13.

Four kinds of sexual experience

Here is Leola’s post about 4 types of sex: https://www.talktantratome.com/post/the-4-types-of-sex

These are the four kinds, along with her brief characterizations of them:

Reproductive sex is exactly what it sounds like. It is sex with the intention of making a baby. It is my experience that reproductive sex is the most acceptable across the world. There are many religious institutions that claim reproduction should be the only motivation for sex.

Recreational sex has the intention of enjoying bodily pleasure and passing the time. And that’s about it. Just for fun… for the orgasms. It is my experience that this is the intention for most sexual behavior.

Restorative sex is using intimacy and life force energy to heal the body, mind, heart, or soul. Restorative sex can manifest in many different ways and heal innumerable parts of ourselves, but it all comes down to energy and emotion. Emotion is energy in motion (e-motion). When we avoid, minimize, or bottle up our e-motions, it may manifest as a dis-ease in the emotional and physical bodies. When you have restorative sex, intentionally or not, you are actively moving energy… you are inviting e-motion to release, clear, and heal. For this reason, restorative sex can be very cathartic… it can bring up past traumas… it can feel like therapy.

Transformational sex offers the divine experience of changing your life, the way you see the world, or the ways you connect with others. Transformational sex can lead to cosmic orgasms - those in which you feel like you’ve left your body. It could also mean exploring new things in bed, like kink or new positions or connecting with more than one other person. These sorts of sex-plorations can reveal new and transformative paths to pleasure and presence, shifting the way you perceive yourself and the world.

The restorative effect of watching the New York City Ballet

Back in 1993 David Hays published an essay entitled, “The Evolution of Expressive Culture,” https://www.academia.edu/9547332/The_Evolution_of_Expressive_Culture.

He had spent the last decade and a half of his life in New York City, where he became interested in the ballet. He bought season tickets to performances by the New York City ballet. While the article is about expressive culture in general (the plastic arts, music, dance, theater, and religion), he takes ballet as his central example. 

 Hays asked: 

Why and how does ballet achieve its powerful effect? At a typical performance of the City Ballet, a large part of the audience are naive. They are not familiar with the pieces being danced; many have never seen them before (the intake of breath that can be heard when the curtain rises on an effective stage set is evidence enough). They are not much expert in the art; the accounts that tie published in newspapers and magazines are generally superficial, often in my judgment missing the essence of the work altogether. Audiences give ovations for performances that seem to me mediocre. Yet the difference in the crowd between entrance and exit is almost tangible. Watching the ballet has changed their mood in a favorable way. Is such a change to be seen between those entering and leaving a great museum of painting or sculpture?

A clue appears in a work that is highly idiosyncratic in both substance and form, Peter A. Bucknell’s (1979) Entertainment and Ritual 600 to 1600. He deals only with England, and says (p. 189):

The ‘magic’ contained in these dances was something that even the dancer could not explain or understand. Because there was something outside the world around him which only dancing seemed to contact–like private prayer–so dancing was pursued in secret.

In secret, but not in solitude. The people of a village would go into the woods at night to dance together, as the people of bands and villages have danced, probably, through the whole history of our species. Bucknell quotes Stubbes (Anatomy of Abuses, 2nd ed., 1583) to the effect that two-thirds of the girls who spend the night in the woods around the Maypole are “violated” (p. 185). Such activities are not acceptable to Catholic religion, or to the Anglican Church that followed it in England; and the Church was inordinately powerful in England at the time. But, reports Bucknell, the Church could not stop these dances (p. 186).

My intention is not to emphasize the sexuality; ‘magic’ is what I think is most important. Balanchine captured that magic, brought it under artistic control, and the New York City audience came into contact with something “outside the world around.” For an audience that probably cannot achieve that contact by prayer, the effect is truly spectacular. Without the artistic control, and the creative genius, Balanchine’s predecessors and contemporaries achieved effects of a much lower order.

While Hays does not use the word “restorative,” that is clearly what he has in mind when he observes: “Yet the difference in the crowd between entrance and exit is almost tangible. Watching the ballet has changed their mood in a favorable way.” That, changing our mood in a favorable way, is the purpose of expressive culture.

Three kinds of music

Finally, we come to my conversation with Claude 3.7. First, after uploading Leola’s typology (which I reproduced above) I asked it whether or not it thought three of the types, recreational, restorative, and transformation, applied to music. Here is Claude’s response:

That's a fascinating parallel! Music and sexuality do share some interesting commonalities across those three categories. Let me explore this connection:

Recreational Music: Just as people engage in recreational sex for pleasure and enjoyment, music is often consumed purely for entertainment and pleasure. Think of dance music, pop songs, or any music that people enjoy casually. The focus is on immediate gratification, fun, and passing time enjoyably. This might be listening to your favorite playlist while commuting or dancing at a club - the primary goal is enjoyment in the moment.

