Emotional Processing – Part 3

Though depression is a wide subject that can be delved into extensively, this article if you will is about emotional processing of the depressed emotion and where it occurs. For the most part it seems to be the frontal lobe region. As most computers can be reprogrammed, the brain can also be reprogrammed as discussed before but is there a more concrete medical way of doing so besides medications of course.

Recently a ground breaking procedure was performed that actually assisted a clinically depressed man of over 30 years to achieve normalcy in his emotional state. It essentially involved shocking the the over active emotional processing center of his brain with an electric current, and having repeated shocks applied to his emotional processing center.

Though at first glance this harkens back to the old days of lobotomies and psycho-psychology, it actually proved to be a successful procedures with no observable negative effects. It involved simply applying an electric current to the neurons which were over firing, so they may be reset.

The procedure is not actually unheard of because it has had success in Parkinson’s patients but its so new and requires further clinical examination. In a way this is almost like a physical rebooting of a small portion of the brain computer which has gone into a “blue screen state”. The computer isn’t damaged but its functions are restarted with a clean state so it may begin processing again.

In many ways emotional processing especially of the emotion of sadness is a very observable phenomenon. Perhaps one day we’ll understand it even better and learn how to control and harness it to make it a more productive function of the brain.

Emotional Processing – Part 2

The changes that occur in the brain as soon as an individual feels sad are almost instantaneous. As we mentioned yesterday, from MRI scans, it was determined that when a person suffers a bout of depression, parts of the brain actually shut off so that that those centers that process the emotion of sadness are in full control. It’s no wonder people can’t function while upset or depressed.

It’s even more unnerving to presume that other parts of the brain which could be used to distract one from being upset don’t function either during the down state, making it difficult to get out of the situation.
Essentially it’s a matter of reprogramming one’s own brain to distract themselves from their own upset thoughts, perhaps by convincing themselves that their thoughts are actually happy ones.

Popular psychology and mainstream psychology often talks about cognitive behavioral therapy as a method of restructuring one’s own thought’s into productive ones through a process called re-framing. Personally having dealt with situations where I was told the most positive things in the world that one could do to improve their emotional state lay in CBT, I actually found it hard to believe my own re-framed perceptions of myself and thoughts until I realized the actual benefit it was having for me and it was easier to put it into effect.

Studies of depression in individuals have shown that people who were depressed and remained depressed after a certain time period, had shown more activity in their frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain associated with logical thought and rational processing where as people who had escaped their depressive episodes from the same study group had shown more activity in the rear part of their brain, which is more associated with processing visual information and immediate environmental stimulus.

This observation somewhat lends itself to the idea that one can possibly get involved with the outside world more actively, perhaps by watching movies that appeal to their senses or interacting with people or immersing themselves in rich experiences, may help alleviate the depressive symptoms. So it’s been determined that sadness exists in particular regions of the brain and physiologically through the disease of depression it can actually become a debilitating condition.

Perhaps this a part of the reason why babies can detect and are sensitive to sadness in people, because even more so than any other mental condition at least, it can prevent an adult from being an effective care-taker.
Next time a more interesting look into emotional processing and the physical description of it.

Emotional Processing

It was recently determined that a baby’s brain is extra sensitive to emotion, as in, on the neural level. Specificaly this means that as soon as an emotion such as sadness is detected in a person’s voice, the infant brain will react a particular way. If only adults could have the same ability when it came to children. We can give them food when they want food, rock them to sleep when they are tired, shield them from people they don’t like, and save our selves a lot of headaches from incessant crying.

This processing of sad sounds such as crying or a voice in despair,occurs in the temporal cortex of the brain. The temporal cortex is responsible for the understanding of speech and apparently, now as we understand,the processing emotion related to sound in the brain.

