Ode to the Brain

I wrote about Jill Bolte Taylor in my personal blog. Jill is a neuroanatomist who suffered a massive stroke on the left side of her brain in 1996. “She observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. In her book My Stroke of Insight , Taylor shares her unique perspective on the brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded brain.” (from her book) For this reason, I sent her a Luna Phoenix guitar.
In this amazing “Ode to the Brain”, Jill joins Carl Sagan, Robert Winston, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Bill Nye, and Oliver Sacks in celebrating the human brain. The material sampled for this video comes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran’s TED Talk, Bill Nye’s Brain episode, BBC’s “The Human Body”, Oliver Sachs’ TED Talk, Discovery Channel’s “Human Body: Pushing the Limits”, and more.

Read Full Post »

The Profound Power of Music

I recently read the book Musicophilia “Tales of Music and the Brain” by Oliver Sacks, a physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. What fascinated and affected me on a deep level was the profound effect that music has on a human being and how defining it may be crucial to defining who we are.

The first video is Oliver Sacks talking about one of the subjects in his book:
Clive Wearing, a British musician who developed total amnesia except for his music and recognition of his wife. An amazing testament to the power of both music and love. The second video is footage of Clive Wearing himself. The video of Clive is heartbreaking to watch, but the transformation that comes over him when he is in the familiar stream of music, which not only survived his illness but survived it intact, speaks to the deep level that music lives in us. I will be featuring other segments from this fascinating book in future posts.

Read Full Post »