Music V. Words

In a way, when I'm in my musical mind, I get dumber.

I think this says something about the way we are constantly creating our reality.

For a while, I was playing the old Nintendo game "bubble bobble" with my Fiancee a lot. One time, after a fiercly competitive round of "bubbling" little digital evil-dooers, I sat down to balance my check book or something. What I noticed was this: I had a tendency to process the information in my checkbook the same way that I was processing the information in the game. It was difficult for me to mentally perform the tasks of visualization necessary to do the math in my head.

After this, I started paying attention to the way videogames would carry over into life. If I was playing an RPG, I would start seeing my daily challenges in terms of "leveling up" and such.

When I am in my 'musical mind," "thinking" is mostly visualization-- both auditory and visual. When my mind is filtering reality through this process, I find it difficult to write or even carry on a conversation with the ease that I do at other times. At the same time, when I'm teaching my English classes, I find it difficult to sing well. I've tried to sing for my students before, and it requires a sort of brain shift to a more spontaneous "in the moment" mind set. I definately feel a shifting of gears to a less verbal way of thinking.

And I've noticed this phenomenon of needing to reset in other ways too-- think about when you go on vacation, and you're body is still telling you you have to get "those reports" (fishing, swimming, sight seeing...) done

Again, I think this has something to do with the phenomenon of "brain waves" as a part of constructing our "normal reality" or "what it feels like to be ME." We are constantly patterning a "me" to compare to the current state of things.