The Relationship Between Dopamine, Meaning and Art

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Every day we experience new and similar sets of stimuli in the things, people, and places that make up our routine lives. Each impression we receive from our environment is channeled through the pathway of our nerves and reaches our brain. Whether or not we are focused on these things, each object within the range of our ability to perceive it takes little bits of our attention away from our focus and reduces our total awareness ever so slightly.
 
Even though the influence is so small no matter what the perception produces an altered state of consciousness. Sometimes these inner states manifest as changes in the regulation of hormones, neurotransmitters, blood circulation, respiration, and awareness levels. Every change in one body system affects every other in a chain reaction to produce one overall effect on the body and mind.

The key to triggering neurological changes and altering psychological states is through the interpretive faculties in the mind or the way something carries importance for us by containing meaning. In each and every case, the meaning must be deeply personal and affect numerous layers within our psyche. Fear is a different kind of psychological and physical experience than joy and anger is different from boredom. These states can be both conscious and subconscious because sometimes the connection from the environment to the personal is known and at other times it's unknown or forgotten.

Meaning is always derived from the past, shaped and patterned on long forgotten people, objects, and situations we are no longer a part of and can't ever return to. An unexamined or thoroughly viewed past is only part of the building blocks we use to construct our mental framework. Every tiny electrical signal derived from one or more of our senses is sent inward and it is the job of the mind to determine whether or not such signals possess extremely personal meaning or no meaning at all. It is an all or nothing proposition in most cases, either a signal matters or it doesn't, there's no in-between.

The mind is a self-programming mechanism we can either put on automatic or use cautiously and with deliberation. Used automatically, we are nothing but puppets in life's comedy and pawns in the drama of others. But used cautiously and with deliberation, we have a chance at controlling how impulses from the environment and people affect us by choosing the meaning from each and every impulse we receive and how we deal with it.

Handled in this way we can align stimuli in the environment, the meaning we derive from them, the reaction our bodies have from the meaning we chose, the emotions that are generated as a result, with our goals in life and the purposes we select for obtaining those goals. This approach and the state of mind which is produced can be called harmony of mind or integrity of thought and action.
 

Art is a stimuli like everything else we can perceive with our senses. Since art is man-made, the equation explaining the manufacture of art essentially breaks down to people affecting changes in other people for the sake of pleasure or some other psychological experience. Whether we're talking about music, painting, film, or clothing, the mind must evaluate a work of art to determine the meaning the artist wanted to communicate or the meaning the artwork has to us, individually.

Depending on the meaning we assign to the artwork, dopamine or another brain chemical will release into our bloodstream to change our psychological and physical state to match the meaning we chose. This may produce pleasure, stress, relaxation, or a sense of understanding between audience and artist.

 

 

Click here to learn more about neurotransmitters or hormones.


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Music and Trance States of Mind
 
Hooks and Earworms
 
The Brain, the Ear, and the Sense of Hearing
  
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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/





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The Secret Language of Words

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What’s in a Word?

A word is a thought, a vocal utterance, and a linguistic symbol representing the thought and utterance. Thought is a mental construct derived from a perceptual impression obtained from the physical environment. Therefore, a thought is a symbol of action in the physical universe.

A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that represents action with semantic meaning. The word ‘action’ is used here to describe either the existence of a person or thing, an action or activity, or the ability to reach for a thing and take possession of it. 

English examples of a morpheme:

The word ‘unbreakable’ has three morphemes: ‘un-‘, ‘break’, and ‘-able’. ‘Un-‘ meaning ‘not,’ ‘break’ as in ‘split or cracked into pieces,’ and ‘-able’ meaning ‘able, liable, or fit to be ______ed, able to _______, or giving or inclined to _______.’ 

Therefore, the idea conveyed by the word ‘unbreakable’ denotes the action of not able to be split or cracked into pieces.

Here’s another example. The morpheme ‘-s’ as in cats, or ‘-es’ as in dishes both indicate plurality (more than one of something).

Classification of morphemes

Free morphemes:

“Town” can appear with other free morphemes (as in town hall) or they can stand alone. The term "root word" is synonymous (the same as or similar to) with "free morpheme".

Bound morphemes:

“Un-” appear only together with other morphemes to form a word. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word.

Derivational morphemes:

Concepts that can be added to a word to create another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy" as in to give "happiness" carries additional semantic information.

Inflectional morphemes:

These modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on, without deriving a new word or a word in a new grammatical category (as in the "dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes "dogs"). They also carry grammatical information.

The Construction of Speech

A syllable is a unit of organization and meaning formed to be used in a combination of speech sounds to create words. Frequently, a syllable is a morpheme, which can be verified by studying the origin of words (derivations). A syllable is typically made up of a vowel and a consonant or consonants.

For example, the word water is composed of two syllables (or morphemes): wa and ter. Syllables are the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, its stress patterns, etc. This little piece of information is extremely useful for the writers of books, advertisements, and songs.

In contrast, a word is composed of singular or multiple syllables, which in turn are types of morphemes. Some singular words can also be morphemes, specifically those classed as a free morpheme.

In writing, there is a creative process available to the artist which consists of a 3-stage process.

