New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime

in Education, K-12, Music, Science | September 4th, 2015

As a sometime musician, it’s only natural that I want my four-year-old daughter to take an interest in music. Sure, it’s a fun bonding activity, and sure, there may be a bit of a stage dad lurking inside me at times. But I’m also convinced of the tangible benefits playing a musical instrument can have on one’s personal development. New science, it seems, backs up this intuition. The Washington Post reported last year on a recent study from Northwestern University which found that “Music training not only helps children develop fine motor skills, but aids emotional and behavioral maturation as well.”

This may not come as a surprise. And yet, the details of the study provide insights our intuitions about the power of musical education may lack. For one thing, as you can see in the CNN report above, the benefits of learning to play music as a child can last for decades, even if someone hasn’t picked up an instrument since those early lessons. As Dr. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, explains, good musical timing is strongly correlated with reading skills and general mental acuity. According to a co-author of the study, James Hudziak, professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont, early musical training was shown to have “accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control.” These brain changes can accompany us well into old age.

Another, Canadian study, published in February in the The Journal of Neuroscience, found that childhood music lessons boost the ability of older adults to hear speech, a skill that begins to weaken later in life. The study found “robust” evidence that “starting formal lessons on a musical instrument prior to age 14 and continuing intense training for up to a decade appears to enhance key areas in the brain that support speech recognition.” Even music lessons taken later life can help rehabilitate the brains of older adults. “The findings,” writes Science Daily, “underscore the importance of music instruction in schools and in rehabilitative programs for older adults.”

Music teachers certainly need this kind of evidence to bolster support for ailing programs in schools, and musically-inclined parents will cheer these findings as well. But before the stage parent in you begins enrolling your kid in every music lesson you can fit into the schedule, take heed. As Dr. Kraus discovered in the Northwestern study, forcing kids to show up and participate under duress won’t exercise their brains. Real, active engagement is key. “We like to say that ‘making music matters,’” says Kraus, “because it is only through the active generation and manipulation of sound that music can rewire the brain.” While musical training may be one particularly enjoyable way to strengthen cognition, it isn’t the only way. But even if they don’t stick with it, the kids willing to put in the hours (and yes, the longer the better) will experience positive change that lasts a lifetime.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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1,000,000 Minutes of Newsreel Footage by AP & British Movietone Released on YouTube

in Education, History, Television, YouTube | July 25th, 2015

Both Faulkner and the physicists may be right: the passage of time is an illusion. And yet, for as long as we’ve been keeping score, it’s seemed that history really exists, in increasingly distant forms the further back we look. As Jonathan Crow wrote in a recent post on news service British Pathé’s release of 85,000 pieces of archival film on YouTube, seeing documentary evidence of just the last century “really makes the past feel like a foreign country—the weird hairstyles, the way a city street looked, the breathtakingly casual sexism and racism.” (Of course there’s more than enough reason to think future generations will say the same of us.) British Pathé’s archive seems exhaustive—until you see the latest digitized collection on YouTube from AP (Associated Press) and British Movietone, which spans from 1895 to the present and brings us thousands more past tragedies, triumphs, and hairstyles

This release of “more than 1 million minutes” of news, writes Variety, includes archival footage of “major world events such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, exclusive footage of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.” And so much more, such as the newsreel above, which depicts Berlin in 1945, eventually getting around to documenting the Potsdam Conference (at 3:55), where Churchill, Stalin, and Truman created the 17th parallel in Vietnam, dictated the terms of the German occupation, and planned the coming Japanese surrender. No one at the time could have accurately foreseen the historical reverberations of these actions.

Another strange, even uncanny piece of film shows us the English football team giving the Nazi salute in 1938 at the commencement of a game against Germany. “That’s shocking now,” says Alwyn Lindsay, the director of AP’s international archive, “but it wasn’t at the time.” Films like these have become of much more interest since The Sun published photographs of the royal family—including a young Queen Elizabeth II and her uncle Prince (later King, then Duke) Edward VIII—giving Nazi salutes in 1933. Though it was not particularly controversial, and the children of course had little idea what it signified, it did turn out that Edward (seen here) was a would-be Nazi collaborator and remained an unapologetic sympathizer.

This huge video trove doesn’t just document the grim history of the Second World War, of course. As you can see in the AP’s introductory montage at the top of the post, there is “a world of history at your fingertips”—from triumphant video like Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, above, to the below film of “Crazy 60s Hats in Glorious Colour.” And more or less every other major world event, disaster, discovery, or widespread trend you might name from the last 120 or so years.

The archive splits into two YouTube channels: AP offers both historical and up-to-the-minute political, sports, celebrity, science, and “weird and wacky” videos (with “new content every day”). The British Movietone channel is solely historical, with much of its content coming from the 1960s (like those hats, and this video of the Beatles receiving their MBE’s, and other “Beatlemania scenes.”)