Restorative Music: Music therapy is a well-established field that uses music for healing emotional and psychological wounds. People often describe certain music as "healing" or use specific playlists to process grief, reduce anxiety, or manage stress. The cathartic release that comes from both listening to and creating music mirrors the emotional release described in restorative sexual experiences. Consider how people turn to certain songs during breakups or use music to "cry it out."

Transformational Music: This is perhaps the most striking parallel. Many people describe profound, life-changing experiences through music - whether at a transcendent live performance, during deep listening experiences, or while creating music. The "cosmic" quality described in transformational sex has its equivalent in musical experiences that people describe as transcendent or mystical. Think of religious music traditions, certain psychedelic music experiences, or the overwhelming emotional response some people have to particular musical pieces.

In both domains, these experiences involve surrendering to something larger than oneself, altered states of consciousness, and potentially profound shifts in perspective or identity.

This framework offers an interesting lens for understanding why music has such a powerful presence across human cultures. Like sexuality, music connects the physical (soundwaves, rhythm, bodily response) with the emotional and even spiritual dimensions of human experience.

Then I uploaded an earlier version of this document and asked Claude for comments:

I've reviewed the document you shared, “EMOTION and MAGIC in MUSICAL PERFORMANCE.” This collection of anecdotes and testimonials is fascinating and directly connects to our conversation about the parallels between sexuality and music!

The document provides rich examples of musicians experiencing states that align perfectly with the three categories we discussed:

Recreational Music Many musicians in the document describe playing for enjoyment, but then something shifts. Penn Gillette's story about being overwhelmed by his bandmate Jonesy's solo represents this recreational experience turning into something more profound.

Restorative Music The document contains numerous accounts of emotional release and healing through music. Bill Benzon's own experience with the "lump in the throat" while recording "A Still, Small Voice" shows how music can move emotions and create catharsis. Stephanie Burrous's description of feeling like she's "sitting on the back porch of heaven" when singing deeply resonates with the restorative concept.

Transformational Music This is perhaps most abundantly documented in the collection. Musicians describe:

• Ego loss (“I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music”)
• Being a channel (“It wasn't really about us. You know we were being a channel for creativity to express itself”)
• Altered states (“I suddenly get the feeling that I'm standing next to myself”)
• Collective consciousness (musicians describing becoming "one organism" with their fellow players)

Leonard Bernstein's quote is particularly striking: “I don't know whether any of you have experienced that but it's what everyone in the world is always searching for... you completely forget who you are or where you are and you write the piece right there.”

This collection provides compelling evidence that musicians regularly experience states that parallel the restorative and transformational aspects of sexuality we discussed earlier. The same kind of surrender, healing, connection, and transcendence appear in both domains.

Dreaming Birds

Maria Popova, Do Birds Dream? NYTimes, March 26, 2024.

A study of zebra finches — songbirds whose repertoire is learned, not hard-wired — mapped particular notes of melodies sung in the daytime to neurons firing in the forebrain. Then, during REM, the neurons fired in a similar order: The birds appeared to be rehearsing the songs in their dreams.

An fM.R.I. study of pigeons found that brain regions tasked with visual processing and spatial navigation were active during REM, as were regions responsible for wing action, even though the birds were stilled with sleep: They appeared to be dreaming of flying. The amygdala — a cluster of nuclei responsible for emotional regulation — was also active during REM, hinting at dreams laced with feeling. My night heron was probably dreaming, too — the folded neck is a classic marker of atonia, the loss of muscle tone characteristic of the REM state.

But the most haunting intimation of the research on avian sleep is that without the dreams of birds, we too might be dreamless. No heron, no kiss.

There are two primary groups of living birds: the flightless Palaeognathae, including the ostrich and the kiwi, which have retained certain ancestral reptilian traits, and Neognathae, comprising all other birds. EEG studies of sleeping ostriches have found REM-like activity in the brainstem — a more ancient part of the brain — while in modern birds, as in mammals, this REM-like activity takes place primarily in the more recently developed forebrain.

Several studies of sleeping monotremes — egg-laying mammals like the platypus and the echidna, the evolutionary link between us and birds — also reveal REM-like activity in the brainstem, suggesting that this was the ancestral crucible of REM before it slowly migrated toward the forebrain.

If so, the bird brain might be where evolution designed dreams — that secret chamber adjacent to our waking consciousness where we continue to work on the problems that occupy our days. [...]

As with the mind, so with the body. Studies have shown that people learning new motor tasks “practice” them in sleep, then perform better while awake. This line of research has also shown how mental visualization helps athletes improve performance.

There's more at the link.

It Shook Me, the Light

Bump! This post is from 2010, but it's been on my mind lately. So I'm bumping it to the head of the queue.

 

During the early 1970s I'd played for two years with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion. Modeled on Blood, Sweat, and Tears and on Chicago, the band consisted of 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet (me), and trombone. On “She's Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.

