EFTA00775254.pdf

From: "Tramo, Mark Jude" •te To: "jeevacation®gmail.com" <jeevacation®gmail.com> Subject: To JE Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 12:19:03 +0000 Attachments: 13.Description.pdf; MissionSlide.ppt Good morning, Jeffrey - Some attachments and comments relevant to your opening question, "Why an Institute for MUSIC, Science, and Medicine?" - they go beyond our discussion of the need to open new, cogent avenues for human neuro-ethology research and clinical research that heals the schism between the fine arts, on the one hand, and science and medicine, on the other. 1. As Nobel Laureate David Hubel said, "Music is what's interesting about the auditory system" . We know so little about auditory cortex physiology and function compared to that of visual cortex, and music, with its mathematically-definable elements, opens an avenue for new discoveries. And given music's mathematically-describable stimulus features and its power to evoke emotions, it provides an ideal can uncover the link between modality-specific sensory processing 2. Or as Musaeus, son of Orpheus, wrote, "Song is to morals of all things the sweetest." Hence the connection to pleasure, aesthetics, and "positive affect" (see attached) and, in turn, the potential to realize and exploit its high benefit:risk ratio to quell suffering, prevent illness, improve recovery in the sick, and motivate learning in the recalcitrant student. As Francis Bacon put it: "The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man's body, and to reduce it to harmony." In the words of a contemporary composer/neuroscientist/neurologist whose experimental methods have ranged from single-unit recordings to lesion effect studies/diagnosis in neurological/neurosurgical patients to evoked potentials to PET to MRI morphometry to psychophysics to experimental cognitive psychology: "Music gives voice of our culture's collective subconscious, an instrument that expresses more Id than Superego - yet it achieves the most sublime of sublimations and moves us to dance on the common ground of emotions and repressed drives that matter most to each and every member of our species." Since your schedule is in flux and tight, my book proposal here is going swimmingly, and we have yet to reach closure on the proposal for Institute endowment, I'll be staying in town until 5P Friday 5/29, then am off to Philadelphia to give two invited talks at the International Mind Brain & Education Society meeting on Saturday ("Prolegomena to a Neuroscience of Education Parts I and II") If I still prayed these days, I would light a candle at St Jude (patron saint of the impossible, hence my middle name!) that these (un)civil bloodsuckers diminish your naturally high ratio of Mesolimbic Dopamine/Endorphin : Amygdala/Cortical Glutamate, at least not enough to affect your joie de vivre. MJT EFTA00775254