[Dixielandjazz] Klyutzy neuroscientist takes up guitar on sabbatical-- writes book & teaches courses on it

[Norman Vickers]

  To: Musicians and Jazzfans list; DJML

From: Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Not sure if this meets the strict DJML criteria for posting, but reading is
optional.  NYU psychologist/neuroscientist decides in mid-life to take up
guitar.  So, studies this on sabbatical year.  Becomes a reasonably
functional guitarist-writes book and then teaches some courses on obscure
points relating music and neuroscience.

 

>From NYTimes 1-25-12.  I have also included the link, in case you want to
read it that way and look at the pix.

Don't chastise me for sending this.  You were warned-reading is optional .
(smile)

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/books/gary-marcus-professor-at-nyu-picks-u
p-a-guitar.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/books/gary-marcus-professor-at-nyu-picks-
up-a-guitar.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28>
&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28

  _____  

January 25, 2012


Applied Neuroscience, the Six-String Method


By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/bruce_headlam/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> BRUCE HEADLAM


At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided
he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of
the country's best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and
three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a
position running New York University's Center for Language and Music.

And he wanted to play the guitar.

For any adult learning an instrument or a new language is terrifying. For a
cognitive scientist, it can also be downright depressing. Humans have an
early childhood window to acquire such skills easily, according to a
long-held tenet in his profession, and it's a window that closes quickly.
Then there is the issue of innate ability. While no single gene can explain
Beethoven, Yo-Yo Ma or "Waterloo Sunset," Dr. Marcus does believe in natural
talent, he said, or at least in the certainty he doesn't have any.

Despite those misgivings he allowed himself one year of dedicated practice,
armed with instruction books, a $75 Yamaha acoustic bought on eBay and one
thing few adult music students have at their disposal: a year's sabbatical.

Three years later he has chronicled his journey in a new book,
<http://garymarcus.com/books/guitarzero.html> "Guitar Zero: The New Musician
and the Science of Learning" (Penguin). Like Daniel J. Levitin's "
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/books/review/Itzkoff-t.html?scp=1&sq=The%
20World%20in%20Six%20Songs:%20How%20the%20Musical%20Brain%20Created%20Human%
20Nature> World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature"
and Oliver Sacks's " <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/books/20kaku.html>
Musicophilia," "Guitar Zero" investigates the intersection between
neuroscience and music. But the thread here is Dr. Marcus's own often
frustrating attempts to learn guitar. It's the sort of book where Steven
Pinker (Dr. Marcus's mentor and collaborator) mixes with K. Anders Ericsson
(the psychologist most associated with the "10,000 hours" theory of
expertise) and Tom Morello (the lead guitarist from Rage Against the
Machine).

Wearing a black jacket and electric-blue dress shirt last week in his N.Y.U.
office, Dr. Marcus, now 41, may not be Rage Against the Machine material,
but he wouldn't look out of place in an '80s New Wave group or maybe a new
outfit called Public Intellectuals Limited.

"You could ask from an evolutionary perspective why anyone plays music in
the first place," he said, although in fact you have to ask very few
questions in conversation with Dr. Marcus because he poses so many himself -
then answers them.

"I don't think music is innately wired in the brain. It's a difficult skill.
So why do we do it?"

His brain didn't seem wired for it. Growing up in Baltimore, he loved
listening to his parents' Beatles and Peter, Paul and Mary records, but he
was uncoordinated, given to bouts of motion sickness and unable even to use
a playground swing. "I think it's something to do with my cerebellum," he
said. He flunked an aptitude test for band and was discouraged from playing
the recorder which, in public school, pretty much leaves the tambourine.

Five years ago he asked a fellow scientist, Dr. Levitin, to show him a few
chords. "His timing was off," Dr. Levitin said. "I told him to practice with
a metronome." But Dr. Marcus couldn't keep the beat and feared there might
be a neurological explanation: a form of musical arrhythmia. Now even the
tambourine seemed out of the question.

"I always thought music was one of the things I was absolutely worst at but
was compelled to try," he said, drawing a small graph on a notebook in front
of him, the "x" representing time and the "y" musical ability. "Here is
Hendrix," he said, graphing a line at about 60 degrees, then tracing the x
axis: that's him. "I thought I was just a flatline."