The evolutionary implications of this are still questionable since there are key questions that require answers, such as: Whether the emotional processing occurs only for specific individuals for example more for women than men, or more for the parents? Does this occur for the baby when he is sleeping vs. awake and what are the differences in activation of the between the two states What are the long-term effects of exposure to this melancholy activation stimulus, and does it change a baby’s personality as they get older.

So far this phenomenon seems to be only applicable to the case for sad emotions, and not so much for neutral or happy sounds. Inclusively, no information concerning angry voices has arisen, but one would suspect that there is a brain activation in this case. This may be a simple evolutionary survival mechanism, because a sad voice could indicate that there is danger or despair nearby so someone would not be able to care for the child or may be more concerned with their own immediate needs instead of tending to the child.

It would actually be nice to know if there was some sort of symbiotic relationship on the bio-neurological level between adult and child, where the child’s face and presence would be able to temporarily enhance the positive emotions of a person so that they may be more attentive to the child’s needs. This way both child and adult could benefit,or at least feel like they are benefiting. Regardless of the findings or the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from this interesting study, it does open up the door to another interesting subject that is related and more pertinent as a subject of interest to everyday life.

Emotional Processing and Depression

The emotion of sadness is a strong one, and it does indeed have a powerful effect on our ability to think. Babies can process sadness and can detect it as we have seen, but can not reason depression as adults can because they do not know the implications of things. This capacity is highly in grained into our psyche though.

It has been demonstrated through the use of MRI’s and other techniques that the brain actually shuts off and redirects all its capacity to dealing with sadness. That means you truly are, on a physiological,psychological and physical way, unable to think effectively when you are depressed. The next entry will explore this idea more in-depth.

Sound Triggers and Thundershirts

Animals being the instinctual creatures they are, respond to external stimulus almost immediately. Much more quickly than the limited perception of our urban-dulled instincts can afford, in fact. Even domesticated pets are especially sensitive to loud noises, to the point where it seems almost as if their autonomous nervous system takes over and they begin to take very active measures to avoid being exposed to “whatever” caused the sound. In the case of dogs they like to run fast and far when in the presence of loud noise, and even cause damage to property by digging or clawing their way through drywall, and even jumping to their death over walls into oncoming traffic. A worse way to go than an imaginary sound I would think. It’s actually reminiscent of how I felt as a kid, really loud and especially directed noises such as people yelling or glass being shattered or dropped would really cause me lots of duress. I never really did get used to it, which brings me to my next point.

The best time to teach someone is when they are young, so obviously it’s best to train them when they are still babies by purposefully causing loud noise and dropping objects near them on a regular basis. it may sound cruel at first, but preparing them for “heartache” when they are younger definitely makes them a lot more prone to survive when they are older.

But sometimes you just can’t train your dog to withstand loud sounds, because’ he’s too old or too sensitive, so other remedies exist, some of them pretty simple like typing your dog to a leash when you know there’s going to be an excess of loud stimuli (like if fireworks are going off around your house). Other more interesting ones are the concepts of Thundershirts, which is a sort of compression shirt which relaxes the animal because of the persistent pressure on their body (e.g. perhaps by giving them something to focus on other than their own discomfort). Although sound, and the effects on the brain and the potential effects that are beneficial to the body are primary topics of the brain in terms of relaxation and focus, I’ve decided to explain any relaxation topics of interest that I find in general, since the idea here is to provide useful information to others and in general learn by myself.

With that said, apparently this thundershirt concept is applied on a regular basis to children with autism and can be applied to children with other nervous conditions to get them to relax through the concept of deep pressure touch. Knowing myself to be a very nervous and unrelaxed person at one point in my life, I would turn to relaxation techniques and when that didn’t work, something more forward like drinking. The relaxation wrap sounds like a wonderful idea in this case, and as an idea can probably help aid in insomnia for animals and possibly one day in the future, people.

