Second Monday Music: Influential rhythms

The significance of musical entrainment

By André Duvall

[Adapted from a paper in the Psychology of Music]

We have all had the experience of listening to a piece of music, enjoying it, and finding ourselves tapping our feet to the beat, sometimes without consciously deciding to do so. Likewise, as we walk down the sidewalk at a comfortable pace, our arms naturally tend to sway in some form of regular motion directly related to the rhythmic motion of our legs. Musicians are aware of the importance during rehearsal and performance situations of synchronizing our internal rhythmic pulse with those of the conductor or other performers. All of these situations illustrate the concept of human rhythmic entrainment. While these examples may seem to be obvious everyday phenomena, the idea of entrainment has significant implications for understanding how humans experience music, and how music can influence human health.

Energy to unload my camera

For my renewed energy I credit the therapy of not trying to use both eyes for computer work (for about 48 hours now). This seems to have made all the difference—or at least that part of the difference that doesn't derive simply from renewed hope, a factor very hard to account for in both introspection and scientific investigation.
    Hope, of course, also plays a role in the matter of religious belief, and might even generally account for the persistence of religious belief. Religious beliefs may not be true, but they do provide hope. Hope that injustice will be righted, that those who died young or horribly will rise again and their oppressors punished appropriately (if not inappropriately by all of them being tortured equally forever and forever), that our old, sagging bodies will be restored to their youthful, sexy (erect) versions, that, alas, we will see our beloved mama and papa again (or that the bastard will have the opportunity to burn in hell),....

Brain drain

Discovering a significant truth is energizing. Rather, not discovering the truth, per se, but discovering something true or false that you think is true—like the experience of people (of whom I was once one) who "discover God" on a lonely road (or in a tent revival meeting) and walk on with delight at having "seen the light." Never mind that "God" doesn't exist and their discovery is, in that sense, a sham. They think (as I once did) that God exists (and, more pertinently, is watching over them personally).

Since a bleeding pineal tumor left me with diplopia (double vision, in my case owing to a neurological injury in the alignment of my eyes) in January 1996, I've hoped that one day I would be able to use both eyes again to fuse my right and left images into one. For over ten years of nothing happening in that direction, I put tape over my right spectacle lens and used only my left eye for focused seeing, though a cataract was beginning to cloud the light. After surgery to remove the cataract (and install a lens that all but removed the left eye's near-sightedness), I didn't have to use tape anymore; my right image was so fuzzy (through spectacles with the same thin, left-eye prescription in both lenses) that my brain pretty much ignored it anyway.
    But then, last year, my new neuro-ophthalmologist proposed that a prism in one of my spectacle lenses could render my two images close enough for the brain to fuse them. His professional enthusiasm for the project matched my personal hope. He proposed an experiment to try to prove this. I'd be fitted for a soft contact lens for my right eye that would approximately equalize its image in size with my left eye's image, and I'd wear a temporary prism patch on one of my spectacle lens for a month. It worked; I was able to fuse.
    The next step, then, was to have cataract surgery in the right eye too. It happened that the optimum lens the surgeon installed resulted not only in unrefracted 20-20 vision in that eye, but also in the complete removal of that eye's astigmatism. (The earlier cataract surgery has reduced the left eye's astigmatism, but not entirely removed it; its astigmatism must have been caused by a combination of surface imperfections, some in the original, natural lens and some in the cornea, which hadn't been affected by the surgery. Apparently the right eye's astigmatism had been owing entirely to the imperfection of its original lens.)
    I "adjusted" to the cataract surgery for a month or so, still using the temporary prism patch, then a permanent prism was ground into the right lens of my glasses (both the ones for long distance and the ones for reading). I could now use both eyes for fused-image driving, movie watching, and so on, as well as for reading and "office work" (most of it involving a computer screen).

