Music Is Better; Agitation Nation
Posted in ideas, politics on May 4th, 2012 by Ira Altschiller – Comments OffI’ve been so submerged in creating the just announced books for the Kindle it is like coming up for air. And then you hit the daily blab. I sometimes have to remind myself to listen to music.
If you pay too much attention to the political news it can drive you nuts. It doesn’t matter which side is perpetrating its fraud. It is just so transparent what their motives are and so transparent in tactics. The enablers are worse than the candidates. Sometimes I think the most discouraging thing is that attack politics seems to work. Like ads for products, the selling of a politician is a finely tuned craft which somehow groks the public mind. Think Machiavelli. Both presidential candidates seem more intent on winning than on thinking — of honorably representing a distinct point of view.
It is especially distressing the media hasn’t decided to take an oath of objectivity. I really don’t think the press has any idea what that might mean anymore. You just have to read between the lines and try and expose yourself to a dose of each side that doesn’t kill you. There is no one in the middle. The whole congealed mass of steaming protoplasm: of politicans, of the press, of the commentators, of interest groups, is really one stinky mass, with little difference underneath. Theoretically, this should be a crucial moment, where the definition of the society is clarified, in a debate that offers the real benefits and deficits of each approach. Instead, given we have a celebrity press, we have personality battles, personality attacks.
Under any circumstances there are limited options for any party. We’ve got no bucks. In addition, the country has its own momentum, buffered by a civil service which, in this sense, serves a useful purpose in its slow, bureaucratic reaction time. And we have a blessed system which dampens drastic change with forced introspection.
So with agitation nation ringing in my ears I’ll listen to Alabama 3 or Horowitz playing Scarlatti. It doesn’t matter. Music is better.
And that is what this recent study corroborates:
“These findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry in the brain. ..To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that an abstract reward such as music can lead to dopamine release. Abstract rewards are largely cognitive in nature, and this study paves the way for future work to examine non-tangible rewards…”


































