I went to see Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal the other night in Oakland California. The setting was beautiful and the crowd was thrilled with the music and the vibes. Late in the program, as they sang a lusty, bluesy song together Taj began to wave his hands in the air and he encouraged us all to do it with him. Everyone began waving their hands and arms in the air and we all fell into a side-to-side sweeping, wave of ecstatic dancing! We were like one big sea anemone, an organism, waving in a sea of music and bodies and bliss.
Why is it so easy to do this?
Music is a universal language. It probably preceded speech. When you listen to or create music many specific areas of your brain light up. The thinking areas, the sensory areas, the memory areas, the motor areas, and even the anticipation and predictive areas of your brain light up during the silence between songs. This happens especially to music that you are listening to that you set up yourself. The 'play lists' that you create on your iPod actually stimulate the parts of your brain that anticipate the next song during the silence between the songs.
One of the other structures that lights up are the mirror neurons you have throughout your brain/body system. These are widely distributed in the brain but occur in the parietal lobe specifically to help you notice and track what your friends are doing. The same mirror neurons fire when you both follow where someone else is looking, with your attention, and when you are doing the looking all by yourself. They are, for all purposes, the same thing to your brain - either doing the looking or watching someone else as they do the looking. Non-duality - "I am both the observer and the observed"! Consequently, we all did what Taj told us to do, once we had looked to our right and left to see if our friends were doing it too!
Mirror neurons help keep you in line with your tribe and keep you connected to others. They help regulate your bodily functions, social behavior, what you do and say to another, how you interpret another's actions and they encourage you to act and feel the way the majority is acting and feeling at any given moment. Mirror neurons are what make you social. They help 'teach' you to be a part of your tribe. You, and everybody else in your tribe, keep an 'eye' out, so to speak, for unity, divisiveness, action, calm, eating, yawning, laughing, and a myriad of other social signals that make you either a part of or separate from the rest. Both listening to and playing music draws on your attention, your anticipation and your mirror neurons too.
Do you have music playing when you make love? I hope you do so let's assume you do. Do you notice that you like to put on the same play list, over and over, at least some of the time? The one you remember having the best lovemaking to? The one that you can hum to and that you anticipate will take you to the same high, ecstatic places you went before?
Because your brain knows what song comes next (You've been listening to this music for awhile now, haven't you!) it can carry on even without the music. Your brain anticipates the next song and is already there, before you can actually acknowledge it. Let's hope your lover likes it too because this same music is putting the two of you into a kind of trance together - a mirror neuron trance.
Assuming this is music you both love, your brains are synchronizing to the music. Your brains are together on this one and they are both anticipating the next words, the next song on the list and the specific pleasure that went along with the songs. They are creating: 'between-brain oscillatory couplings'. Couplings = good. So music helps you to make more connections through brain synchronizing. This then effects bodily movements and even the anticipation of great pleasure.
Great experiences and the memories that went with those are guiding you. These are your own personal mirror neurons binding together. You are talking to each other in ways you aren't aware of but that help you to stay in 'one mind'. Combine that with pheromones, oxytocin, adrenalin and the other neurochemical cocktails that go with LOVE and, well, you're either in for the ride of your life or a very hard fall once the glow is gone. Good luck!
Suzie Heumann is the founder of Tantra.com. She studies, writes, has authored three books and makes films about conscious sex, Tantra and the Kama Sutra. Check out Tantra.com Premium for the most comprehensive tantra training available on the Internet!
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now its Micheal Buble and Bare Naked Ladies
That's why monkey see, monkey do.
And monkeys have very little self-control.
Marching to one's own drum-beat is difficult.
To refrain from copying the crowd is what makes a rare unique person.
Group Think is the easy way - witness the lemmings in sub-prime mortgage.
Don't forget invasion of Iraq under the false pretense of WMD.
Count the number of senators and congressmen who objected to the Iraq war.
I see how mirror neurons help reinforce a sense of being part of. When yiou laugh even though didn't get the joke but everyone else is laughing, that's ok. Sometimes the mirror neurons can add difficulty to living a principled life. I often find myself ostracized for speaking out against recial slurs and jokes. I know I'm the outsider and the one who's making waves and I 'm willing to put myself there. At the end of the day, it's me I've got to answer to. Still I like to get along as much as everyone else.
I much prefer the good side to mirror meurons. My wife and I frequently listen to Fleetwood Mac Rumours. It's a great album for making love, especially THE CHAIN, that song sort of hypnotizes us and we get lost in each other. I'ts pretty nice.
warm regards,
little brother
If two people sit in identical chairs across from one another (mirror images), and one has neurological damage, if someone massages the damaged/paralyzed area in the non-paralyzed person, the paralyzed person can feel relief as if he is receiving the massage himself
Or, if a person has had a stroke and one side of their body is compromised, a mirror can be placed facing toward the patient's healthy side, and by exercising the healthy side of the body, the motor neurons begin firing to reactivate the paralysis and bring back some sensation and function tot he stroke victim
Saw this on Charlie Rose with a neuroscientist (whose name I've forgotten) and never forgot this
Thanks
Like many, I am hard-wired for music, which can give pleasure unlike anything else. It can open up new spaces within ourselves, initiate a new route from childhood to adulthood and back again, help us retrace emotional and intellectual travail.
I have another reflection. To what extent does the music which moved you 20 years ago move you still? And did you when you first heard it recognize that it would not collapse after a year or two?