Finland & Music: Easter Passion & Dementia!

Finland is one of the few non Asian countries where their educational results matched those of Singapore and Hong Kong without spoon feeding.

They value their Health Care system and they protect their National Parks.

Looks like their emphasis on music education may be good for the grandparents too.

Listening to classical music modulates genes that are responsible for brain functions

March 13, 2015

Helsingin yliopisto (University of Helsinki)

Although listening to music is common in all societies, the biological determinants of listening to music are largely unknown. According to a new study, listening to classical music enhanced the activity of genes involved in dopamine secretion and transport, synaptic neurotransmission, learning and memory, and down-regulated the genes mediating neurodegeneration. Several of the up-regulated genes were known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds, suggesting a common evolutionary background of sound perception across species.

Listening to music enhanced the activity of genes involved in dopamine secretion and transport, synaptic function, learning and memory. One of the most up-regulated genes, synuclein-alpha (SNCA) is a known risk gene for Parkinson's disease that is located in the strongest linkage region of musical aptitude. SNCA is also known to contribute to song learning in songbirds.

"The up-regulation of several genes that are known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds suggest a shared evolutionary background of sound perception between vocalizing birds and humans," says Dr. Irma Järvelä, the leader of the study.

In contrast, listening to music down-regulated genes that are associated with neurodegeneration, referring to a neuroprotective role of music.

"The effect was only detectable in musically experienced participants, suggesting the importance of familiarity and experience in mediating music-induced effects," researchers remark.

The findings give new information about the molecular genetic background of music perception and evolution, and may give further insights about the molecular mechanisms underlying music therapy.

                                                      

© 2012 Am Ang Zhang

A reprint:

Easter Passion: Classical Music & The Next Generation

 Easter will soon be here and it is time for Bach's best music.

Passiflora alata ©2008 Am Ang Zhang

In the early 1600s, a Jesuit priest came across a Passion flower in South America and was taken by its complexity and beauty. That night he had a vision, so the story went, that the flower's trio of stigma resembled the three nails used in the crucifixion; the stamens represented the wounds; the spiky purple crown above the petals, the crown of thorns; and the tendrils of the plant were the scourges. The name was a direct reference to the Passion of Christ. I find it peculiar that the plant has been found in the wild in every continent except Europe and Antarctica. 

In England the Victorians loved it and then fell out of love with it. Now it is making a comeback possibly due to the fruits’ popularity in modern gourmet cooking. 

There are many varieties and some are edible. Of the edible kind there are two big groups, the one with the dark skin one and the one with the yellow skin.

The plant itself, from the stem to the leaves and the flowers, have been used by South American natives for various medicinal purposes, none currently approved by the F.D.A.

The fruit has some of the most concentrated fragrance of any fruit species. The charm is in its acidity which enhances the intense flavour and natural sweetness. With fine vanilla ice-cream it is a delight. It can be used as a topping for many desserts and famously for Pavlova. It is made into soft drinks and is often used in tropical cocktails. The golden variety is best eaten fresh and the dark skin ones can be left to mature as the flavour intensifies further.

With the golden to near blood red seeds, the fruit qualifies as a colourful non-green fruit, with all the necessary anti-oxidants. To me it is just flavoursome. 

©2008 Am Ang Zhang

As it is Easter I am listening to St. Matthew's Passion. Would this indeed be the piece of music to take to your desert island? 

“On the Easter music note, it is perhaps appropriate to mention Mahler’s Second Symphony: The Resurrection. The text of the music made no biblical reference and it was Mahler’s very personal view of life and his life was full of tragedies and suffering, with the premature deaths of his siblings and daughter, and his own heart disease. There has not been a greater composer to emerge since his death.”

The biologist Lewis Thomas when asked what message he would send to aliens famously said: “……Bach, all of Bach……”. 

Richard Dawkins picked it as one of his eight desert island discs. Now you know.

The Guardian:Why we are shutting children out of classical music.
April 2, 2009 Tom ServiceTom Service is a 33-year-old classical music critic. For 25 years of concert-going he found himself to be amongst the youngest in the audience.
But there is something else that is strange:
“I've noticed that bus and train stations now pipe canned classical music, day-in, day-out, through their speakers as a way of stopping young people hanging around. So toxic have the associations become, that this experiment actually works: there is evidence that playing Beethoven and Mahler has reduced antisocial behaviour on the transport network.”
He went on:

“An entire generation, aged between 10 and 30, seems radically disenfranchised from classical music. How, and when, did this happen?”
Then in Finland:

“A couple of years ago, I saw a class of seven-year-olds in Helsinki enthusiastically learning Finnish and maths by performing sophisticated little songs with astonishing tuning and rhythm. And this wasn't a music school - just a typical Finnish state primary. Finland only developed its curriculum in the postwar period, but it works: today, the Finns are classical music world-beaters, and their education system has produced more great instrumentalists, conductors and composers per capita than any other country on earth.”
Esa-Pekka Salonen is of course the Principal Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Finland’s most famous music export in recent times.
I was at a concert recently and a large numbers of players in the orchestra were Koreans. Well apart from steel and TV and cars, the Koreans are now into golf and music in a big way. The LPGA is certainly dominated by Koreans. Could it be that music gave them the edge in golf as well, not just the chopsticks?