Interesting points that have arisen are exactly how sound affects the animal brain and causes action in the nervous system, as it relates to control. In many ways, negative reinforcement is the primary teaching mechanism for many people and animals. Who would after all do something if the risk of pain is too great unless you are a member of the Jackass crew or the benefits of reward are greater. A loud sound is naturally in grained in most of use to be a sign of trouble, and thus even passive loud impulsive sounds we usually are startled by. Even the thundershirt if not used on properly can cause the dog’s Pavlovian response to be triggered and them associate the shirt with the storm (or fireworks) providing that the shirt doesn’t relax them sufficiently. The mind in general is an interesting reactive mechanism.

The Mozart Effect

Sound as an environmental phenomenon has the ability to effect our lives just as much as the air we breath, yet many people don’t really think about the affect of sound on our health unless it impacts us negatively. For example we all are aware that a train passing by at a high-speed will usually cause a sound loud enough to damage our ear drums. Listening to loud music constantly over the course of years will lead to a form of ear damage called tinnitus as well as general loss of hearing. We tend to focus on the negative and ignore the blatant positive sometimes.

As we’ve discussed in several entries in this blog already, music can affect our brain in several ways and at some point I will go much deeper into the concept of entrainment (once again, for you non-regular readers, the ability to play certain frequencies of music and cause the brain to deliberately react in certain ways as depicted in EEG data :). For now, let’s accept that on a simpler level, we know the effects of certain types of music for example blues can relax us or make us reflective, and upbeat rock music can inspire us to pursue a goal aggressively. Music can make us feel an intense array of emotions such as fear or anguish to happiness and positive motivation, especially if one is attached emotionally to particular music at hand. Granted from personal standpoint, I would find it rather difficult to get attached to one of Mozart’s Sonatas (personal preference), perhaps our brain’s can detect the underlying patterns which help to organize the “musical information” better.

Less commonly considered are reflective music, inspirational music, music that just puts us to sleep and which can relax us when we feel tense. All these considerations may lead us to consider creating a music diet so to speak. Perhaps in the morning, if we want to get up earlier with a little more pep in our step we can put ona waltz or at work we can listen to highly organized music to get us focused on our task. It’s kind of like eating eggs and sausages, for breakfast and maybe a salad and a hamburger for lunch, and something heavier like pasta, for dinner, which will eventually help you in going to sleep. Personally I can think uaof worse pills to swallow than listening to music regularily throughout the day to assist your work.

The “Mozart Effect”

Don Campbell, world-famous music researcher wrote a book in 1997, based off of the 1993 study by Raucher, Shaw and Ky, called “The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Unlock the Creative Spirit”. The book itself has been used as a basis for a number of follow-up studies and follow-up products that purportedly assist in strengthening the mind with the power of classical music; e.g. the Mozart effect.

The Mozart effect is controversial in itself, since the results of the experiment that gave rise to the theory were inconsistent but promising enough to allow serious consideration. Music researchers and therapists often make a career out of studying and applying this phenomenon. Specialists refer to the power of classical music to cure or assist in the “reduction of effect” of several types of cognitive diseases, such as add, autism and dyslexia.

Whether or not here exists a so-called Mozart Effect, there are benefits to utilizing power of music in an organized fashion, e.g. in the form of a “musical diet”,to help aid your productivity throughout the day and your life. As usual I’ll be exploring this more with you in a future episode.

9:53

Digital or Not

Prince, the artist formerly known as relevent, has recently spoken out against digital music. He says that the effect of digital music on the brain is negligible because it’s presented in bits instead of a continuous analogue stream. Though he does have a point, that digitally reproduced music, depending on the sampling rate and quantization don’t completely reproduce the analogue tones that it was generated from, this is like saying that there is no such thing as a good quality picture because it’s all outputted in pixels. His understanding of the effect of music on the brain is possibly almost as limited as his album sales to the below 40 crowd.

What is the Difference Between Listening to Digital And analogue Music?

The thing to remember about digital music is that it is essentially a method of storing and reproducing analogue music in an efficient fashion.
How good a digital reproduction sounds is a matter of how accurately you want to reproduce the analogue music you originally heard.