Movietone’s one nod to the present takes the form of “The Archivist Presents,” in which a historian offers quirky context on some bit of archival footage, like that above of the Kinks getting their hair curled. The completely unironic lounge music and casually sexist narration will make you both smile and wince, as do Ray Davies and company when they see their new hair. Most of the films in this million minutes of news footage (and counting) tend to elicit either or both of these two emotional reactions—joy (or amusement) or mild to intense horror, and watching them makes the past they show us feel paradoxically more strange and more immediate at once.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

in Economics, Education, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology | June 24th, 2015

Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer “yes” to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. Though it may seem like we’re all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they’re wrong they’re still well worth reading.

Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification.

That’s so far, at least, as de Botton’s very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life’s program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton’s own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives.

De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses.

Note: For those interested, Yale has a free open course on Sociology called “Foundations of Modern Social Theory,” which covers most of the figures listed above. You can always find it in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Cambridge University to Create a Lego Professorship

in Education | June 24th, 2015

Image by Julochka/Flickr Commons

So it turns out that my two-year old son might be qualified for a professorship at an elite university. No, he’s not some Doogie Howser-style savant. He just really likes Legos. And Cambridge University – the school of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking – has announced that it’s getting ready to create a Lego professorship this fall.

The position, which is slated to start in October 2015, came about following a £4 million donation from the Lego Foundation. The Denmark-based organization, which owns 25% of the Lego toy company, states that their mission is to “make children’s lives better — and communities stronger — by making sure the fundamental value of play is understood, embraced and acted upon.” The Foundation already has ties with MIT and Tsinghua University in China, among others.

Who ever lands the professorship will also head the Research Centre on Play in Education, Development and Learning and will explore the connection between learning and play.

The qualifications for the job seem remarkably broad. As the university says: “The candidature should be open to all those whose work falls within the general field of the title of the office.” They don’t, however, specifically mention that candidates have to be potty trained. I’m getting my son’s resume ready.

You can read Cambridge’s background documentation here.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Doctoral Dissertation as a Graphic Novel: Read a Free Excerpt of Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening

in Comics/Cartoons, Education | June 23rd, 2015

My circle of friends includes more than a few grad students, but few of them seem very happy, especially those who’ve already put every part of the process behind them except their dissertation. As they struggle to wrestle that daunting beast to the ground, I — as a non-academic — try to provide whatever perspective I can. To my mind, a dissertation, just like any other major task, demands that you break it down into small pieces and frame each piece in your mind just right, so I naturally think Nick Sousanis made the right choice by writing his dissertation, panel by panel, frame by frame, as a graphic novel.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow recently wrote about Unflattening, Sousanis’ “graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature” that doubled as Sousanis’ dissertation in education at Columbia University. Doctorow quotes Comics Grid’s Matt Finch, who describes the work as one that “defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.” Uniting the perspectives of “science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points.”

A bold claim indeed, but one you can evaluate for yourself by reading the fifteen-page excerpt of Unflattening now available for free, or purchasing your own copy of this groundbreaking dissertation online. It will give you an idea, making reference along the way to astronomy, ancient Alexandria, modern Manhattan, Gilles Deleuze, Sousanis’ dog, Ulysses, Buddhism, and the medium of the comic book — or the graphic novel, or sequential art — itself. You can find out more about this impressive work of art, scholarship, or however you prefer to regard it at the Harvard University Press site or Sousanis’ own.

via Boing Boing

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

in Education, Science | June 4th, 2015

Click here to see the entire histomap in large, zoomable, format.

The early decades of the twentieth century belonged to Cecil B. DeMille and his epic films both Biblical and classical: The Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah. The grand scale of these pseudo-histories required the most up-to-date cinematic invention of the day, and the most imperial vision, one later decades looked upon rather cynically. But just as the epic has roared back with a vengeance—with technological feats that make The Greatest Show on Earth look like community theater—so another medium of ambitious scope once popular between the wars has made a reappearance: the historical infographic, or as it was called back then, the “histomap”—5‑foot long visual histories of a variety of disciplines.

As with film, information technology has advanced to such a degree to make this early means of condensing huge amounts of data perhaps seem quaint. But if we imagine a world pre-internet, when the prospect of visualizing a subject as complex as, say, evolution, would be daunting indeed, we might just find the histomap as impressive a means of conveying information as its early readers did. These huge graphs of big ideas, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, fit “with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the ‘outline,’ in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! All of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.”

We’ve previously featured that 1931 “History of the World!” histomap, an impressive condensing of 4000 years of human activity. The evolution graphic you see here, also from 1931 and “arranged” by John B. Sparks, is equally impressive, and speaks to the times in ways that DeMille’s Bible movies did as well. Bear in mind that the Scopes Monkey Trial had only concluded six years earlier, and the country—as it is again today—was hotly divided over the subject represented here. Nonetheless, Sparks and publisher Rand McNally gamely presented this “Story of the Emergence and Progression of Life” with confident precision and without apology.