Step 1 consists of specifying meaning.

Step 2 consists of specifying the sounds which will represent that meaning and designating that word’s usage in the particular language it was invented.

Step 3 establish the word in the language of the culture. When we produce (or invent) a word, we are essentially turning the sense impression of an experience into a thought and expressing or communicating that thought through sounds (a process known as lexicalization).

Therefore, you should think of the action of creating words as the process of uniting units of sound with units of meaning. Similarly, you could conceive of the writer's creative process as a series of efforts to fill a reader's imagination with meaning.

All languages can be analyzed in this manner and in each case you'll find that every word in all languages are simply meanings combined with other meanings that describe objects or events in the physical universe. Think about the words you use every now and then to increase your understanding of the words you use and how you use them. All sorts of dictionaries are available to assist you in unraveling the mysteries contained in words.

For artists who use words to create works of art an extensive vocabulary, a good command of grammar, and a mastery over the meanings of words are all necessary and important accomplishments to attain.

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Related Music:

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Related Article:

Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers (Part 1)

The Human Voice: The World's First Musical Instrument
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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/



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3 Types of Artist / Music Income

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As an musician, do you dream of a big record deal, acclaim, or fame and fortune? Or are you more interested in a career with music and an income level sufficient to earn a comfortable living? As a painter, do you want to be able to sell enough of your pieces to earn steady income or do you want to license your pieces to catalogues, calendars, and film makers for a fee? As a chef, do you want to open your own restaurant or chain of restaurants, sell books of your recipes, and make appearances on television food channels?

Whatever financial rewards you seek with your career as an artist or musician, there are 3 types of income you should be aware of and know what their sources are. The 3 types of income are passive, portfolio, an earned. Some of these incomes can bleed away your ability to become wealthy, while others can make you rich. What differentiates these 3 types of income is their source and tax rate.
 
Income Sources and Tax rates

Earned income is the highest taxed of all the incomes (50%) and is generally earned as an employee. This type of income can be made as a musician by working for a studio and playing with the bands and musicians that need back-up personnel to fill in their arrangements. You might be paid by the hour or earning a fixed salary, but either way you'll taxed 50% of what you earn. As a chef, you'd earn this type of income by working in a restaurant, making dishes every night, coming up with new recipes, and dealing with food suppliers. As an illustrator, you might work for a company like Disney or Pixar generating new characters and backgrounds for animated movies and T.V. shows. In each of these cases, the work may be very rewarding but the pay will probably be horrible, if only because of the deductions for taxes.

Portfolio income is the second highest taxed of the incomes (20%) and is generate from paper assets such as stocks, bonds, ETF's, and mutual funds. Usually this type of income is created by individuals through a 401K, IRA, or brokerage account through the appreciation (increased value) of their investments in paper assets. If you're an employee at Capitol Records or run a small record label, you are able to contribute a certain amount of your earnings to a 401K, IRA, or brokerage account in an effort to save and grow enough money for retirement. Different tax rules apply for different situations in regard to the amount of contribution, but in general gains in paper assets are taxed within this bracket.

As an artist it is possible to generate portfolio income from your artwork but it'll require financial savvy, creative thinking, and an extensive use of contracts to be able to discover how. For example, look up celebrity bonds, specifically Bowie Bonds, and find out how David Bowie was able to take himself public by leveraging his royalty money and create an asset for investors to profit from.

Passive income is almost always generated from investment real estate and in the form of rental money. If planned properly passive income taxes can get as low as 0%. A competent tax attorney or tax accountant should be able to educate you about lowering your passive income taxes to 0% legally through the purchase, sale, or acquisition of additional real estate properties. Using part of your earned and portfolio income to buy real estate is a wonderful tactic for an artist to use in eventually becoming financially free.

Another source of portfolio income an artist can produce is from licensing their work for uses other than what was originally intended. For musicians, this might mean having your music used in T.V. shows, movies, and remixes. You could also investigate the publishing side of songwriting and write songs for singers and bands who need new or more material, while you take a small cut from every CD they sell or performance they give. Some songs can live forever by living many lives in the recordings and performances of other musicians, but as long as the songwriter was able to retain creative control over the music, then he can profit from every CD, concert, radio play, and re-release that ever gets made.

Now imagine how much income you could pull in if you had several or dozens of songs working for you, like an employee, essentially freeing you from having to work ever again. This way you can focus on composing new songs and performing.

To get a thorough and in-depth education about taxes, artist income, and contracts, get in touch with a competent music or intellectual property attorney, tax accountant, and music publisher.

To learn more about the 3 types of income, click here.


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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/


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To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation securely through PayPal, click here.

 

The Pythagorean Theory of Color and Music

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The Pythagorean Theory of Color

"There are numerous arbitrary arrangements setting forth the mutual relationships of the planets, the colors, and the musical notes. The most satisfactory system is that based upon the law of the octave. The sense of hearing has a much wider scope than that of sight, for whereas the ear can register from nine to eleven octaves of sound the eye is restricted to the cognition of but seven fundamental color tones, or one tone short of the octave."

