Bach: life, death, God and eternity
Handel: love, fury, loyalty and power
I thought about my preoccupations at that age. Definitely life and love. Probably wisdom as well. Not power, fury, God, death or eternity.
About neuroscience and music (mainly classical). Exploring the relationship of music and the brain based on experience of two careers.
“Placebos are drugs, devices or other treatments that are physically and pharmacologically inert. Placebo interventions do not, by definition, have any direct therapeutic effects on the body. However, all treatments are delivered in a context that includes social and physical cues, verbal suggestions and treatment history. This context is actively interpreted by the brain can elicit expectations, memories and emotions….” * (my emphases)Studies reliably show a success rate of around 30%, or higher, if the therapist is caring and convincing (the "context"). The context of acupuncture, for example, includes ritual, tradition ('proven over centuries'), positive expectations, value (it's not cheap), and perceived competence of a skilled practitioner exhaustively trained in an ‘ancient art.’ The needles don’t even have to puncture, just prick, so long as the patient experiences the context.
In 1816, I was consulted by a young woman labouring under general symptoms of diseased heart, and in whose case percussion and the application of the hand were of little avail on account of the great degree of fatness.Such "percussion and the application of the hand," augmented by placing the ear directly on the chest, were used by Laennec's contemporaries to examine the heart. The fact that Laennec played the flute might account for the novel way he solved his problem.
I rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased, to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of the ear.
The most dense bodies do not, as might have been expected from analogy, furnish the best materials for these instruments.... Bodies of a moderate density, such as paper, the lighter kinds of wood, or Indian cane, are those which I always found preferable to others. A greater diameter renders its exact application to certain parts of the chest, impracticable; greater length renders its retention in exact apposition more difficult, and when shorter, it...frequently obliges [the doctor] to assume an inconvenient posture....Flutes in Laennec's time were almost all made of wood. One might wonder whether Laennec as a flutist was especially able to evaluate sounds made by flow, of air through the flute and of blood through the heart. Laennec named his instrument, “stethoscope” (from the Greek stethos, chest or heart, and skopos, observer). Here is his drawing:
"A cell has to make a set of decisions to ultimately end up at a very specific fate. I compare it with playing a music piece. You can play jazz and get the liver [cell], or you can play classical and get something else. By now we can do that for about 40 cell types, and nearly all the time we can go from the stem cell to the young neural cell, then to a specialized subtype of nerve cell."Of course, he doesn't actually expose developing cells to music, but the musical metaphor helps illustrate the complex process of cell development and how we can influence it. The metaphor can achieve reality during whole brain development in childhood when the brain cells are deciding how to fit in and what to do in their new universe inside your skull.