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Http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta.html

Another TED Video. Love This Site!

Music is medicine, music is sanity. This statement is just part of Robert Gupta's talk about Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic American musician, who has been the subject of many newspaper articles written by Steve Lopez along with a 2009 film adaptation based on these columns called The Soloist which starred Jamie Fox and Robert Downey Jr. Though I have not seen the film, this lecture as a musician interested me and was very inspiring. The story has two very interesting points from a psychological perspective, the Ayers and his relationship with schizophrenia, along with his relationship to music.

Gupta talks about his first encounter with Ayers, who upon first meeting him definitely recognized his symptoms of schizophrenia he referred to it as jumbled, but in a gregarious, jovial way, relating baseball to Beethoven's 4^th symphony. He then had a normal civil conversation about music. Gupta points out that Ayers has refused treatment because of his previous experience with shock therapy, thorazine and handcuffs. These methods have left a lasting terrible impression on Ayers mind. Ayer's is prone to many schizophrenic episodes, wandering the streets while his own mind torments him. After accepting the request for lessons from Ayer's, upon arrival Gupta felt very threatened. Reeve attributes this fear Gupta felt was a result of him anticipating a harmful event like Ayer's schizophrenia taking over and him exploding. Yet he still was motivated to maintain this relationship. Why would Gupta be motivated to do such a thing, even under adverse conditions? I believe it was a combination of a genuinely high expectancy and outcome expectations along with a need for intimacy and achievement, especially when these needs can be met in the field of his passion.

Not having seen the movie, and being a musician myself I am perplexed and in awe at the amazing level of change the music makes in his cognitive processes. When giving the lesson, instead of talking scales and theory, Gupta just began playing. The more he played, the more Ayer's manic rage transformed into an advanced understanding, curiosity and grace, the music being the catalyst of this incredible almost invisible pharmaceutical. His mind changed and he spoke about music with a transformed sense of insight. He was then again the brilliant Juliard student who related on a personal level, playing many of his favorite pieces by ear. Reeve says that emotions energize and direct behavior, this sea of emotions that musicians feel may have a very large role in this transformation. Gupta says through the artistic lens that is a musician's creativity, that music changes us. For Ayer's specifically music is medicine, it is his sanity, it also helped Ayers feel affiliation again, the deficit of no social-relationships could not have contributed positively to his condition in any way.

The emotional level of Ayer's love and appreciation for music helped him find his mind. While I do not know how his story ends, I am certainly inspired and reminded of why I play myself. It truly reaches down to a person's core. This brings so many questions about the emotional significance of music. Does it directly satisfy a need? What is its purpose? Why does it make people feel such intense emotions? There are many theories out there, but none of them have quite explained the creativity aspect. Why is it that when a musician writes a song  or plays a song that is significant to them it makes them feel complete? It is a feeling like no other feeling in the world. This is definitely something I will be looking into further, especially the relationship between music, emotion and moods.

In one of my classes last week we were talking about the importance of mentors in our lives. It took me a while to think of a consistent mentor who has helped encourage me throughout my life. In essence, my experience with a mentor has revolved around persuasion techniques utilized by my mentor attempting to persuade and encourage me to continue a behavior. The textbook mentions how important coaches, parents, employers, therapists, etc. are in our lives and how such figures will always be there (for the most part) to lend a convincing hand. A lot of the time these convincing attempts serve as an efficacy booster for me, the mentee. 

I have grown up in a musical family all my life, and I have also grown up playing the violin. There have been countless times throughout my life where I have wanted to give up and quit playing the violin. These sentiments mostly burgeon from my dissatisfaction with practicing the damn instrument. But, as we all know, "practice makes perfect." Unfortunately for me, I did not want to be a "perfect" violinist, let alone become that prodigious of a player. Fortunately, however, I had a set of encouraging parental figures who have continually given me the positive feedback and support necessary for me to continue my practices, at least all throughout high school and into my first couple years in college. My parents always knew that I didn't really want to quit. They were also well aware that practicing did not come easy for me, nor did it enlighten me. But, they always found creative ways to build up my self-efficacy, with regards to my violin playing skills and habit formation. Consequently, I know have the desire and intrinsic motivation to play the violin. I have played in the UNI orchestra all but one semester and I am a violinist for a post rock instrumental band in Cedar Falls.

Who have been positive role models/mentors in your life? 

In what areas have they impacted you and encouraged your own self-efficacy? 

  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?bl

    This article talks about sociologists who set out to determine which types of gossip travels the fastest (whether people prefer good news, bad news, etc). The researchers studied a list of the New York Times' most emailed articles "checking it every 15 minutes for more than 6 moths... and controlling for factors like placement in the paper or on the Web Home page."

        The main researcher seemed to hypothesize that stories about sex and politics would be among the highest ranked. To his surprise, the stories that were most emailed actually tended to be those emotional in nature, with positive (those that "inspired awe") faring better than those that were negative. Those that are intellectually challenging and lengthy are also more often emailed. There were also a surprisingly high number of scientific articles that made the most emailed list.

       I was rather surprised by some of these results at first, but after thinking about the potential reasons behind the results I believe I understand this data better. Or, perhaps I am suffering from hindsight bias. In any case, I think it does make sense that people would want to send positive, awe-inspiring articles to their friends and loved ones because we very much want to increase others' feelings of happiness. Emotion is at the very core of our being. There is such an abundance of negative news presented on television, perhaps emailing positive articles is a way to help offset cable news' generally negative tone.

       The researchers made a quick observation about how one might have expected articles consisting of financial advice to be more popular. Their thinking was that if Person A gave person B great advice, then person B would return the favor at a later point in time. Another possible motivation they theorized was that some people might just send articles to "show off" and let others know that they stay well-informed.  

      I also found it a little surprising that articles a bit longer in length and "intellectually challenging" would be among the most popular. I have always been rather hesitant to send lengthy articles to friends because I worry that saturating them in an abundance of information that they might not even find remotely interesting could just make them mad. It does make sense though, that longer articles would be more likely to contain some type of interesting information in them than short articles. I wonder if social networking sites present a confound problem that creates a bias in favor of long articles - for example, if I read a short, interesting story and want to summarize what it said for my friends, I will often just post it on my facebook status.  

        The popularity of science articles was a bit baffling at first, but I think it does seem to make sense to me now. I believe people enjoy reading interesting science articles because they help us think in a new and different way. Scientific discoveries help us gain insight and perspective about the true physical and emotional nature of ourselves and our surrounding environment. I think reading about science can evoke feelings of transcendence - there is much we do not know and there is much we will never know, but with each additional step we take in studying the world, we come that much closer to solving the problems we face and that much more connected with the world around us.