Playing Scared (14 page)

Meditation lowers anxiety by enhancing the circuitry between the left prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. It turns out that the prefrontal cortex, the logical, analytical part of the brain, the region most associated with executive function
and higher thinking, is also associated—on the left side—with positive emotion. The more active the left prefrontal cortex, the more resilient—or, as Davidson puts it, Resilient—one is. This understanding has been confirmed by dozens of studies and MRIs that show the more activation there is between the left prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the more emotionally resilient the person is. But the range of variation among individuals is staggering. The amount of activation in the left prefrontal region of a Resilient person can be thirty times that of someone who is not Resilient.

How resilient am I? Based on my history at the piano, it would appear that the answer is “not very.” Definitely a small
r
. In my worst moments, I worry that my hippocampus, that little seahorse in the brain, may be a bit shriveled. It is well-known that chronic stress can impair the function of the hippocampus, which plays a critical role in consolidating short-term memory into long-term memory. (After a fear memory is laid down in the amygdala, it gets consolidated in the hippocampus.) Research has shown that people whose post-traumatic stress disorder is caused by repeated trauma (soldiers exposed to severe and repeated carnage in combat, individuals repeatedly abused as children) have smaller hippocampi. But there is also intriguing evidence for a chicken-or-egg dilemma, that having a small hippocampus may actually precede the PTSD and thus predispose one to the disorder.

It may seem frivolous and even presumptuous to compare a case of performance anxiety with PTSD, but in fact a 2012 study of orchestra musicians in Australia did just that. The study found that 33 percent of the musicians met the criteria
for a diagnosis of social phobia, while 22 percent identified themselves in a questionnaire as positive for post-traumatic stress disorder. The author of the study, psychologist Dianna Kenny, concluded that detailed memories of mangled concerts were recalled with “a clarity and emotional ‘present-ness’ that resemble, in some instances, the flashbacks experienced by those who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.”
³

Damage to the hippocampus interferes with a person’s sensitivity to context. The soldier who patrols the streets of war-torn Tikrit on high alert is doing his job. When he brings that same hypervigilance home to the States, he is undone; the sound of a car backfiring puts him over the edge. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder of disrupted context. A damaged hippocampus—unable to form memories of the context in which a trauma occurs—inhibits the ability to distinguish the screech of an incoming bomb from the siren of a fire truck. Luckily, the brain’s plasticity can help compensate. In his book, which reads like part science, part self-help, Davidson writes that “thought alone can increase or decrease activity in specific brain circuits that underlie psychological illness.” The extent of such neuroplasticity is evident from MRI studies of people who were born deaf. Their auditory cortex, the part of the brain ordinarily reserved for hearing function, is appropriated for peripheral vision. “It is as if,” Davidson writes, “the auditory cortex, tired of enforced inactivity as a result of receiving no signals from the ears, took upon itself a regimen of job retraining, so that it now processes visual signals.”
⁴

Correspondingly, people who are blind from birth and who learn to read Braille show a measurable increase in the size and
activity of those parts of the brain ordinarily reserved for visual function. “Their visual cortex—which is supposedly hardwired to process signals from the eye and turn them into visual images—undertakes a radical career change and takes on the job of processing sensations from the fingers rather than input from the eyes.”
⁵
It’s not such a great leap, then, to assert (as Davidson does) that a person can modify his or her brain through meditation. The practice of mindfulness trains one to redirect thoughts and feelings—“the manifestation of which is nothing but electrical impulses racing down the brain’s neurons.” Mindfulness practice strengthens the left prefrontal cortex at the expense of the right, a nifty exchange given that the right prefrontal cortex is usually predominant in depressed people. Fifty years ago, Timothy Leary counseled a generation to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Davidson’s message goes like this: “Breathe deeply, stay focused, change your brain.”

Meditation is a way to take stock, observe, and create distance from the obsessive internal chatter. A psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley is exploring another tool to calm the mind, with a simple experiment that engages the kind of self-talk more typically associated with preschoolers. Ozlem Ayduk asks university students to recount a personal experience by using the third-person voice, shifting from “I” to “he” or “she.” The shift from first person to third appears to dilute the emotion that is otherwise inflamed by the recollection of a distressful experience. It alters perception and allows the mind to create some distance from the experience. The meaning of that memory may then be reinterpreted and
its negative association resolved. Not unlike meditation, it allows the individual to adopt a more compassionate response to his or her own failings.

