I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.
In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.
Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
The miracle is that, in most cases, he succeeds – for the powers of survival, of the will to survive, and to survive as a unique inalienable individual, are absolutely, the strongest in our being: stronger than any impulses, stronger than disease.
A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.
Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.
I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever completing a life means.
If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world.
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations, and about 10 percent of the visually impaired get visual hallucinations.
I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
I think there is no culture in which music is not very important and central. That’s why I think of us as a sort of musical species.
Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.
The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.
A profound intriguing and compelling guide to the intricacies of the human brain.
Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring its memory.
Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I’m concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.
Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.