The is the first of what will be several weekly postings of portions of the house concert at Twin Valley on 6/29/08. This is the Andante con moto tranquillo from Mendelssohn's 1st piano trio. I am playingon the Steinway B, with Sonny Enslen (cello) and Daphne Tsao (violin).
Here is the second Piazolla tango we did at the 6/29/08 Sunday musical at Twin Valley.
This week, I'm starting a seven day vacation in Toronto with my partner Len. It is our 19th anniversary. The mindblog posts that appear will be using Blogger's neat new feature that permits the specification of a date in the future for a prepared posting to actually appear on the website.
Yesterday, Sunday, June 29, we hosted a social/musical at our home on Twin Valley road in the Town of Middleton, Wisconsin. Len does the food and I do the music. Over the next period of time, I will post here and on YouTube the music we played. Here is the invitation to the event, followed by a photo taken just before the music, and one during it:
Debussy. Someone who listened my recording of this on YouTube asked how to get the sheet music to this piece, and as I sent them the information and listened it again, I decided to relay it on to MindBlog as a bit of relief from the more brainy stuff.
Ever alert for the latest speculation on a possible biological basis for why I might be gay, I come across this little gem on fruitflies: genetic manipulation that enhances dopamine levels in males makes them more likely to court with other males.
I'm warming up to do some recordings this spring and summer.... this is Chopin's Nocture Op. 9 No. 1
Spring around the 1860 stone schoolhouse on Twin Valley Rd. in Middleton WI. is taking its time. It was a very hard winter.
I recently attended the Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion (Now in its 14th year). Its topic was "Emotion, Consciousness and Psychopathology." I want to mention the talk given by A.D.(Bud) Craig, which was a real tour de force, the kind of science I feel I can integrate with my own personal experience. Its title was "How do you feel? The neurobiological basis for human awareness of feelings from the body." I have referenced Craig's work in previous posts, also check here. Here are PDFs of his two recent review articles in Trends in Cognitive Science (2005) and Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2002) which I recommend.
His view is that in our nervous systems, there is a fundamental bilateral partitioning or separation, from basic spinal cord and brain stem homeostatic systems to our highest prefrontal lobe functions, in which the right side spends energy and the left side brings it in. This reflects the relative activities of the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous systems. (enter 'parasympathetic' in the google search box in the left column to see some previous mindblog posts on autonomic regulation of chilling out versus getting excited).
The right and left insula appear to be central in processing feelings, all the way from basic (interoceptive) body sensing (posterior insula) up through subjective feelings, disgust, trust, anger, social hurt, empathic happiness, lust, pain, etc. All of these are homeostatic emotional currency that help regular body balance all the way from from blood pressure, glucose, heart rate, salt regulation, up through social self image. Here is a graphic from his 2005 article that shows the central role of the left and right anterior insula (which act as the sensory cortex of limbic system) in receiving information about body state and feeling from sympathetic and parasympathetic input and then interacting with anterior cingulate (the motor cortex of the limbic system) and frontal cortex. (click to enlarge):
Positive emotions (pleasant music, maternal emotions) correlate with enhanced left parasympathic, left anterior insula, left anterior cingulate and left frontal activation, while negative emotions (anger, fear, etc.) enhance activation of the corresponding structures on the right side.
Some very simple manipulations can stroke the relative activation of these two systems. Slowing one's breathing, as usually happens during meditation dials up the left anterior insula system, while breathing more rapidly increases anxiety and right anterior insula activity. In fact, giving instruction to a subject to breathe more slowly or more rapidly can change their emotional reaction to stimuli. In one experiment mentioned by Craig, a picture of a baby seal elicited warm nuturing emotions when breathing was slowed, but when breathing was increased, subjects were more likely to suspect the seal might attack or bite them! Experiments are now being attempted to measure whether oxytocin (the affiliative, trusting hormone) correlate with left insular activation while right insula activation correlates with cortisone (the stress hormone) release.
This sort of global description fascinates me, because it instructs us in how integrated a package we are, and how attention to some of the basement details of our daily life (such as breathing) can fundamentally alter our mood and temperament.
Here is a second version (posted April 23, 2007) of the Debussy Reverie I initially put on YouTube Aug 29, 2006). I'm amazed that the first version has had ~90,000 viewings, and the second (made in response to comments on the first version) has had ~8,000.
I'm back in Madison, WI., at the old stone schoolhouse on Twin Valley road.
This morning I hit the road again, leaving the family home to drive back to Madison Wisconsin. I may miss tomorrow's blog post. The picture shows a partial skyline of downtown Austin, taken from across Lady Bird Johnson Lake.
From the drive into Austin Texas yesterday, the roadsides (seeded with wildflowers by Lady Bird Johnson) were a riot of spring flowers at their peak. (Click to enlarge).
My first day on the road to Austin, TX. (see April 1 post) ended at Waklulla Springs State Park in the Florida panhandle, staying overnight in the Park Lodge. The second night has been at L'auberge Casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana (the room sans gambling)...heading out for the Cajun Trail along the coast today.
I'm loading boxes into my Honda Civic, leaving my condo in paradise (Fort Lauderdale) to return to Madison, Wisconsin via Austin, Texas - where I visit my son and his wife who live in the family house in which I grew up. It is a week or two early to return to Wisconsin, but I've decided I should symbolically share the suffering by arriving for the last gasp of a winter that has deposited 107 inches of snow on my Twin Valley home.
I've decided to take a leisurely tourist drive, tonight staying in the Wakula Springs State Park in the Florida panhandle, at the Wakula Springs Lodge, an example of Mediterranean Revival architecture built in 1937 by Edward Ball, who established the Wakula Springs wildlife preserve in 1934. After driving along Florida's Gulf coast Wednesday I'm heading on to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and crashing at the L'Augerge Du Lac casino. Thursday morning I will take the "Creole Trail" along the Louisiana Gulf coast into Texas, and then head on to Austin. I'm not sure what my internet status will be. I have asked a friend to post some blog drafts I've prepared ahead. It would be therapeutic for me to be off the grid for a few days.......
I thought I would punctuate the stream of 'serious' posts with a paste from my piano recordings, this being "Three Fantastic Dances" by Shostakovitch:
I am SO grateful that I am able to be a snowbird, now in Ft. Lauderdale. Here is a picture of my home in Wisconsin, where more snow has fallen this winter than in any year since recordings of snowfall began in the 19th century.
I just realized that today is MindBlog's second anniversary. It is hard for me to believe that there have been 902 postings since Feb. 8, 2006. Back then I had just read an article in the New York Times on the rising blogging fad and thought to myself, "Since I am reading and thinking about all this stuff anyway, I might as well take the small extra effort to clean it up a bit and present it." The extra effort turns out to be not so small. The number of subscribers to the MindBlog feed has risen to over 400, and on a given day there are 300-1,500 views of individual postings. Being a borderline (or maybe not even borderline) obsessive-compulsive, I've become yoked to the lockstep production of at least two blog postings a day. The retired professor isn't feeling all that retired..... Anyway, I am grateful for the kind emails I have received, and I've enjoyed responding to requests for further analysis or information.
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