Daniel Barenboim and transcendent timelessness

Daniel Barenboim processes life and music on another level. Michael Kimmelman writes about Barenboim in the Sunday Times, and marvels at this polymath.

The bookshelves behind him bulged with volumes in French, Spanish, German, English and Hebrew.

“Rubinstein read Cervantes in Spanish, Dostoyevsky in Russian, Voltaire in French,” Mr. Barenboim said. “Music has become specialized today. There used to be a different notion of musical culture. I believe that Furtwängler genuinely felt — maybe he was naïve, but he felt that he personally could save German culture from the Nazis. He wrote about the introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in relation to the Greek idea of chaos and catharsis. How many musicians think that way today?

Here's something to chew on from a book Barenboim recently wrote:

“When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death.” He adds, “Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”

Child's play = following curiosity

From Carla Hannaford's Smart Moves, Why Learning is not all in your head:

Dr. Paul MacLean ties the process of imaginative development to the development of play that becomes the essence of creativity and high level reasoning. He feels the link between the emotional limbic brain and the frontal lobe of the neocortex allows for the ultimate expression of human creativity and development.

Hannaford continues:

Play represents full mind/body integration, through specific myelinated pathways between the limbic system (thalamocingulate division), and the frontal lobes of the neocortex. When we are able to take in our fill of sensory stimuli, process and integrate it with richly developed base patterns, and express new insights in a creative way, we are then truly at play.

Is the regulated cross talk between the limbic system and the frontal lobes of the neocortex, expressed by Hannaford and MacLean as play, also describing the curious mind?

Curious mind vs. Competitive mind

I'm continuing to think about Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset, and the idea proposed by Ronald Burt, that creativity occurs at the intersection of different social worlds.
Burt:

''The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act, but creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game. Most likely, an original idea is an idea that came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it.''

I've written about using the Growth Mindset to consider ideas that were not necessarily reflective of one's self image. Perhaps this takes the form of discarding an idea because it disagrees with you, or what you believe you are projecting to the world (perhaps for the wrong reasons?)

I've often felt that the idea of curiosity has implications for the acquisition of knowledge. If our mindset is one of measuring ourselves against others, the acquisition of knowledge takes a narrower, linear form. We only consider ideas as they relate to how we measure up to the next person, and the people we associate with are likely to be those we are able to define and measure ourselves with. Our motivation for learning is constrained by achieving more than, or most.
Thinking in this direction limits us in how far we can travel. One car length ahead of our competitor?

intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

If we are motivated by an innate curiosity, we will look in many directions to sate our intellectual hunger. This can lead to many unexpected connections, and more questions. To extrapolate from Burt, our curiosity sends us seeking different intellectual and perhaps ultimately different social spheres.

I wonder if we use different parts of our brain when our learning is motivated by these two different concepts?


When I am very curious about an idea or a topic, I want to read everywhere and anywhere about the subject no matter how broad the range of material. If this kind of thinking were a cookie, it would resemble a really delicious and funky tasting home made one.

If I am feeling competitive and my motivation is to do better than someone else, I will focus on more obvious places of reference, and pour over the material over and over again. This cookie would be very uniform, sweet and laden with butter. -the kind you eat a few too many of until you regret the lead weight in your stomach. Perhaps this is a bonus if I am competing to develop a skill. It reminds me of ferociously competitive athletes who possess an astounding level of skill with an extremely narrow focus.

What famous people remind you taking the curious approach to the n th degree, and those who take the competitive view in a similar fashion?
Two off the top of my mind:

Curious: Albert Einstein: He dreamed about dancing on light beams. Discovered relativity
Competitive: Michael Jordan: He wanted to dominate everybody in basketball. Became greatest basketball player in history.

Are there people who are emblematic of a hybrid of these types of thinkers. Is this possible?

Walking is a balanced system (informed by Yoga?)

I was on a flight back to Chicago, sitting next to my 3 year old son, and a wonderful thing happened. He fell asleep as soon as we took off. I happened to have a whole New York Times in my possession, with a blissful 90 minutes of leisure to read it. I came across an article about people taking lessons on walking from their Yoga instructor. The concept is that most people's body awareness is remarkably limited in maximizing one's walking efficiency. The resulting inefficiency leads to sore backs, ankles, legs, etc.

During 10 sessions over about seven months, students learned to walk with their feet parallel, weight evenly distributed and bodies aligned.

One student described that

"back pain was gone and walking stride had changed drastically."

The Yoga instructor, Jonathan FitzGordon, owner of Yoga Center of Brooklyn:

"Most Americans don’t have a clue how to step, People would enter with terrible posture,” he said. “Then they’d do beautiful yoga, and listen to everything I said about alignment. As soon as class ended, they went straight into the bad posture.”

The Times piece went on to describe that,

Under Mr. FitzGordon’s instruction, the clients try to correct their entire movement system rather than address aching knees or shoulders in isolation. “The body is like a machine,” he said. “Each part has it’s own job, and everything is connected.”

A physical manifestation of sensing the balance?