I couldn’t begin to tell you how the science here has aged, though some of it, I’d suspect, not particularly well. In any case, the form of this elegant data map, with its graceful lines of descent flowing down the page like magma, complements its content. Rather than presenting the theory of evolution as a forgone conclusion or belief, Sparks’ graphic lays out all of the evidence, and fits it together neatly and comprehensively. Some modern evolution infographics surpass the visual appeal, but not the level of scientific detail shown here. Others reduce the science, and the design, to the level of oversimplified ideology. And though we may have enough historical distance to make infographicss of hundreds of years of evolutionary thought, it may seem that the technology of the evolution infographic may not have advanced as much as we might expect.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem “Please Master” and Loses His Job

in Current Affairs, Education, Poetry | June 1st, 2015

Image by Michiel Hendryckx.

Although the boundaries of what should pass for free speech in high school English classrooms will be forever in debate, most everyone would agree some boundaries must exist. But what of the speech of famous authors? Of towering figures of 20th century poetry? Should their speech be subject to review? What of an English teacher who allows the most risqué Beat poem you’ve ever heard to be read aloud in class by the poet himself, Allen Ginsberg, via an online video (perhaps this one)? Award-winning English teacher David Olio, a beloved 19-year veteran, did just that when a student asked to share Ginsberg’s ecstatic, and very explicit, poem “Please Master” with the class.

After complaints from several students, the school administration suspended Olio, then forced him to resign. Whether or not this decision was just is a debate that extends beyond the scope of this post. The variables are many, as Slate’s sympathetic Mark Joseph Stern admits, including the fact that Olio did not exactly prepare his students for what was to come, nor give them the opportunity to opt out. The high school seniors—on the threshold of adulthood and some already with one foot in college—may not have had their “emotional health” endangered, as Olio’s termination letter alleged, but it’s little wonder some of them found the material shocking.

Ginsberg’s poem, which you can hear him read above, describes a “fantasized sexual encounter between Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.” It is graphic, writes Stern, but “not obscene.” Instead—in its allusions to St. Teresa’s angelic visitation in a “profane description of anal sex as a nearly divine act”—Ginsberg’s poem is “dangerous because it juxtaposes tenderness with masochism; dangerous because it rapturously celebrates a vision of same-sex intimacy we are only supposed to whisper about.” Read the poem, listen to Ginsberg read it, and judge for yourself.

Of course, this is hardly the first time Ginsberg’s work has caused controversy. His Beat epic “Howl” (1955), with its sexually charged lines, irked the U.S. government, who seized copies of the poem and put its publisher, poet and City Lights’ bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on trial for obscenity. Well over sixty years later, Ferlinghetti has written in defense of David Olio. We can safely assume that Ginsberg, who died in 1997, also would approve. And while we have every right to be shocked by Ginsberg’s poem, or not, and find the decision to fire Olio warranted, or not, I tend to agree with Stern when he writes “if every English teacher were that enthusiastic about his subject, America would be a much more literate, educated and interesting place.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

in Art, Creativity, Education, Graduation Speech, Life | May 25th, 2015

I’ve attended my share of graduations and hence my share of graduation speeches—from politicians more interested in stumping than inspiring their audience; to local TV personalities assuring graduates they too could become local TV personalities; to the real Patch Adams, who wasn’t nearly as funny as Robin Williams in his less-than-funny turn as Patch Adams. My experience has taught me that graduation speeches generally suck.

But not for the most recent batch of graduates of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, who got both bracing honesty and career validation from a speaker most likely to give it to you straight. With his trademark foul-mouth gruffness, De Niro told the graduating class what every aspiring artist needs to know: “You made it,” he said, “and you’re f*cked.” The world, De Niro told his audience, is not opening its arms to embrace art school grads. For all our pop cultural celebration of creativity, the so-called “creative class”—as we’re told again and again—is mostly in decline.

Of course it’s never been an easy road for artists. De Niro knows this full well not only through his own early experiences before superstardom but from his upbringing: both his mother and father were bohemian painters with turbulent, fascinating lives. And so he also knows of what he speaks when he tells the NYU grads that they “didn’t have a choice.” Where pragmatic accounting grads may be “passionate about accounting,” De Niro says, “it’s more likely that they used reason and logic and common sense to reach for a career that could give them the expectation of success and stability.”

Not the arts grads, the famous actor says: “You discovered a talent, developed an ambition and recognized your passion.” Their path, he suggests, is one of self-actualization:

When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You aren’t just following dreams, you’re reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re f***ed. The good news is that that’s not a bad place to start.

Maybe not. And maybe, for those driven to sing, dance, paint, write, etc., it’s the only place to start. Granted, NYU students are already a pretty select and privileged bunch, who certainly have a leg up compared to a great many other struggling artists. Nevertheless, given current economic realities and the U.S.’s depressing aversion to arts education and funding, these grads have a particularly difficult road ahead, De Niro says. And who better to deliver that hard truth with such conviction and good humor?

h/t @sheerly

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

New Research Shows How Music Lessons During Childhood Benefit the Brain for a Lifetime

1,000,000 Minutes of Newsreel Footage by AP & British Movietone Released on YouTube

Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

Cambridge University to Create a Lego Professorship

Doctoral Dissertation as a Graphic Novel: Read a Free Excerpt of Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening

10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explicit Poem “Please Master” and Loses His Job

Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

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