On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn't make it. The sax and I started our improv. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good.

And I tensed up.

It was over.

After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it — “that was nice” — enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been. Did he know what had happened? Or, if not ‘know’ exactly, did he sense a special magic in the performance? I ask because performers and audience often have a very different ‘sense’ of the same performance. Perhaps the guy was just complimenting us on our ‘freak-out’ chops, not on any magic in the music.

That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but also fearing it. A child of the 60s, a very geekish child of the 60s, I’d read quite a bit about altered states of consciousness, as they were called in the scientific literature. I read around in the secondary and tertiary literature on mystical experiences, and even a bit of the primary literature – though just exactly what’s the point of reading a mystic’s account an ineffable encounter with . . . . well, with what, exactly?

I knew such things happened. And now, in little more than a couple of heartbeats, now I too knew. But what is it that I knew?

Other than the experience itself, I knew that what all those people had been writing about was real. It’s not that I doubted it. Still it’s one thing to read about walking on the moon, even to see video footage and photographs of space-suited men walking about. It’s another thing to be there oneself.

But how can one experience be so powerful, so polarizing, that it haunts your thoughts and echoes through your soul for years afterward? What is the human nervous system that THAT can happen? In attributing the experience to the nervous system – as opposed, say, to an encounter with the divine, I do not thereby mean to dismiss it – oh, that? that was just a burp of the nervous system. We cannot dismiss it. The nervous system is us.

Now the memory's faded & the ambivalence too. But I'm playing better music now than ever I did back then. I’m talking not so much about technique – that comes and goes – but about expressive power, about ‘authenticity.’ Is that authenticity and echo of that experience?

Who knows?

* * * * *

Such experiences are common enough among musicians. Over the years I’ve collected accounts from books and articles. Here are some from Jenny Boyd, with Holly George-Warren. Musicians In Tune. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

 

Patty Smyth (p. 161):

When I have had those experiences, I'm singing by myself. I've had those moments when I do feel the voice coming through me, and I know it's coming from out there. It's a certain tone in that voice that makes me feel that way. It chokes me up.

Cece Bullard (pp. 161-162):

It's like you leave your body. It's like you're dizzy and lightheaded and yet right there. My hands just seem to throb, like a pulse almost. It's the best feeling in the world, bar none. It took me a lot of singing lessons before I finally connected with that feeling. The first time it clicked and I connected, I nearly fell down, and I started crying.

Sinéad O'Conner (p. 164):

A lot of times I shake uncontrollably. I can't control the shaking, and it's not because I'm nervous, it's because I'm singing. It's because it's coming out and it's making me shake. It feels like being drunk, it's like an out-of-body experience. There are times when I've done gigs — and it doesn't happen every time you do a show or every time you write something — but they've told me stuff I've done onstage that I'm not aware I've done.

Branford Marsalis (p. 173):

High, you feel high. It's easy to do it physically, but it's hard to do it mentally. I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit. The sublime cannot be routine. Three times, and you never forget them. It's with a combination of musicians, it's never just me.

Ringo Starr (p. 176):

It feels great; its just a knowing. It's magic actually; it is pure magic. Everyone who is playing at that time knows where everybody's going. We all feel like one; wherever you go, everyone feels that's where we should go. I would know if Paul was going to do something, or if George was going to raise it up a bit, or John would double, or we'd bring it down. I usually play with my eyes closed, so you would know when things like that were happening . . . you've got to trust each other.

Huey Lewis (p. 179):

I find it more of a group experience for me. You look around and all of a sudden the song is playing and singing itself. It’s just like a wave that you ride. It’s tremendously exhilarating; it doesn’t take any energy and you look around and say, ‘Yep, this is it!’ It happens quite often but not for long periods of time. Almost at every gig that will happen somewhere for a fleeting moment. Some gigs it happens more often than others, and those are the good gigs.

Eric Clapton (p. 185):

It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes at a certain point. Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not something I could experience on my own. . . . other musicians . . . an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at one point. It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another musician. But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They're all transported toward the same place. That's not very common, but it always seems to happen at least once a show.

I don’t for a moment think these musicians are all describing the same thing. But just how many different things they’re describing, that I don’t know. Branford Marsalis says, “I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit.” Eric Clapton says that “it always seems to happen at least once a show.” Are they talking about the same thing? How could you tell?

Whatever it is, this family of musical experiences, it visits us in this devastating performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “One hand, one heart” by Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa.

Why must (white) folks always be surprised that good jazz musicians work on autopilot?

Sean Carroll's Mindscape #104: David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity. I was blitzing my way through the transcript and came across this passage and just lost it:

0:56:44 David Rosen: Yeah, it is all happening in real time, sometimes as fast as 240 plus beats per minute with cords changing perhaps at every quarter note or every half note, and… So it was amazing in which some of the greatest jazz musicians say things like Miles Davis famous quote, I’ll play and I’ll tell you what it is later seems like it’s amazing, these eminent performers, these anecdotal response to show that they’re actually letting go, they’re releasing that cognitive control to be in more of a state, which I think they’re familiar with the state also in terms of being that experience in terms of getting there and are able to enter that state more easily of relaxing and performing kind of in a bottom-up sensory kind of way.