Tom again:
“Here is a ready-made answer to the problems of renewing classical music's role in society. Make them statutory requirements for every local authority, and give them the responsibility for rebuilding the network of classical musical possibility that used to resound throughout the country.”
And perhaps throw in golf for good measure.

It was in 1990 that American troops played deafening pop and heavy metal music day and night outside the Vatican Mission to Panama City that Noriega surrendered.

In future, this strategy might have to be changed, Beethoven, Mahler and God forbid even Bach.

Tom Service’s last words:

“We've already lost one generation - we can't afford to lose another.”

Other Easter Posts:

Easter Passion: Bach, Beethoven and Mahler

Passion and Easter

Music & Memories: Mendelssohn & Village Hut!

It was as far back as 1960 when the Cockroach Catcher and a few school friends would sit in the back yard of his friend’s village hut and grind away a black disc. We knew the music well as we do not really have other records. On one side was Bruch’s and the other Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. My eyes welled up when Chloe Hanslip came on stage at the Royal Festival Hall to perform the Mendelssohn. Of course she played extremely well (she played a Guarneri del Gesu 1737). As it was, we were all refugees in Hong Kong following Mao’s taking over of China. It was strange that my friend who lives in a hut should own an old gramophone player and one single disc. No matter, it started me on to classical music and I never looked back.

Then I remembered Kandel, but here it was more than the music!!

Eric Kandel, M.D.:

"We are what we are through what we have experienced and what we have remembered."

In 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in New Orleans for the American Psychiatric Association Annual Conference. One of the lectures attracted a long queue and it turned out that the Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel was giving his lecture. I was fortunate enough to be able to secure a seat.


"What learning does is to change the strength of the synaptic connections in the brain," Kandel explained, "and this has held true for every form of learning so far analyzed. So, what genetic and developmental processes do is specify the cells that connect to each other, but what they do not specify is the exact strength of those connections. Environmental contingencies, such as learning, play a significant part in the strength of those connections.""Different forms of learning result in memories by changing that strength in different ways. Short-term memory results from transient changes that last minutes and does not require any new synthesis of proteins, Kandel said. However, long-term memories are based in more lasting changes of days to weeks that do require new brain protein to be synthesized. And this synthesis requires the input of the neuron’s genes."

Kandel & Lohengrin: Music & Brain

Music & Walnuts: Mozart & ADHD!

Berlin Wall, Appassionata & The Lives Of ...

Music & Knowledge: Mozart & Brain!

© 2005 Am Ang Zhang

As the cock crowed, the grandfather left the house on his half mile walk to the little park by the river for his morning Tai Chi with a group of seniors. He was in fact the leader of the group and it fell upon him, a young looking 83 year old to go through the sequence of Tai Chi moves that had been passed down by his grandfather and others before him. His wife sometimes accompanied him but today she had to baby sit the grand-children as their parents were on an early shift. When they finished they sat around for some social chat and drank green tea from their thermal flasks. He walked home refreshed from the morning’s exercise and social gossips. As he neared home he could hear his grand-daughter practicing the piano. What lovely Mozart! He stepped into the house to find his grandson busy at a Nintendo game.

“Why aren’t you practicing your violin? If you just play computer games, your brain will turn into water.”

His grandson shut down the Nintendo, “Grandma, you should try it some time. It will be good for your brain.”

 “I am too old for it. My brain is all water anyway, according to grandpa!” She just remembered that she had to take her Ginkgo capsules.

The grandson played some scales on the violin and then the Vivaldi A minor. From memory, as that was how he was trained.

At breakfast, the young children listened to Grandpa reciting ancient classical Chinese poems - a long standing family tradition. Soon the grand-children left for school.

Grandma now cracked some walnuts while grandpa got ready to go to the market to see what fresh fish he could buy that day. The walnut was to go with their home reared free range chicken. They grew their own vegetables too.

Later that day they would be having a good game of Mahjong with a retired couple.

Much of what they did would help to maintain their brain fitness.

Ginkgo biloba with its romantic botanical history is no longer the Dementia buster it promised to be. (Those who know of the village in Japan where there are loads of Ginkgo trees could have told you that. The village has the highest Alzheimer rates in Japan.)

I was reminded of Woody Allen’s film, Radio Days, where the young Allen (who else) was brought before the Rabbi by his mother for his advice because Allen was hooked onto the radio. The Rabbi’s skepticism was perhaps not that dissimilar to ours nowadays about iPhones, computer games and brain exercises. Indeed the young Allen should be concentrating on his upcoming Bar Mitzvah and the Torah memorizing.

The Old views on Brain.

When I was training in London in the 70s, I spent some time at Queen Square. Those in the know will recognize it as the place for neurology this side of the Atlantic. It was drilled into us then that sadly we were given a number of brain cells when we were born and it was all downhill from then on or something to that effect. It was well known that neurologists were great diagnosticians but for most neurological conditions, not much could be done. How depressing indeed. Even as recently as four weeks ago, I heard a young doctor told his father that there was nothing he could do with his brain cells. One is given so many at birth and no more can be expected. Lord Brain (1895-1966) would have been so proud.