Not quite. I soon noticed that I couldn't read a book for more than a few minutes before my eyes seemed to rebel, and I begin to see two lines of text, one more or less horizontal, the other slanting in at about five degrees from the upper right. Fusing was just too much of a strain to do for long. (I already knew this from a pin-hole experiment of my own I had conducted in the years right after the brain surgery. I must have wanted so badly lately to fuse again—regularly, day in and day out—that I wouldn't let myself remember how much of a strain it had been and might continue to be.)
    Working at a computer with both eyes was proving even less successful than reading a book or magazine. I could fuse, with considerable effort, for a few seconds only, before the two images flew apart and I had to favor one eye (virtually always my preferred, left eye) for looking at words or pictures. Making only the mightiest effort, could I get the eyes back together for a few more seconds of fusing. Without realizing it (or putting two and two together), I ended days at the office exhausted and was falling asleep on the commute ride home virtually every evening.
    My eye doctor suggested that I do some "pencil push-ups" to strengthen the eye muscles that "crossed" the eyes for close-up. Bring the pencil end towards my eyes slowly, then take it away, and again and again, thirty times or more a day for a month. The push-ups did make a difference. I could now read a book for much longer before noticing the rebellion, but I saw hardly any improvement at the computer. We tried the exercises for another month. No more improvement.
    Okay, my doctor said, the prism you have aids fusing in the vertical dimension. We could put a horizontal prism into the other lens of your reading spectacles. It needs to be slightly under-strength, so that you don't become dependent on it and your eye muscles lazy.

I've had my new reading glasses for a week. Reading a book is great, but in some ways computer work has become even worse. The horizontal prism makes it possible for me to fuse longer looking at the screen. The fact that I can do it more readily now encourages me to try harder (a conscious effort) to achieve it. The attempt is painful, and I can make it for only a little while before I want to scream.
    So. The "truth" that I think I have discovered today (through the suggestion of my wife, who proposed it and pointed out that I myself hadn't given a thought to this possibility) is that my recent almost chronic fatigue could be owing entirely (if it turns out I have no sleep apnea whatsoever) to "brain drain."
    I went to my primary care physician last November with my first complaints of being continually tired. Only today did it occur to me that that was but a few weeks after the experiment described above, my second cataract surgery, the vertical prism, my new glasses...and the apparently regained world of image-fusing....

Whether this "theory" is true or not, and whether the sleep study results will identify a sleep disorder or not, I believe, right now, that my wife may have discovered to me the primary reason I have been so tired lately. Curiously, this "truth" (whether it be true or not) gives me hope, even energizes me—I don't feel so tired right now. I don't need for my physician to call me today; I can wait until next week to be told the results of the sleep study.

Before sitting down to write this, I stuck a piece of tape over my right spectacle lens, as of old.
    The hope that I will use both eyes fully again might have been dashed, but the hope that my energy level will rise again is revived.

A mystery absolute

When I learned that Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, wanted to "study the neurological basis of faith," I imagined clinical experiments involving MRI machines, probes into subjects' brains, and the like. And I expected, after his book's devastating critique of religious faith (belief without evidence), that he would propose a scientific alternative for individuals' "religious" or "spiritual" lives—scientific in the sense of controlled experimentation, double-blind studies, etc.

How surprised, then, was I to learn, in his final chapter (before the epilogue), that he recommends individual observation of one's own consciousness, very much along the lines of Eastern practitioners of Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism. (Harris spent several years inquiring into these practices before he undertook his baccalaureate degree in philosophy at Stanford University.)

Though I may have more to say about the thought of Sam Harris (I haven't yet read his sequel: Letter to a Christian Nation), I'll leave you now with the concluding paragraph of the epilogue of The End of Faith^*:

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mytery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground of any experience we might with to call "spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.

This concluding paragraph resonates happily with my own "mystical" temperament. Harris doesn't exactly sound like a man with horns, does he? He's not what people tend to imagine when they hear that someone "is an atheist."
________________
* My reading of the book began with the epilogue, which entirely captivated me the first time I read it and compelled me to read the book.