0:57:37 Sean Miles: Yeah, I wouldn’t venture to compare myself to Miles Davis, even though we share the Miles part of the name, but Dave and I had a presentation that we worked really, really, really super hard on, and we kinda did this kind of surprising thing because we’re kind of doing this meta-demonstration of the surprise effect of the music, and when we finally did the presentation, which was like this is in Nashville at the BMI building in front of a bunch of industry executives… Music industry executives. It was about six minutes long, and so there was a musical part of it, and we get to the Break, the musical break after the first verse, that is the course and the second verse starts and I had the feeling… I don’t know if you know Sean, like when you wake up when you’re on vacation somewhere and you’re jet lagged and you just wake up and you don’t know where you are.

0:58:29 Sean Carroll: All that time.

0:58:29 Sean Miles: That… Yeah, so that’s how I felt, but I was on stage in the middle of the performance and I was highly engaged in it it was like I was carrying the performance and I felt like I was waking up, I didn’t remember anything that happened before, and we were three minutes into the performance.

0:58:46 Sean Carroll: Right and I think that… Help me get it straight here, so there’s this saying that If you’re not an expert, if you have not practiced as much, if you’re just an amateur you’re just learning. Improvisation, maybe creativity more generally, but at least improvisation is more of a system two thing ’cause you’re thinking it, you’re overthinking it or you’re trying to control it very much, and then through training, it becomes a system one thing, it became subconscious and automatic.

I'm tired of hearing and reading of people who are surprised that (good) musicians are "actually letting go, they’re releasing that cognitive control to be in more of a state..." Actually, you mean, actually, really and truly letting go? Where have you been all these years, what cave? That's  old hat, it really really is.

Gimme a break! And you know what, it's the same for classical musicians, and they're not making it up at all. They're playing from a score. But to deliver a convincing performance you've got to let go, you've got to let the score play you. Listen to this, it's happening to/with Carreras and To Kanawa:

Grimes (c) in the zone while producing [and AGI too]

From a conversation with physicist Sean Carroll:

Sean Carroll: 00:10:13 What you’re given in the workspace is the individual sounds and you put them together to a beat? Or are you given whole beats?

Grimes: 00:10:13 Yes. You can construct the sounds from scratch, but you don’t have to. Or you can buy out a sample pack and get sounds, or you can get an 808 or a hardware and make sounds. The way I describe production is, it’s sort of probably like what Mozart used to do except you can actually see it in real time so you don’t have to be able to imagine everything. You’re basically making the whole thing. You’re composing, you’re scoring. You’re writing the melodies, harmonies, whatever. You are making the drums and you construct a piece of music from scratch.

Sean Carroll: 00:10:55 Is it intentional that you start with the beat? Is that a creative choice or it’s just easiest to find the rest of the structure that way?

Grimes: 00:11:05 I just need to know the BPM and I cannot compose to a click. That doesn’t work, so I need to make the beat. I’ll often delete it and make another one that’s better. What I usually do is, I make kind of a crappy one, like a midi. Then I do chords, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Make sounds. Then I’ll do weird wordless vocals that are like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.” Then I go back. It’s sort of like a weird religious experience because it feels like, “What’s happening?”

Sean Carroll: 00:11:40 You get in the zone of something.

Grimes: 00:11:40 You get in the zone, it feels like it’s being written for you. Then you go back and then it’s like a weird puzzle that you go back retroactively and solve. Can we change the synth to a much nicer synth or maybe a hardware synth instead of a software synth? Write lyrics that roughly sound like what I was mumbling. That’s kind of how it works.

Grimes: 00:21:10 Mindfulness is way too wholesome, is basically my thought. Mindfulness is not edgy, it’s not cool, it’s not dark.

Sean Carroll: 00:11:59 I can’t help but think of a Jane Austen novel where after dinner, one of the ladies would play piano and sing. Every woman in society had to have those skills and we’ve lost those since there are records and things like that.

Grimes: 00:12:13 That is interesting. Because women used to, or a geisha used to be a thing. Women would be like fucking … Sorry. Am I allowed to swear?

Sean Carroll: 00:12:19 Yeah. We’ll mark it as explicit. Don’t worry. It’s fine. [...]

Sean Carroll: 00:12:34 What I’m wondering is, does this electronics idea help us bring back the idea that we’re all making music? People, it can be much more widespread?