The process of producing a digital replica of a sound involves taking a continuous sound say out of an acoustic guitar, recording it via a microphone and then turning into an electrical signal. This electrical signal is then chopped up into pieces, via a process called quantization. In order to really understand why you must be familiar with the concept of computer storage. Without going into too much depth, computers need to store data in discontinuous chunks of memory called bits. For a tutorial on this concept, go here. For now, let’s just say that since music is data, it must be treated as such by being made digital. When you chop something up and make it digital, one would imagine that you are losing information, which is true. However, if the information loss is small enough, then the difference between the original wave form and the digital replica is imperceptible. This is called A/D error.

Of course to achieve this low error rate, one must be able to record at a high enough quantization rate, and also play back the sound at a high enough fidelity. The same principle applies to when video is viewed off of a regular digital LCD vs. a high-definition Television. High definition televisions have small enough pixels, such that the error between the analogue TV signals and the digital picture you see are negligible.

What About Digitally Produced Music?

This is another fine point to consider. A common example is a guitar hooked up to a solid state amp vs. a tube amp. A solid state amplifier in short produces a digital version of electric guitar sounds, although you hear the analogue waveform. A tube emp produces an analogue sound, which is also heard in analogue. Many musicians with well-trained ears are in disagreement over whether the sound outputted from a “digital amplifier” really sounds much different from that produced by an analogue amplifier. This is indeed a relevent debate because artifacts produced by tube amplifiers are not reproducable by solid state amplifiers (yet) and vice versa. The confusion The Idiot currently known as Prince seems to have is between digital storage and digital production. If Prince was truly against digital music then he would stop using reverb or playing his inane music out of Fuzz Pedals. I digress.

In short to assume digital music whether reproduced analogue or digitally produced music via a synth ora solid state amplifier affects the brain in different ways is not a simple enough assertion to make, but would be an interesting study to perform.

11:30

Music As Tool: An Introduction

The effect of music on a person’s mood is indeed quite strong. Some of the physiological responses are created in the body are same euphoria inducing responses associated with sex, eating and exercise. It’s no wonder music is so addictive and a necessary part of the lives of many people.

This phenomenon is a major facet of song craft, and how many professional musicians create songs that will create emotions. Throughout the centuries, music has been created with the intent of inspiring people to war, inspiring people to love, and more recently inspiring people to exercise. In more ambitious ensembles this is done with the intent of coercing particular subliminal responses in people. This is possibly why rock music is used in several commercials as incidental music, because it imparts to you a whole range of emotions that make you feel excited about buying a product, or that you are making a bold decision in doing so.

Another interesting observation along the lines of the rhythmic component of music, that we were talking about yesterday is that although certain types of music can really get you going, the capacity to do so is heavily interpretation based. Different strokes for different folks. Before a particular piece of music can have an effect on you, much research indicates that you’d have to have an emotional connection to the piece already. This means that you’d probably have to listen to it more than once or during a “traumatic” event before it could be embedded into your psyche and start causing some of the physiological responses associated with music and the body. This is another reason why advertisers try to create incidental music that sounds like the top 20 hits over the last century, and what a good portion of America and the rest of the world listen to. A lot of this music,or at least enough about the music that has become popular serves as a template to create effective advertising music, when a top 10 artist themselves is not available to do it for an advertiser themselves.

Due of the capability to “entrain our brain”, the choice of music associated with a particular product or campaign is of utmost important during key phases of product advertisement such as the consideration to buy phase or the ramp of phase.
Is Music in Advertising disingenuous?

