Arthur Murray Winter Park, Circa Night Out

Attention all, Your Circa Lounge "Night Out" will start at 10pm this Thursday Night, come listen to great music and dance the night away with your Arthur Murray, Winter Park Dance Staff. Just a little Music Tip Below: Book Suggestion Reading: "Your Brain on Music". Daniel J. Levitin. Researchers in the field of neuroscience and music believe that they can learn a lot about human behavior by considering the evolution of the mind. What function did music serve humankind as we were evolving and developing? Certainly the music of 50,000 and 100,000 years ago is very different than Beethoven, Van Halen, or Eminem. As our brains have evolved, so has the music we make with them, and the music that we want to hear. Did particular regions and pathways evolve in our brain specifically for making and listening to music? Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from Mr. Levitin’s laboratory and those of his colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain. Through studies of people with brain damage we've seen patients who have lost the ability to read a newspaper but can still read music, or individuals who can play the piano but lack the motor coordination to button their own sweater. Music listening, performance and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem. Could this fact account for claims that music listening exercises other parts of our minds, that listening to Mozart 20 minutes a day will make us smarter? The power of music to evoke emotions is harnessed by advertising executives, filmmakers, military commanders, and mothers. Advertisers use music to make a soft drink, beer, running shoe or car seem more hip than their competitors'. Film directors use music to tell us how to feel about scenes that otherwise might be ambiguous, or to augment our feelings at particularly dramatic moments. Think of a typical chase scene in an action film, or the music that might accompany a lone woman climbing a staircase in a dark old mansion: music is being used to manipulate our emotions, and we tend to accept, if not outright enjoy, the power of music to make us experience these different feelings. Mothers throughout the world, and as far back in time as we can imagine, have used soft singing to soothe their babies to sleep, or to distract them from something that has made them cry. This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience - the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology. I'll discuss some of my own and the latest studies researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure. They offer new insights into profound questions. If all of us hear music differently, how can we account for pieces that seem to move so many people - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night (Vincent)" for example? On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference - why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna? The mind has been opened up in the last few years by the exploding field of neuroscience and the new approaches in psychology due to new brain imaging technologies, drugs able to manipulate neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, and plain old scientific pursuit. Less well known are t he extraordinary advances we have been able to make in modeling how our neurons network thanks to the continuing revolution in computer technology. We are coming to understand computational systems in our head like never before. Language now seems to be substantially hardwired into our brains. Even consciousness itself is no longer hopelessly shrouded in a mystical fog, but is rather something that emerges from observable physical systems. But no-one until now has taken all this new work together and used it to elucidate what is for me the most beautiful human obsession. Your brain on music is a way to understand the deepest mysteries of human nature. That is why I wrote this book. By better understanding what music is and where it comes from, we may be able to better understand our motives, fears, desires, memories, and even communication in the broadest sense. Is music listening more like eating when you're hungry and thus satisfying an urge? Or is it more like seeing a beautiful sunset or getting a backrub, and thus triggering sensory pleasure systems in the brain? Why do people seem to get stuck in their musical tastes as they grow older and cease experimenting with new music? This is the story of how brains and music co-evolved ­ - what music can teach us about the brain, what the brain can teach us about music, and what both can teach us about ourselves. Neuroscientist, Daniel J. Levitin, the book is called “This is Your Brain on Music” My background with music as a kid growing up was piano lessons for many years, chorus in the middle schools years, and later in life acoustic guitar. The college years I was able to apply all that musical experience to Ballroom Dancing. The business itself is just a very FUN business to be involved with. Ballroom Dancing and being surrounded by the students, I was able to realize at a young age the difference it makes and the positive effects that dancing does for people as well as how it changed my life immensely; Of course being surrounded by the music, which has always been a great outlet for me. The book is fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed it, if you get a chance, put this one on your “book to read list.” Best regards, Lizabeth Rice, Director of Marketing Arthur Murray Studios, Winter Park 407.673.7339 www.winterparkarthurmurray.com liz@winterparkarthurmurray.com