Grimes: 00:12:42 I do think it should be more widespread and the one thing I love about stuff like Audacity or Ableton or whatever exists, super democratizing music. Because for a while it used to be, in the ’70s or whatever, it’s millions of dollars to make an album. It’s really expensive to go to a studio, record on tape, whatever. That’s all really expensive. It’s still, I would say prohibitively expensive at the moment for a lot of people, but in ten years I think everyone will have access to the same tools, basically.

Here's comes an interesting little bit of generational awareness:

Grimes: 00:14:23 That’s another thing I really wanted to talk about, because I feel like we’re in also the end of art. Human art.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:29 Okay? Elaborate on that.

Grimes: 00:14:32 Once AI, once there’s actually AGI, it’s just going to be so much better at making art than us.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:39 Artificial, sorry, AGI?

Grimes: 00:14:41 Artificial General- once there’s not just AI, it can do one task or basic things.

Sean Carroll: 00:14:49 Not just playing chess.

Grimes: 00:14:50 Once AIs can totally master science and art, which could happen in the next ten years. Probably more like 20 or 30 years. I don’t know what you think. I’m actually curious what you think?

In the beginning it was just Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the idea was to craft a full-scope intelligent machine. But all the actual programs were highly specialized. So in the 1990s someone (Ben Goertzel?) coined the term "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) to cover that full scope, that is, the scope of what AI had aspired to in the beginning.

Carroll is skeptical about the coming AGI and so am I. But that's beside the point.

Musical high: Free, rockin’ and tight as a frog’s bottom

This is cobbled together from notes and from out-takes from my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, and my personal notes.

Zoom!!!

How are we to weigh and understand the following testimony, the first by Branford Marsalis, the second by Eric Clapton?

High, you feel high. It's easy to do it physically, but it's hard to do it mentally. I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit. The sublime cannot be routine. Three times, and you never forget them. It's with a combination of musicians, it's never just me.

It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes at a certain point. Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not something I could experience on my own. . . . other musicians . . . an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at one point. It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another musician. But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They're all transported toward the same place. That's not very common, but it always seems to happen at least once a show [1].

Are these guys talking about the same thing? Branford’s experience happened only three times whereas Clapton’s seems quite common and almost predictable, despite his disclaimer. Is one a better musician than the other? Or do rock and jazz make different demands and give different rewards? All of the above?

As for myself, I had a powerful experience in my mid-20s. During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns, sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement. On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn't make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.

That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memory's faded & the ambivalence too. I'm playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.

Still, there are gigs and there are gigs.

Group Grok

For about a decade near the end of the previous century I played with the Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band in upstate New York. We had about three or four gigs a month—mostly local clubs, private parties, and weddings. In my six or seven years with the band two gigs stand out above all the others, and one of the two was just a bit better than the other one. We played these gigs within the space of a month—I believe, in fact, they were no more than a week or two apart. The gigs were in very different venues. The first one was for a Parent’s Day dance at Skidmore College, an exclusive private school in Saratoga Springs. The second gig, the better of the two, was a club date in a sports bar in North Troy that had a large biker clientele that nite. Two very different venues, two different crowds, but both were dancing crowds, which certainly affected the band’s performance.

Band personel shifted from year to year, but none of the players were full-time professional musicians. During the period in question the band consisted of a lawyer, an advertising executive, a commercial photographer, a car salesman, two men who drove trucks for beverage distributors, and me, a freelance technical writer and independent scholar. I don’t know whether the other players judge these gigs as highly as I do—though they certainly felt they were good at the time. And I should emphasize that my judgement of these gigs is not a judgement about my own playing. I got a fair amount of solo space in general, and I had my usual slots for these gigs. However, I don’t remember anything outstanding in my performance at these particular gigs—that’s a different list. I remember these gigs because the band felt loose, free, rockin’ and tight as a frog’s bottom. We were in synch, among ourselves and with the crowd.

I do not know whether or not anyone in that band was ecstatic on either of these nights. I certainly was not. Nor do I think it matters much, aesthetically, morally. Intellectually, that’s a different matter. That’s about understanding what happens. We’ve hardly even begun that journey.

Transcending

Every athelete and every musician has her routine game. And at some point in her life, and maybe more than one, she plays above her routine level. Most of us have had an experience in some sphere of our lives that lifts us out of ourselves and thereby becomes a touchstone against which we measure our lives. If we live long enough and well enough we may even grow beyond measuring our lives against those moments while still treasuring them and telling stories about them, to our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, to our friends and their children. Those story-tellings are themselves moments of sympathetic communion with our fellows and the connected tissue of those tellings is one of the means by which we preserve and assert our values.

