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Classical music is an acquired taste. I have not quite recovered from the extraordinary experience of hearing a live performance of a 100-year-old concerto at the Royal Festival Hall last week, but I know that the notion that classical music can be as exhilarating in its own way as a Rolling Stones revival sounds off-beam to most of the population.

Here’s a great TED Talk by  Benjamin Zander on “The transformative power of classical music”.

I, too, only really started taking an active interest in classical music in the past few years. I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend to catch some lunchtime concerts at my old Uni, and got hooked.

Notwithstanding my lack of musical training, I tentatively started putting together some “rough guides” to classical composers on one of my other blogs:

• B-List: Vivaldi - A Rough Guide
• B-List: Beethoven - A Rough Guide
• B-List: Chopin - A Rough Guide

My Symphony

To live content with small means;
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
And refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich;
To study hard, think quietly,
Talk gently,
Act frankly;
To listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart;
To bear all cheerfully,
Do all bravely,
Await occasions,
Hurry Never.
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.
This is my symphony.

— William Henry Channing

1) Your “feared self”:

Via Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy:

In a surprising 2008 study, researchers at the University of Bath, UK, found that the fear of failure drives consumers far more than the promise of success ; the latter oddly tends to paralyze us, while the former spurs us on (and pries open our wallets). In fact, as the study found, the most powerful persuader of all was giving consumers a glimpse of some future “feared self.”

[…]

2) Your “ideal self”:

…marketing strategies centered on celebrity do the exact opposite: they appeal to fantasies about our idealized future selves.

[…]

Time Out, the hit 1959 album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was one of the first popular jazz works to explore meters beyond the traditional 4/4 and ¾. (The first number, which is the top number of the time signature in sheet music, represents the number of beats in the measure, and the second number represents the note value that receives one beat. 4/4 means that there are four beats and a quarter note lasts for one beat, yielding four quarter notes in each measure.) “Take Five“ and “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” two of Brubeck’s most popular works, are both on Time Out.

Justin London is a professor of music at Carleton College in Minnesota who specializes in music perception and cognition, particularly with respect to musical meter. He says that Brubeck actually inspired much of his research into rhythm and meter. “I knew that it had a visceral, toe-tapping sense of beat and rhythm,” he says, “but according to most theories of rhythm and meter developed in recent decades, it couldn’t, given its uneven beat structure.”

London says that Brubeck’s rhythms can play with the listener’s innate toe-tapping ability—the technical term is entrainment. “Whenever you start doing anything in rhythm the whole motor center of the brain starts lighting up.” He notes that musicians and nonmusicians do equally well on tests of this ability. It appears to be an innate skill, part of the way we interact socially. Asymmetrical meters may be appealing because they test people’s native entrainment ability and keep the brain more active while listening and performing. “The asymmetrical meters do make you work a little harder to make you stay along with them, and that’s part of their appeal, attraction and charm,” London says.

Brubeck wasn’t too caught up in the psychology or numerology of his music. “Of course, rhythms can be looked at in a mathematical kind of way,” Langham says, “but I think as a musician he was more focused on making sure that the music reflected a type of emotional content, that it was able to reach people and move people, even if it wasn’t in a standard time signature like 4/4.”

Vale, Mr Brubeck.

MEDITATION and mindfulness: the words conjure images of yoga retreats and Buddhist monks. But perhaps they should evoke a very different picture: a man in a deerstalker, puffing away at a curved pipe, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself. The world’s greatest fictional detective is someone who knows the value of concentration, of “throwing his brain out of action,” as Dr. Watson puts it. He is the quintessential unitasker in a multitasking world.

Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.

The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction. Mindfulness, in other words, helps our attention networks communicate better and with fewer interruptions than they otherwise would.

Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.

The implications are tantalizing. Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.

Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked into buying things they don’t want or need. There’s no need to feel foolish; the retail industry spends an inordinate amount of time and money figuring out the science (yes, it is a science) of how to sell the most stuff. But it is a good idea for consumers to know what they’re going into, especially around the holiday season, when stress levels are running high and stores are packed with shoppers spending money left and right.

Though far from a comprehensive list, here are six tactics retailers use to get you to part with your hard-earned dough.

1. Holiday ploys: The scents and sounds of the season. […]

2. They trick us into staying inside as long as possible. […]

3. Lighting matters. […]

4. “Triangular balance” and shelf manipulation. […]

5. “Just toss everything in a pile. People like that.” […]

6. Analyzing our every move. […]