But as a scientist he was keenly interested in the compensatory mechanisms:
how the brain can essentially rewire itself to make up for deficits caused
by a stroke, trauma or even a nonexistent sense of rhythm. Maybe with
training his prefrontal cortex could accomplish what his cerebellum
couldn't.

What finally pushed him wasn't seeing Springsteen in concert or listening to
the "Goldberg" Variations. It was a video game, Guitar Hero, that rewards
players who can press the correct buttons in time with recorded music. He
was terrible at first, but through sheer repetition he improved just enough
to think that maybe rhythm could be learned after all. But real guitars, he
was frustrated to learn, weren't designed by computer engineers.

Compared to his Guitar Hero controller his Yamaha felt heavy and awkward.
The musical scale isn't perfectly linear. (Quick: what's another name for C
flat?) And the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different
strings. "That's something the brain doesn't want to deal with," he said.
"There's no one-to-one relationship on where the notes are. You have all
these memory traces that interfere with one another."

He feared the window had closed for good, but with everyday practice, single
notes became scales, and his smallish hands became strong enough to form
chords. "It was gradual and piecemeal," his wife, Athena Vouloumanos, a
neuroscientist and assistant professor at N.Y.U., remembered. "He had to
think about the beat and figure it out in an analytical way."

Three years later his practice is now aimed almost purely at improvisation.
At the book party/mini-concert for "Guitar Zero," held in front of students
and friends at an N.Y.U. lecture hall last week, he was joined on stage by
Terre Roche, a longtime music teacher and part of the singing group
<http://www.roches.com/index.html> the Roches, to improvise in a scale he
had learned that morning.

Over a simple chord progression, he picked out notes on the guitar fluently
and with a clear sense of direction, always landing on a chord note at the
end of a phrase. It wasn't a perfect flight, but he didn't crash into any
walls either.

Afterward Ms. Roche, who specializes in teaching adults, said, "I see a lot
of fear in adults, fear of looking silly, fear of feeling foolish: 'Why
didn't I start earlier? ' " Dr. Marcus was forthright about his
deficiencies. "We did a lot working really slowly, which fortunately he
liked to do," she said.

But he had no interest in learning particular songs. Nor has he tried to
acquire the tricks that most fledgling players rely on by reading
transcriptions of Chuck Berry or Eric Clapton licks, and he may be the only
amateur guitarist alive who doesn't spontaneously play
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAgceen153I> "Blackbird" over and over.

"I have a lot of need for cognition," he said. "I want to know how the
guitar works. Some people are 'show me this riff in "Hey Joe.' I'm not that
kind of player."

Those two approaches - learning the scales or learning "Hey Joe" -
illustrate different modes of mental processing that are at the heart of
"Guitar Zero." On the one hand is abstract thinking, basically a tool kit of
rules that can be applied in new situations. Atonal music, which relies on a
strict sequence of notes, might be the best example.

The other is data mining, that is, dredging up material from a vast store of
knowledge. Paul McCartney can't read notation, but he has a vast store of
music to draw on and could, for example, compose "Blackbird" based on a Bach
lute piece he learned as a child.

Dr. Marcus is particularly interested in how the human mind toggles between
the two approaches. As a scientist he gives equal weight to both ways of
thinking, but as a player he clearly prefers rules to riffs.

Like most musicians he wants to move beyond both and play from emotion or,
as he said, "from the brain stem." "I'm still analytical at most moments,"
he said. "I'm not sure if that's a limitation of me as a musician or as a
human being."

In the meantime there are other compensations. He has shifted his research
from language to music, developed several iPad apps (including one for
improvisation) and he now teaches a course at N.Y.U. called "Guitar Hero
(and Heroines): Music, Video Games and the Nature of Cognition." He even
admits to enjoying heavy metal for its nerdy embrace of complicated scales.
"I love 'Stairway to Heaven' now," he said.

And his rhythm has improved to the point that he was actually complimented
on his dancing at a wedding a few months ago.

"I'm not great," he said. "But for an academic, I think they were reasonably
impressed."

 
--end--