Reference 

[1] These passages are from Jenny Boyd, Musicians In Tune, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, pp. 173 and 185 respectively

"One pill makes you..." – Contrasts on a psychedelic theme

Charlotte Shane reviews two recent books about psychedelics, Tao Lin, Trip, and Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind. Here's a passage from the end of the review:

White families make millions from selling huge quantities of marijuana, while people of color are incarcerated for possession of minor amounts. Young white people broadcast paeans to microdosing on their podcasts, and wealthy white moms write about it in books, but there’s no national conversation about meaningfully reconsidering the incoherent and murderous “war on drugs.” (LSD and psilocybin are Schedule 1 substances, alongside heroin, cannabis, and MDMA, meaning the government regards them among the most addictive and the least medicinally useful.) How to Change Your Mind is steeped in the belief that drugs might be OK in institutionally circumscribed contexts, when overseen and administered by professionals, but that they should not be left in the hands of the pleasure-seeking masses. (“[Do] I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not exactly,” Pollan writes in his conclusion.) Take a moment to picture the populations best positioned to benefit from an arrangement like that, and imagine how much opportunity for mismanagement, price gouging, and general abuse it might allow.

Lin regards psychedelics as subversive, and powerfully pure, because they can make people happy and healthy. (Overwhelmingly, this is the case, and even terrifying trips rarely result in lasting damage—though the drugs can have disastrous results in schizophrenics.) But Pollan looks at an aspect of the psychedelics trend that Lin doesn’t: Its role in Silicon Valley. He mentions Steve Jobs’s claim that dropping LSD was “one of his two or three most important life experiences,” and name-checks Stewart Brand, who thinks that “LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment . . . that distinguish[es] the computer culture of the West Coast.” As a further endorsement, he adds, “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’”

While some drugs can guide a user toward enduring openness or empathy, no drug will instantly render a selfish man selfless, or a cruel woman kind. And if psychedelics are becoming somewhat ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, it’s proof that they can’t automatically instill ethics in a community used to operating without them. (Would you take a drug that made you as a creative as Steve Jobs, if it also made you just as much of an asshole? Don’t answer that.)

Two notes on psychedelic experience (Michael Pollan on Joe Rogan)

Michael Pollan’s just published a book about psychedelic experiences, How to Change Your Mind, and Joe Rogan just had him on his podcast. It’s an interesting and far-ranging conversation. I want to look at two little bits of what Pollan said.

Psychedelics, dreams, and metaphysics

Michael Pollan at about 27:09:

Where do you get the idea of a beyond? Where do you get the idea of a heaven or a hell, if not from some altered state of consciousness? You know, people talk about visiting the underworld in Homer’s time, so how did they do that? Was it dreams? Dreams don’t have the authority that psychedelic experience has. There’s something about psychedelic experience that has this, it’s not just an opinion, it’s not a fantasy. It’s something real, it’s objective truth. William James called this the noetic quality of the mystical experience. And that certitude comes from psychedelics. It seems totally plausible to me that at the earliest stages of humanity if people were indeed taking psychedelics, this might explain how they came up with these ideas.

I want to push back just a little. While Pollan’s right about the noetic quality of (at least some) psychedelic experience, I think he short-changes dreams.

I take my cue from an observation that Weston La Barre made in The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (p. 60):

... the Australian Bushman themselves equate dream-time with the myth-time that is mysteriously brought back in ritual; myth is as timeless as the unconscious mind. It is the delectability of dreams that makes them desirable, and it is their desirability that (along with lowered critical threshold) that gives them their intense “reality” and conviction. The fact that he dreams first forces on man the need to epistemologize.

Our own view of dreams is so thoroughly psychologized that we can easily think of them as just something the mind/brain does. How do dreams appear to people who, lacking the explanatory and theoretical machinery of modern psychology and neuroscience, cannot psychologize them? Why think about dreams at all; why not simply forget about them? What structures and processes must a brain have if it is to remember both dream events and real events, to compare them, note the differences, and wonder about those differences? It seems to me that people lacking the interpretive buffering of this psychologized view of the world might well see dreams as genuine journeys to another realm. When were our ancestors able to do this?

And if they also had the benefit of psychedelics, those experiences would reinforce the metaphysical imperatives of dream experience. The two experiential realms would supplement one another.

The social construction of reality

At about 34:24 ff. Pollan observes:

One of the really striking things, I’ve been on the road now, this is my second week out talking about this book, and I have been struck by how many people have had powerful psychedelic experiences they don’t talk to anybody about. And I come along as a kind of, I don’t know, kind of a credible person who’s interested. And, this is journalists too. They turn of the tape recorder and the say ‘can I tell you a story?’

Something happened to them. It might have been in their twenties, or earlier, that changed the course of their life; and, either because there was a stigma attached to it, or it was kind of had this 60’s woo woo thing about it, or there were kids around, they didn’t feel comfortable. So they kept it in a box labeled ‘weird drug experience’.

But it’s not just a drug experience. This is your mind. The drug may have started the process, but everything you see in this experience – those are real psychological facts, from your unconscious or your interpretation of your environment. It’s not the molecule that fore-ordained this experience....

So you have this big experience and you put it in this box, saying ‘weird drug experience’. But when you take it out sometimes you find that there’s real gold there. There’s fool’s gold too...

