A Little Reading Lesson
One of my favorites of the latter is a book called The Family Music Book. It's a cloth-bound book, a deep red with black lettering, and comprises about 600 pages. It contains everything from Wagnerian opera to jigs and reels to Beethoven and popular songs of the era. We had this book on the piano when I was growing up, and I played much of it through the years. But the book had become worn and the pages were crumbling - it was the soft, yellowish paper found in very old books of its type. On a whim one day, I checked eBay to see if another one existed, and lo and behold someone had one in "very good" condition for sale. I bought it, and imagine my delight when it arrived, in very good condition, and better yet, containing an inscription on the inside cover facing page: "To Clarence from Etta, 1916."
But back to "reading" music. When I was a kid, reading music was taught in school. I have no idea if this is done any more, or if so, how. But back then, the teachers had a wonderful tool which consisted of a wooden bar fitted out with wire holders for chalk. The teacher would insert a piece of chalk into each of the 5 holders, and then draw a musical staff on the blackboard. She (it was generally a "she" then) would then add musical notes to the staff she'd drawn, indicate sharps and flats, and would lead us in singing the notes - based on a scale that she would play for us on a recorder. It was pretty basic stuff, and certainly not as complex as learning to play a musical instrument, but it introduced the concept of "reading" music to young kids.
Playing from this wonderful book of music brought back many memories, but it also made me wonder about "reading" music - or other forms of notation. Not too long ago (well, actually, 2005) there was a game called "Guitar Hero," that involved "playing" a guitar by matching colored "frets" and strumming in time. Lately, I've seen music offered for download by the composer, written in a program that has a "keyboard" notation, left to right, and you match the notes by hitting the appropriate key or keys as the music scrolls up, holding the note for as long as the note is shown. There's an app called Magic Piano that does basically the same thing, but with just two or three fingers, and is more of a game mode - what can you score?
I recall when a relative had a stroke, he suffered aphasia - the loss of the ability to understand and express speech. It locks the victim away from communicating, though the brain is still "thinking." A therapist recommended asking the man to "sing" his thoughts. She explained that the "music center" of the brain and the language center are connected, especially in anyone who took an interest in music (if you doubt this, try singing a song you learned decades ago - you'll likely remember the words, even if it was a silly old commercial or nursery song). If the person tries to sing his or her thoughts or wishes, that may create a new connection that allows the person to recover lost speech. For this man, it worked, and though he was never as fluent and verbal as he'd once been, he was able to talk again - and when a needed a word, he'd try singing it.
Scientific American tells us that music, both listening to it but more specifically reading it and playing an instrument, is a great workout for the brain. "Neuro plasticity is the brain's ability to change throughout life. The Hebbian principle (neurons that fire together wire together) is what underlies it. The more you engage in any activity, the more consistently neurons are firing together, which results in stronger connections. What is unique about music training is its capacity to induce neuroplastic changes in all areas of the brain. You use your occipital lobe to read and interpret pitches and rhythm; your temporal lobe to process sound; your frontal lobe to attend to the music, inhibit distractions and remember what you just played; and your parietal lobe to integrate all of the incoming sensory information."
What's interesting about this is, unlike most "brain workouts" such as chess or sudoku or crossword puzzles, playing an instrument by reading the musical notations is a complete workout for your mental faculties.
So I began to wonder what other types of "reading" can do for your brain. How about cursive writing? It's becoming a lost art, to the extent that many young kids can't read it at all, other than perhaps picking out a capital letter here or there. I realized many years ago that while I could type really, really fast, and that it was therefore quite efficient for writing a story or taking notes, I didn't remember what I'd typed anywhere near as well as I remembered what I had hand-written. Not printed, by the way - written. As a school child, I took copious notes in cursive. This included taking notes as I read a textbook. I found, when I went to study for a test, that I could recall with great clarity anything I had written - in cursive. Later, when I began taking notes on a laptop, that recall was greatly reduced. Psychology Today affirms my self-discovery: "Data analysis showed that cursive handwriting primed the brain for learning by synchronizing brain waves in the theta rhythm range (4-7 Hz) and stimulating more electrical activity in the brain's parietal lobe and central regions. 'Existing literature suggests that such neuronal activity in these particular brain areas is more important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning.'"
For a while, there was a craze for "speed-reading." The idea was to train your eyes and use a finger (this was somewhat important) to scan the page of a book. You didn't read "word for word," but in groups of words to "grok" (no, that's not actually the word, but if you "grok" something you get the whole idea - no need to go into the details - see Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land) the meaning of the passage. I had a friend who swore by it - I found it boring. Eye tracking studies done years later by website analysts detected how the eyes moved around a webpage, learning what attracted attention and what didn't, and how long the eye hovered on an image, words, or other cues, in the hopes of learning how to place advertising, and draw attention to areas of the page, apart from the left to right, top to bottom "reading" that most people are accustomed to. I am convinced there is some relationship to this darting-and-scanning way we approach digital material, no matter the device, and the way we hop from subject to subject, easily distracted and not immersed in the subject, and speed reading. Do you find it harder to pick up a book and settle down into reading it than you used to? It takes me a few pages to get lost in a book these days, where once upon a time I'd be gone in seconds.
And speaking of that, someone mentioned to me not long ago that she always felt sad when she reached the end of a book. "I left that world," she said. "It was over." And she said she always wanted to read a book before watching a movie created from it. I agreed, though I also said that whenever I wanted to "visit" a book-world again, if I picked that same book up again, even years later, I would "see" my same brain-movie in my mind. Interestingly, that same experience doesn't occur with an actual movie! I might remember having seen it, and a particularly good one will come back to me, or I'll remember really enjoying it, but it's not the same as revisiting the world of a book that I created in my mind. But the Harvard Crimson disagrees: "Watching a motion picture is an inherently more passive experience than reading a book. Yet it imparts content in a much more easily consumable way than a book of consumable way than a book of commensurate length. Movies are more tangible, visual, and compact than comparable written works, and therefore easier to remember."
I'll have to remember that.
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