Music and Dementia

 

                                                    We don’t stop playing because we grow old;                                                                 we grow old because we stop playing.                                                                      -  George Bernard Shaw

Does the music you enjoy indicate intellectual capacity?

Stereotypically, classical music is the favorite genre of the pretentious and intellectually elite. While this isn’t always true, research suggests that there might be a bit of truth to that stereotype. 

Two independent studies, conducted in Britain and Italy respectively, found that those who have greater intellectual function tend to correlate with liking classical music. In the British study, doctors found that musical tastes changed as patients lost brainpower to dementia, with some who had previously loved classical music turning away from it in favor of pop. The Italian study produced almost identical results, with complete turnarounds in musical tastes as gray matter in the brain was damaged or diminished.

This isn’t to say that all pop fans are mentally incompetent or lack smarts, researchers from both studies were quick to assert, only that it appears to take more brain power to be able to appreciate classical music. 

I find this interesting but still love listening to everything from Green Day to Artie Shaw and the 3 B's, and Eddie Vedder to Mel Carter. 
 

They're Taking Over The World

AI has moved from mildly irritating to intrusively pushy in a matter of months. In writing platforms they are especially obnoxious. AI has its place, don't get me wrong, but not in creative writing, and it should be something one opts into not something that is foisted upon us without our consent or knowledge. 

And.....it's not as smart as it thinks it is.  For instance the Gmail Gemini bot doesn’t know the difference between periodically and sporadically. He refused to believe the latter is a word.  Some of the creep's edits (so called "corrections") are just plain funny. So we might as well laugh. For instance, when proofreading copy, I recently came across this AI invention: He was fuzzy on details became  he was a fuzzy tail. 

I’m managed to turn off some of the AI “enhancements” but not all of them. And with every update, Google throws a new wrench into the mix. Like the one a miscreant threw into my great grandfather’s oilwell to disable it.  (A true story) They don’t make it easy to  disable their entrenched AI bots and while their wrenches are mostly just annoying, some make it impossible to produce, clean, innovative and imaginative human writing free of artificial intelligence. Their main problem? They aren’t human.

A Cultural Milestone

The $70 million JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER for the Performing Arts opened on Septemer 8, 1971. The first piece performed was Leonard Bernstein's Mass, which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had asked the composer to write in memory of JFK.

Designed by American architech, Edward Durell Stone, the center represents a PUBLIC-PRIVATE partnership. History of the Kennedy Center here.