It’s become a cliché that reality is a social construction. Crudely put, if we can’t talk about it or otherwise share it with others (thought art, for example), then it doesn’t exist. It’s not real.

Now, once again, we may be talking about these things. We had the counter-cultural 60s, which got quick down pretty quickly. And back in the 19th century we had the fascination that opium held for the British romantics – e.g. Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”.  It’s not obvious where this conversation will go.

Joe Rogan talks with Howard Bloom, Zoooommm!

I couple days ago I was making my regular online rounds when I discovered that Joe Rogan was talking with Howard Bloom THIS VERY MOMENT on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Yeowieee!” said I to myself, “I gotta’ check it out.” Why? Because Bloom is a trip and a half, a force of nature, though just what that nature is, well, that’s not at all clear.

I know Howard. I was in his Paleopsychology Project, corresponded with him for a couple of years and visited him at his Brooklyn apartment a couple of times. He played a crucial role in setting up my book deal, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. But I’m ambivalent about him. He’s very well read, imaginative, and brilliant. But, as my teacher Dave Hays was fond of saying, a great talent requires a great discipline. And Howard lacks discipline. Oh, he works hard–in his own way as hard as James “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” Brown–but hard work is not the point. It’s how you do that work, the craft and care you put into it, that counts.

Howard lavishes his craft and care on words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, on slogans and catch phrases – a number of them turn up in his conversation with Rogan – but he’s not so careful with the underlying ideas. My sense is that Howard has a few underlying themes and ideas that are important to him – everything’s connected; it’s a social world from quarks through galaxies; we long to be part of something bigger than ourselves – and uses those to paper over everything. Or, to switch metaphors, those are his hammers and he uses them to turn everything else into nails. Quarks, Dave Barry, toxoplasmosis, the Yanomami, biological evolution, the 86 billion neurons of the human brain, entropy, the excitement of the crowd at a rock and roll concert (or one of Hitler’s elaborately staged rallies), galaxies, the Big Bang–they’re all nails that Bloom pounds into his grand unified theory of everything. And, at least to some observers, everything turns out to look like the mind of Howard Bloom, a very skillful and industrious Howard Bloom.

Thus, if you look through the comments on his discussion with Rogan–which has almost 580,000 views as I write this and is approaching 4000 comments–you’ll find that a lot of listeners are, shall we say, skeptical, a skepticism often expressed in blunt and nasty terms – as these things go “a narcissistic egomaniac that thinks he’s the modern day Einstein” is rather mild. But you’ll also find some people who are fascinated by Bloom–after all, he drips with fascinating stories, facts, and numbers–and who like him quite a lot. And if you read closely, here and there you’ll find some folks of both minds.

It’s not Bloom that I’m interested in, however, it’s Rogan. But I had to set things up. Like Bloom, Rogan’s an intellectual omnivore, though with a different style and purpose. Bloom is convinced he knows how the world works. Rogan is trying to figure it out. That’s why he talks to all these different folks in his podcasts.

This post is about two points in this long conversation, almost three hours, where Rogan pushes Bloom.

In the Moment

At this point we’re well over an hour into the conversation. Bloom has been talking about how PG Wodehouse and Dave Barry inspired him to write a book about the 60s, then off to quantum physics in Moscow, and then to the “universal brain”–a biggie for Bloom. At roughly 1:23:40 Rogan asks:

JR: “Are you thinking of this while you’re saying it, are you thinking of the vast numbers of people that are listening and watching? Or are you just relaying the information; like are you cognizant?”

HB: “Yeah, both.”

JR: “Both.”

HB: “Because I want...[bit about Einstein giving him is marching orders]... to make good radio for your audience.”

JR: “But once you, what I’m trying to get at is once you’ve got it established in your head that nothing is isolated, that everything is connected, when you speak, are you aware when you’re speaking, that everything is connected? I mean are you actually, consciously thinking of all of these different minds, taking into account of all these different mind-blowing things that you’re saying, and then applying them out in the world.”

HB: “I think so.”

JR: “Yeah.”

HB: “I mean, if you hear it coming out of my mouth, that’s what’s churning around in my brain.”

JR: “You’re such a bright guy, I’m just tryin’ to understand if you’re in the moment, or if you’re in the moment as well as being consciously aware of the spread of information that you’re...”

HB: “Well my obligation is to do both simultaneously.”

“In the moment”, that’s the key phrase. What’s it mean?

Remember, Rogan is a life-long martial arts practitioner and he’s got a decade and a half of experience as a commenter on mixed martial arts. As far as I can tell, MMA is the bedrock of The Joe Rogan Experience, a world of experience Rogan returns to time and again, with many of his guests coming from the MMA world. When Joe Rogan wants to know “What is real?” that’s where he goes.

Being in the moment is the core of that reality. Pure action and sensation, without thought. In the moment.

