Music, for a while

I forced myself to watch the first clip below, because if 5.2 million Americans are living it daily, shouldn’t I be able to take 13 minutes?

Yes.

30% of the veterans will have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, with symptoms that include persistent memories, nightmares, aggression, irritability, and inability to feel affectionate with others. Oh, but that’s just the emotional side. On the physical side, there are the night sweats, the gastrointestinal complaints, the chest pain, and so on.

There’s also the little problem of sleep—PTSD people frequently have sleep apnea and insomnia. Then we have to consider the social problems—the isolation of the victims, the effect on families and spouses, as well as children.

The disorder lasts six months—for some. For others, death is the only cure.

And it’s no little problem—14 million Americans have seen active combat. Here’s what the Rand Corporation has to say about the scope of the problem.

A release from the Rand Corporation reported that 300,000 US military personnel deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression.

Another reports that one in six soldiers who’ve served in Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom suffer from PTSD or service-related stress. Regardless, the numbers are overwhelming.

Unlike past wars, where there were front lines and safe areas, the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq never know when or where the horrors of war will come to them. The level of mental and emotional stress is unprecedented, as is the shock of military and civilian attacks. Early evidence suggests that the psychological toll from these wars will be disproportionately high compared to physical injuries.

Other evidence points to the fact that the multiple tours of combat duty, unique to Iraq and Afghanistan, dramatically increase the percentage of soldiers coming home with PTSD or other psychological damage.

So how much is this going to cost us? Well, according to two economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, the total cost will be between 4 to 6 trillion dollars. Oh, and the costs will peak in 30 or 40 years time.

The economists also point out that it isn’t just treating the mind—patients suffering from PTSD use medical services 71% to 170% more than non-PTSD vets. Why? All that stress leads to physical illness. Here’s what Bilmes has to say….

This was the experience with Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD. And recent studies show that PTSD sufferers are at a higher risk for heart disease, RA, bronchitis, asthma, liver, and peripheral arterial disease. They are 200% more likely to be diagnosed with a disease within five years from returning from deployment.

Well, I got into this whole question when I came across an article using music therapy on PTSD victims. Would it work?

There’s some evidence that it might. In fact, Walter Reed hired a music therapist and created a program late last year. And music has often been cited as a healing force; doctors noticed that hospitalized soldiers improved faster when exposed to music.

But according to Oliver Sacks, it’s really only been in the last five years that had come to understand neurologically what music does. He claims—and who am I to take on Dr. Sacks—that music occupies more space in the brain than language does. And as you can see in the clip of Gabrielle Giffords and her music therapist, while Giffords cannot talk, she can sing. That’s because the part of the brain that processes music was unaffected. The amazing thing, though, is that the music is essentially teaching speech back to Giffords, and in doing so, creating a new language center in the right side of the brain, not the left, as it normally is.

So will it help the shattered veterans, as they live their hellish lives? Well, I can only tell you this—I googled “music” and “amygdala” together and came up with the words of this blogger, citing a study by Stefan Koelsch:

The amygdala, which processes emotions thought to be essential for survival, is a limbic structure. Studies have demonstrated that the amygdala responds a certain way to strong music-evoked emotions (chills). Even when chills aren't experienced, different specific changes in amygdala activity (and activity of associated structures) are observed in response to joyful versus dissonant music. Other studies have shown that certain limbic and paralimbic structures exhibit increased activity in response to videos shown with music, as compared to videos presented alone. Video/music studies have shown different neural responses depending on whether the music played was joyful or fearful.

These limbic/paralimbic structure studies provide support for Koelsch's assertion that music-evoked emotions are just as real as everyday ones, since they activate the same structures.

If that’s true, that’s amazing.

“Music for a while, shall all thy cares beguile,” begins a famous song by Henry Purcell. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it weren’t only for a while, but permanently?

From Cardboard Bicycles to the Voice of God

One of the strange things about being a blogger is that you frequently start out fully intending to write about one thing, and then discover yourself compelled by what seems a better, more interesting affair.

Though the first intention—an Israeli guy who’s making cardboard bikes—is pretty interesting. The cost alone is amazing—he estimated each bike will be less than fifteen US dollars. Most people pay more for a good bike lock than that.

I know all this because the good Taí sent me a link about the bicycles from The Economist. And it seems that the inventor, Izhar Gafni, has done his damnedest to use everything recycled. The hand bars are derived from Coke bottles. The chain is from recycled car rubber, as are the wheels. The frame and most of the rest is made up cardboard, which Gafni has folded, to increase strength. After that, he applies a resin to increase resilience, and waterproofing.

The low cost makes the bike a godsend for poor countries, since transportation is often a critical problem in the lives of poor people. I looked it up, in those days when I was championing everything from green roofs to the Lion’s Club eye glass donation to making an actual windmill be the star in Wal*Mart in the sign outside our stores.

