Do you remember the movie Rain Man? Where Dustin Hoffman's
character, Raymond Babbitt, could memorize phone books, count 246
toothpicks at a glance, and trump the house in Vegas?
What he had is a condition known as savant syndrome. The rarest
of the rare is the prodigious savant, who can demonstrate
unbelievable skills such as multiplying long columns of numbers
instantly and factoring cube roots in only seconds.
Perhaps you've heard of Matt Savage, a jazz phenomenon. He
released his fifth album this year, has made guest appearances on
the Today show, 20/20, and NPR. And Matt is only 11 years old!
Matt is a musical savant.
And here's where it gets interesting...
Recent discoveries suggest we may all carry a savant inside us
waiting to be born! Read on...
As new research reveals areas of untapped potential in the brain,
some neurologists are asking whether there might be a way for the
average person to switch on these hidden skills. Diana Deutsch,
an expert in music cognition, discovered that, as children, we
all may have had Mozart's ear for identifying notes but then lost
it.
Imagine having the skilled ear of Mozart!
The Centre for the Mind in Sydney, suggests that autistic savants
have "privileged access" to the mind's raw data before it's
parsed and filtered by the brain's executive functions. This
means that we must learn to hear the raw tone before our logical
mind tries to conceptualize the experience. Our knowledge and
expertise deafens us.
STOP and ask yourself this question:
"Am I willing to do what it takes to be the best musician I can
be?"
If you are, then follow these simple steps to supercharge your
hearing:
- Close your eyes (after you've finished reading the instructions,
of course).
- Make a noise by hitting your fist against your chair.
- Now hear that sound again in your mind.
- Now imagine it again, first louder, then softer. Make the sound
again if you have difficulty remembering it.
- Now imagine the sound coming from across the room.
- Imagine it from above you, then from below you. It may help if
you imagine hitting your fist against the chair again.
- Next, imagine some of your favorite music.
- Make it louder, then softer.
- Make it faster, then slower.
- Make it come from different parts of the room.
- DO IT NOW - Don't skip this exercise!
Do you know what this exercise did for you? (If you didn't do it
yet, do it now before you read on) First, it strengthened your
creative listening skills. Second, we bypassed your logical brain
by having you create and manipulate sounds that didn't exist.
Third, we proved that you are WILLING to do what it takes to
become a better musician and that you CAN do what it takes to
become a better musician. Hearing is believing.