Music is like that too. I’m a musician, I’ve been there. You aren’t making the music; rather, it manifests through you. Countless other musicians, and listeners too, have been there – I’ve collected a variety of anecdotes in Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance. Bloom also knows it; when he was a publicist in the music business he worked with some of the top acts in the world.

But just what does that have to do with Bloom’s state of mind/being as he talking with Rogan? It’s not clear to me just what Rogan is asking of Bloom, and I don’t think it was clear to Bloom either. No matter. He asked.

However...

It sometimes happens when writing. I wrote one paper, about Shelley, in such a state when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. It’s certainly not something I set out to do. I didn’t even know it was possible. But, there I was, late at night, with the paper due at noon the next. I was beat–I’m not at all a night person. I sat down at the typewrite and WHAM! It happened. The paper wrote itself over the course of, I don’t know, three, four, five hours or more. I finished it at dawn. And it was a good one.

Never again.

Is that what Rogan was asking of Bloom? Is he asking if Bloom was in some kind of transcendent state as well as “being consciously aware of the spread of information that you’re...”?

Who knows.

Psychedelics and the default mode network (DMN)

Michael Pollan, The New York times Magazine:

If the ego can be said to have an address, it would probably be in something called the default mode network, a high-level hub in the brain linking the frontal cortex to older centers of memory and emotion. The D.M.N. appears to be involved in a range of operations related to our sense of self, like rumination, time travel (contemplating the past and future), theory of mind (the ability to impute mental states to others) and the so-called autobiographical self: It helps us integrate whatever’s happening to us now with the story of who we are, thereby giving us an abiding sense of a self that is consistent over time. Neuroscientists recently began imaging the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD, and they were surprised to find that, rather than increasing brain activity, as you might expect, the drugs radically quieted traffic in the D.M.N. In particular, when volunteers report the experience of ego dissolution, their brain imaging shows a precipitous drop in D.M.N. activity.

Taking this network temporarily offline may allow the whole system to “reboot,” in the words of Robin Carhart-Harris, a pioneering neuroscientist who has done extensive work imaging tripping brains at Imperial College London. The “loosening of cognition” that results, he says, is especially helpful to people suffering from the varieties of mental stuckness, including depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession.

All these conditions, as Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, points out, may share an etiology. “There are a range of difficulties and pathologies in adults, like depression, that are connected with the phenomenology of rumination, and an excessively narrow, ego-based focus,” says Gopnik, whose research explores the consciousness of children, which she believes bears a similarity to psychedelic consciousness. “You get stuck on the same thing, you can’t escape, you become obsessive, perhaps addictive. It seems plausible to me that psychedelic experience could help get us out of those states, create an opportunity in which the old stories of who we are might be rewritten.”

The true nature of reality is strange

I’m a regular reader of Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution (which he runs along with Alex Tabarrok). As some of you know, Cowen is a libertarian economist with various and capacious reading habits, a foodie, and a collector of Haitian art. He’s just published a post entitled “Why I don’t believe in God”. I’m sympathetic with some of his points.

Thus:

2. The true nature of reality is so strange, I’m not sure “God” or “theism” is well-defined, at least as can be discussed by human beings. That fact should not lead you to militant atheism (I also can’t define subatomic particles), but still it pushes me toward an “I don’t believe” attitude more than belief. I find it hard to say I believe in something that I feel in principle I cannot define, nor can anyone else.

2b. In general, I am opposed to the term “atheist.” It suggests a direct rejection of some specific beliefs, whereas I simply would say I do not hold those beliefs. I call myself a “non-believer,” to reference a kind of hovering, and uncertainty about what actually is being debated. Increasingly I see atheism as another form of religion.

I would especially mention that first clause, “The true nature of reality is so strange…” We do almost all our thinking within circumcised boundaries. Those boundaries may be more or less well defined of they may be fuzzy, but they are boundaries and most of the world is outside them. But when we try to think about it all, things just go wonky.

Coming to the end:

6. I do take the William James arguments about personal experience of God seriously, and I recommend his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature to everybody — it’s one of the best books period. But these personal accounts contradict each other in many cases, we know at least some of them are wrong or delusional, and overall I think the capacity of human beings to believe things — some would call it self-deception but that term assumes a neutral, objective base more than is warranted here — is quite strong. Presumably a Christian believes that pagan accounts of the gods are incorrect, and vice versa; I say they are probably both right in their criticisms of the other.

7. I see the entire matter of origins as so strange that the “transcendental argument” carries little weight with me — “if there is no God, then everything is permitted!” We don’t have enough understanding of God, or the absence of God, to deal with such claims. In any case, the existence of God is no guarantee that such problems are overcome, or if it were such a guarantee, you wouldn’t be able to know that.

Personal experience, that too is strange. Music is friendly to such experience. Drugs too.

Will those post-singularity computers have such experiences? Is that what we are, a mystical experience in the mind of a post-singularity computer?

How strange.