Music is a very “useful tool” in the sense that it doesn’t need to be already associated with a marketing concept to allow a person to associate with that concept. Advertising in music and music in advertising are actually two very diverse subjects which are widely studied and there are several essential functions that music performs in this context. It might be considered somehow disheartening to think of music being used in this fashion since it ideally should be the brainchild of an artists experiences and emotions throughout their life. On the other hand, the artist does need to eat and because of my own experience I wouldn’t ever knock someone on using their talents for monetary gain, so long as the integrity of their work is not compromised. Unfortunately it often is in the pursuit of financial security which becomes evident in their song writing, which degrades the quality of their future works. Even more so, besides music being used as the vehicle to provide a bridge to successfully advertising a product it might help one to think that marketing music has its own genre, namely jingles. Perhaps as long as marketing music is recognized for what it is, just that, then “music as a tool” doesn’t become an as inauthentic concept.

The Basics of Rhythm

There are many things that are appealing about music to different people. Popular music of course appeals to the widest range of people for particular reasons, but we all have varied tastes, the reasons for which are much too involved to quantify. So let’s start by looking at one of the most rudimentary elements of music: Rhythm.

A lot of the effect of music on our minds has to do with the fact that we are naturally rhythmic creatures, and we operate (or optimally should operate) in cycles. The functioning of our body is, by necessity, controlled by a “master clock”, more commonly known as the heart. Several processes within our body such as the metabolizing of sugars into energy and the respiration of air are other blatant examples of rhythmic processes. Taking it a level higher, our daily lives are even affected by this concept of periodicity. We go to bed at a certain time, we awake at a certain time, we have daily rituals we perform to get through the day. There are certain societal rituals that have steps that are required to be followed in a particular sequence to complete effectively and so on. It’s no wonder that music, an inherently rhythmic process can have such an effect on our systems, in so many ways.

Why does dancing come naturally to most of us, unless we have 2 left feet? It’s because it has been shown in several experiments that the rhythmic components of music help organize our physical movements, and vice versa we tailor our music to our physical movements (e.g. Dance Music). It’s even been shown that certain rhythmic people help people with completely disorganized thought process like those with Aspergers or ADHD be able to complete tasks much more efficiently, organizing their thoughts for them.

I sometimes wonder why I like metal so much. I know a lot of people can’t stand it, although there are different kinds of metal which are accessible to people with different dispositions. Metal is inherently a heavily derived art form and usually expressing a limited range of emotions. However the typical metal song has several rhythmic passages of various complexity, usually in 4/4 time. So for me, someone who inherently has trouble concentrating on a task, it is probably more related to the energy and the structure than the range of expressed emotions. Its helping me write this blog right now 🙂

An Example…

According to Thomas Jefferson, he used music to help him write the Declaration of Independence. Without his violin, his brain wouldn’t be able to formulate the ideas to put in such a grand document. I can say some of my most productive times coding were when music I really dug, was playing in the background. I’m aware of brain entrainment and perhaps it works on a level that’s almost like a side-effect for the music being played in the background. An example and possible explanation is the low-frequency drum beats of a rock song. When played in succession possibly allow the brain to get into a resonant pattern whose regularly possibly helps eliminate distractions (like a mental tuning fork).

Another example…

So even Einstein attributed his intelligence to being able to master the violin from a young age. How his mother had the insight to buy him a violin to improve his intelligence is beyond me, it definitely helps support the idea that music helps to unlock hidden potential as well. Einstein played mostly classical and folk pieces, which were complicated in nature. He improvised extensively and attributed this to his ability to solve complicated mathematical problems. If this is true, then it can lead one to believe different kinds of music improve thought processes in different ways. Perhaps enjoyable club music you’d probably listen to while doing some inane repetitive busy work,could help you focus on the task at hand instead of being drawn away by more “imaginative” thoughts. The opposite is most likely true for more freeform music, especially when you play it yourself. It could open up new channels in your mind allowing creativity in thought and the development of unique solutions to problems.

In conclusion, there are several benefits to music in regards to making thought processes more efficient and the periodic component that we all know as rhythm is a major element of this beneficial effect.

The enough misery stamps before a star bankrupt.

Enough misery stamps before a star bankrupt.

Somthing Trivial, but Interesting to Consider

A Simple Look Into Human Psychology