The Pythagorean Theory of Music  

"To Pythagoras music was one of the dependencies of the divine science of mathematics, and its harmonies were inflexibly controlled by mathematical proportions."

"The lyre was regarded as the secret symbol of the human constitution, the body of the instrument representing the physical form, the strings the nerves, and the musician the spirit."

"Every element in Nature has its individual keynote. If these elements are combined in a composite structure the result is a chord that, if sounded, will disintegrate the compound into its integral parts. Likewise each individual has a keynote that, if sounded, will destroy him."


This essay is from Manly P. Hall’s book "The Secret Teaching of All Ages,” which can be read for FREE or purchased here through Amazon. 

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

 

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Ashtanga Yoga – Primary & Intermediate Series, Supplementary Videos

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In my article “Smart Moves for Musicians” and in all subsequent posts related to exercise, health, food and water my intent has been to help educate you on how to incorporate a powerful food and exercise program into your artist lifestyle. The reason it's important to have such a program aligned with an artist lifestyle is to overcome and prevent the types of physical problems which commonly ail sedentary professionals. Typically, the issues range from carpal tunnels, back aches, headaches, lower back pain, cramps, stiff joints, poor posture, obesity, low metabolism, and much more. There's nothing less sexy than an old rock star who's put on 50 - 100 lbs. of weight and trying to make a comeback.
problems that afflict musicians and artists in general.

To further encourage you to start or maintain your current exercise regimen here's a series of video demonstrations for Ashtanga Yoga, one of the most challenging of all forms of yoga. The beauty of these videos is that it shows an approach to working out which allows you to do it anywhere, anytime, and in any weather, with or without equipment.

The instructor in these videos is the founder of the Ashtanga branch of yoga himself, Sri Pattabhi Jois. These 2 videos are intended for beginners and intermediate students of yoga.

Primary Series

Intermediate Series

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Smart Moves for Musicians: Exercise Without Weights Anytime, Anywhere

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

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Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers

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Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There’s a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn’t use such terms, since they don’t refer to anything. We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That’s the function of every conversation. Let’s say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they’re trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called “words.”

…you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people’s everyday “waking activity.”

-          Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs Into Princes

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Walls and Bars of Words

The unique power that words possess is by having influence over the way we perceive and interpret our experiences. How? When we produce a word in language we are in fact turning a perception about something in reality into a thought, then assigning sounds that transmit the idea as meaning to others. Writing is only slightly different, in that, writing is simply transforming the sound into a symbol (letters or glyphs) that conveys, we hope, the same meaning as the sound. The word, whether written or spoken, becomes the symbolic carrier of the idea. One of the wonders of the mind of man is in conceiving of an efficient method of communication about some aspect of life. In many ways for us communication is life and everything that relates to communication is connected with an idea about reality, or things in the physical universe.

The process of transmission goes even further than just the creation of language. Not only are we turning actions into thoughts, and then turning our thoughts into sounds, and finally turning the sounds into language (symbols), we are also choosing the words that will describe our experience of reality into an interpretation (a sense or feeling) of our experience. In other words, we also choose how we will perceive and act in the world we live in by our use of language. We will train ourselves and allow others to train us to see the world in a habitual manner which over time can become a mental prison – with walls and bars of words.

 

By our words we are also choosing how to “feel” about our lives. So it’s the words we choose and the way we choose to use them to describe our actions and the actions of those who act with us in the world that in turn shapes our thoughts about existence, which to a lesser or greater degree creates our reality. Oddly enough though, reality never changes and our thoughts are only subject to reality or our choice of words where the words are a medium and not the substance of our thoughts or reality.

Emotional states are largely determined by the way we perceive our experiences or by our quality of thinking about our experiences and our relating them to our values. What we emote about and in what manner is set by our thoughts about reality and our values.

 

Values are those things in life which we require and pursue for our personal survival. Words play a major, although not exclusive, role in the process of creating our emotional states and our understanding of reality. Emotions are like words in that they are a sort of barometer for our interpretations of existence. They are important, but they do not set the tone of existence.

 

Emotions are automatically generated within us as we experience reality over the course of our lifetime. Once we set our values in life or when they are set for us by others, our minds constantly compute a sum total of our existence, which produces an emotion such as anger, grief, boredom, or joy.

We have arrived at a point in human evolution where we are no longer able to differentiate these facts about human culture, learning, existence, and the mind very well. So it’s no wonder we aren’t even aware of the fact that now we are turning the sounds and symbols of words into our thoughts and making the mistake of confusing our words (as sounds and symbols) with our thoughts. We are confusing the symbols with the actions.

 

This is what makes words so powerful today and in so many industries. The professionals in these industries have mastered the use of words to such a degree that we are spurred to action in many instances not by our own determinism, but by theirs. This unfortunately places us at the mercy of symbols and makes us slaves to language. This is what also makes words so powerful in music and why songwriters too are among those professionals who use words to emotionally move us, thereby converting us into fans and consumers.

 

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 Related Music:

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Related Article:

The Skillful Use of Questions in Songwriting

 

Metaphors as a Songwriting Tool

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Remember to join our mailing list.

To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation securely through PayPal, click here.