I’ve been lucky enough to experience heightened and altered consciousness from music making, listening and dancing. Chasing that feeling motivates me to keep making and studying music, in spite of the lousy pay.
I’m reading a wonderful book right now by William Benzon called Beethoven’s Anvil. Benzon looks at the state of brain research and uses it to guide conjectures about the evolutionary functions and origins of music. One of his most interesting ideas is that music, at its best, is a kind of waking dream.
In peak musical experiences, whether playing or listening, people often report that they “stop thinking.” Benzon observes that you don’t actually stop your brain activity in these situations — quite the opposite, your brain is firing on all cylinders. So what’s stopping? Benzon identifies it as your internal narrator, the module of your brain that creates your social self-consciousness. This module also gives you the ability to create explicit narrative memories and to imagine the future. (The narrator module isn’t a specific anatomical region of the brain; rather, it’s an emergent process resulting from the interaction of many brain regions.)
During peak musical experiences, you stop thinking about the past, future and your own motivations and intentions. You just exist in the moment, fully absorbed by your bodily sensations. This is probably the same mental state that most animals inhabit all the time, and it’s the one you experience in dreams. Benzon refers here to the idea I’ve seen in writing by Carl Sagan and others, that dreams are the lizard brain exploring and making sense of the neocortex.
As for the sense of floating and flying, Benzon notes that you frequently experience these feelings in dreams, a further hint that dreaming and music are related. It’s possible that the brain activities producing your social self are connected to the ones maintaining your sense of bodily orientation and location. When you suspend one, you suspend the other.
I’ve come across it in other fields too – it’s going with the flow, ain’t it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
That’s exactly what it is. Though I’d say that there are different levels of flow. There’s low-key flow, like you (ideally) feel when you’re chopping up vegetables or sweeping the floor, and there’s ecstatic flow, like you feel in peak music experiences.
It’s a compelling set of ideas. We can all recognise it. And related to the the ‘inner game’ stuff that I’ve been reading about lately. Anyway, I understand all the theories, it’s just it’s a lot harder to turn off those unwanted inner voices when I play.
The ‘inner game’ might be an interesting blog post topic, btw
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm……………………..hm.