Yet it was also London that shook the world with new discoveries about the brain, and the study was on the most unlikely group of people: Taxi drivers. Their “KNOWLEDGE” was the basis of our knowledge on brain plasticity today. The “KNOWLEDGE” is a term officially used to describe the test the Taxi Drivers had to take to get the licence to drive Taxis in London. Streets in London have evolved over time and are not on any grid system at all. Early postmortem examinations led some pathologists to note the small size of the Taxi drivers’ frontal lobes. Yet actual weight measurement showed that size was all relative. It was the enlarged hippocampal region that created that impression. Later work using modern scanning techniques confirmed the early impressions.

If two to four years of “KNOWLEDGE” acquisition can change the size of the brain in a grown adult, what else could we do?

The rest, as they say, is history.

The SharpBrains Guide To Brain Fitness 

The book covers the changes to the brains of musicians and medical students. It tells us that just three months of memory work can have noticeable effect on the brain of medical students, and music memory work has similar impact on musicians. I was pleased to learn that Bilingualism helps too. From infancy, I and my siblings were brought up with speaking two Chinese dialects at home.

Will medical schools that have abandoned traditional teachings please bring back Anatomy-the old way?

Mozart & Music

Is the piano China’s answer to the problem that is facing many parents in the west, i.e. ADHD? Could it be a novel substitute for Ritalin and other stimulants? With the advent of unproven modern approaches to education at all levels, very few subjects require memory work. Yet in the last decade or so, memory work has been shown to be beneficial to “brain power”, leading to a whole new approach to neuroplasticity. Learning a musical instrument is one way to give the brain the right amount of training. 

Did the 300,000 or so that took up piano this year in China know a thing or two about brain plasticity? Currently 30 million children are reported to be learning the piano in China.

For now, just as the west is abandoning classical music training as part of the school curriculum, parents in China are paying for their children to have piano lessons. By some reckoning, North America probably consumes 90% of Ritalin and similar stimulants, whereas China is probably consuming 90% of the pianos produced. One factory in the south of China is currently producing 100,000 pianos a day.

As a child psychiatrist, I find the ones on ADHD showed great promise but I doubt if we are ever going to see the end of the stimulants’ hold on the condition in the West. It is interesting to note that Stimulants never took off in China, a country with a fifth of the world’s population. Computer games, on the other hand, have really taken off there.

Bridge and Sudoku were mentioned in passing, along with other favourites like crosswords. There is no mention of Mahjong although in the East it is all the rage, nor the memory work required in some religions. Their gods might know a thing or two about the brain.

Mozart's birthday: 27 January 1756

Music Posts:
Old and New: Multiple Sclerosis & Elgar
The Ring: Child Psychiatry & Human Behaviour
Nobel: Kandel and Lohengrin
Lohengrin: Speech Disability, Design & Hypertension
Easter Passion: Bach, Beethoven and Mahler
'The Knowledge' and the Brain

Music: Fit for a Spa

© 2001 Am Ang Zhang

Friend:

Our resort has a luxury spa complete with a huge indoor heated pool.  I always wonder where spa and restaurant owners can turn for help in choosing their background music. 

Out of the top of my head, the following pieces of music may be good:

1.       Pachelbel Canon – by Johann Pachelbel  Play

2.       Prelude to Lohengrin – by Richard Wagner Play

3.       Symphony no.5  - Adagietto - by Gustav Mahler Play

4.       Meditation From Thais - by Jules Massenet Play

5.       La Traviata – Act 3 Prelude – by Giuseppe Verdi Play

6.       Adagio in G Minor – by Tomaso Albinoni Play

7.       String Quartet in C, Opus 163, D956 – 2^nd movement Adagio - by Franz Schubert Play

8.       Cello concerto in E Minor, Op 85 Adagio Moderato – by Edward Elgar Play

9.       Tristan und Isolde – Prelude - by Richard Wagner Play

10.   Adagio for Strings, op.11 – by Samuel Barber Play

11.   Andante Cantabile Op 11 – by Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky Play

12.   Das Lied von der Erde - Der Abschied – by Gustav Mahler Play 

My thanks to Jobbing Doctor, who had the following additional suggestions:

•     The Swan of Tuenola – Sibelius Play
•     Second Movement of Bach's Double Violin Concerto Play
•     Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams Play
•     Sinfonia from Bach's 21st Cantata ('Ich hatte view bekummermis') Play
•     First Movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C Play
•     Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Anaeas Play
•     September from Strauss's 4 last songs Play

Other Music Posts:

Nobel: Kandel and Lohengrin 

Lohengrin: Speech Disability, Design & Hypertension

The Dark Side: Il Trovatore

Doctor Atomic

Illness and Morality

Lunar Eclipse

Chopin: Proms Gallery & Maria Joao Pires

Bayreuth: The Ruling Class & Photography

Proms: Mahler & Nature