Bicycles for Humanity—an organization starting in 2005, has shipped over 45,000 bikes to Africa. That’s not nothing. For a culture based on cars, the bike is a toy. But here’s what the organization says in its webpage:

A bicycle solves the problem of mobility and helps empower people to change their life. The mobility a bicycle provides allows people to travel greater distances in a shorter length of time and transport much more weight. Mothers can carry containers of water back to their village in a fraction of the time walking required. Students get to school faster saving precious daylight for studies. Parents transport more items to market to sell. Healthcare workers are 3 to 4 times more productive.

It’s estimated that ten million bicycles are dumped in landfills in Europe and North America. But these bikes are critically needed in Africa, and other developing nations.

Well, in those long-gone days of my bearing the standard of sustainability at Wal-Mart, I would have proposed something like this. Wal-Mart donates all its cardboard—or at least that usable for the bikes—to a local factory set up to produce the bikes. Wal-Mart also provides support for marketing, human resources, finance, and logistics. And of course, for every bike purchased at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart donates a cardboard bike for the kid in Africa who needs one.

In those days, ideas like the one above came as regularly as flies to a picnic. And, like the flies, the ideas were always swatted down. One of the first victims of corporate positivism is the shadow side—a negativism to anything that is new and—especially—not vetted by the boss.

In fact, for all the thinking outside the box that we were always adjured to do, there were people who practiced rote inside the box. Because it’s not only possible to make bicycles from cardboard, you can actually make furniture from paper.

Or at least papier—as in papier mache. It was quite a Victorian thing, like the horsehair upholstery used on couches. And primarily it was tables and decorative objects. But not always—check this out:

Nice, hunh? And since it’s been around since the mid-nineteenth century, pretty durable, as well. The British Victorians, it seems, listen to offbeat ideas at bit corporate America.

What some people listen to, it also turns out, is the voice of God.

I know this because it really seemed unlikely—could I make a post out of a cardboard bicycle? I’m only on page two here, and 639 words. So I was trawling, looking for something with a little more heft than just a bicycle.

CNN came sailing through, as it so often does. And who could not click on a link, “My Take, If you Hear God Speak Audibly, you (Usually) Aren’t Crazy.” Clearly a thing to check out.

Full disclosure—I have had an audible hallucination. By which I mean I perceived a voice that was exactly the same in feeling and experientially as the voice of Mr. Fernández, each night, three feet away from me at the dining room table.

And in fact it was Mr. Fernández’s voice that I though I heard, saying the words that he says every night to his favorite cat, Kitty.

“Yo,” I shouted.

No response.

There was nothing eerie or uncanny about it. He simply wasn’t there.

Nor am I alone. About one in ten Evangelical Christians say they have heard the voice of God, according to T. M. Luhrmann. Gallup, in 1999, reported that 23% of Americans had heard a voice or seen something that was not there in response to prayer.

Nor is it only God we’re hearing. A surprising number of people report hearing the voice of a person they have lost, and are grieving. Twenty-eight percent, according to one study in Wales, over 60 percent, according to Dr. Phil.

In contrast, the rate of schizophrenia—the hallmark of which is hallucination—is only about 1%. And the messages / hallucinations tend to be different—the messages coming through prayer are filled with peace and love. Psychotics tend to hear quite the opposite.

Well, it’s a curious topic—what’s real and what’s not. There are also, by the way, negative hallucinations—when you don’t perceive something that is there. They probably happen a million times a day. How many times, when I was practicing the cello, focusing so intently on the music, did I lost sight of the actual cello—the reddish-brown varnish, the nick on the purfling—that I was playing?

And there are a number of diseases and conditions that can produce hallucinations: epilepsy, migraines, steroids, even too much caffeine.

Come clean. Besides that one hallucination, I’ve come very close to others. It was in my darkest moment on depression, and it felt as if only enormous willpower could keep me from changing my thoughts into voices. I was, I think, at that threshold where thought becomes voice.

Better minds than my mind will figure it out. In fact, one of them—Oliver Sacks—is soon to be out with a new book entitled Hallucinations. So he may prove or disprove my theory: the center for recognition of oral speech (that is, the voice speaking next to you) is very close to and intimately linked to the center that processes words, including the words that form our thinking. Sometimes, with stress, fatigue, varying chemicals and different diseases, the connections are lost, or jangled. A thought becomes a voice.

Well, why not? We live in part in a land of mystery: a thought becomes a voice, or a form, like the vision of Jesus after his death. Oh, and also a more prosaic land, where a cardboard box becomes a bicycle.

Which, for a kid in Africa, might be both a mystery and a miracle.