It’s the difference between this:
What an asshole I am. I can’t do anything right. I never play the piano the way I want to play. I should just give up and quit.

And this:
Poor Sara! Why is she so scared? When she made a mistake during the Brahms rhapsody, how did she feel? Why does she get so upset when she makes a little mistake? Why does she think she has to be perfect?

The UC Berkeley students in Ayduk’s 2014 study were ordered to deliver an impromptu speech and perform a series of math tests, counting backward by threes and sevens—all in front of a panel of evaluators instructed to correct their every mistake and judge their intelligence. “It basically makes people completely freak out,” Ayduk says, grinning. Physiological measurements confirmed it: The students’ stress levels soared through the roof. But the students who reflected on their feelings in the third person showed less stress, reported less shame, and scored higher in the math drills.

“People who use the first-person pronoun are really just rehashing what happened,” Ayduk explains. “They tell a story by saying, ‘First this happened, then I said this, my boyfriend said that, and then I said …’ That’s the way autobiographic memories are encoded. It’s about the sequence of events: where it happened, who was involved, what was said and done, what emotions were felt. People taking the third-person perspective also do that. We all do that.” Yet the students who told their stories in the third person were able to make peace
with an experience and walk away from it. The meaning of the story had changed. It was reinterpreted and released as a source of stress. One of Ayduk’s colleagues, Jason Moser, a psychologist at Michigan State University, conducted EEG studies that found a dramatic change in brain waves between first- and third-pronoun usages. Students were wired up and exposed to a series of images, some neutral, some gruesome. The neutral images included a coffee mug, a tissue box, and a light bulb. The gruesome images were truly gruesome: a mutilated body, a woman held at knifepoint, a shark attack. The students were asked first to reflect on their responses to the images in the first-person voice. During the second round, they were asked to reflect while using their first names.

“In the first person, when they used the word
I
, we got the normal brain response,” reports Moser. “It lit up for the emotional scenes. But when they used their own names, moving into the third person, the emotional response pretty much went away. And it happened within seconds.”

The approach bears comparison with mindfulness practice in that it teaches people to stand back and observe their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in a healthy way. As Fritz Perls once said, attention “in and of itself is curative.” The practice of meditation demands that one observe every thought, every sensation, every feeling, without judgment.
My concert is only six months away and I already feel scared. I just don’t know if I can do it. Hmm, interesting that this thought has entered my brain
. Or we can try to lessen the amygdala response by talking to ourselves in the third person.
Sara has had some difficult performances in the past and now she’s scared that she may
never get her act together. She forgets that she is very prepared and doesn’t have anything to worry about.

I have been multitasking ever since I was a little girl, propping the latest Nancy Drew mystery on the music stand while executing Hanon exercises in every key. Now, occasionally, at the end of a long and demanding yoga class, I find myself in Shavasana, in a state of unfettered thought and judgment. The space around my body feels extended. I float untethered. It is a moment of sublime concentration. The instant I grasp for it, it eludes. More often, I am thinking about what I plan to make for dinner, which of my kids I’ll call on the way home, and how much more piano practice I want to get in before I climb into bed. The lights are off, thirty bodies lie prostate all around me, and I’m still multitasking. How do you change a habit to which every part of your body reverberates? One way is to just keep coming back to the breath.

Denny Zeitlin’s earliest memories are of climbing onto his parents’ laps and placing his little hands over their big ones as they played the piano. The family’s Steinway grand dominated the living room, and when Zeitlin was two or three he was given free rein to explore it, to clamber around inside, crawl over the soundboard and across its steel wire strings, to pluck them and lose himself in an ecstasy of sound and touch. Hours went by like this, he remembers, during which he struck and clanged the strings with spoons and blocks and other household objects, before moving on to the black and white keys. It was permission, he says, with a capital P.

Zeitlin is proof that an unhappy childhood is not a prerequisite for becoming an artist. The San Francisco–based jazz pianist and psychiatrist grew up in a Chicago suburb, with an older sister and two doting parents. His father was a doctor, his mother a speech pathologist, and both were amateur musicians. At seventy-five, Zeitlin is still drawn to those “intergalactic sounds” from childhood, still exploring
and creating sound worlds that challenge orthodox assumptions of what constitutes music.

With more than thirty-five albums under his belt, Zeitlin is a musician’s musician who twice placed first in the DownBeat International Jazz Critics Poll. He has composed music for
Sesame Street
, and he scored the 1978 remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. He also is a clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, where he teaches psychiatric residents, and has a full-time private practice in San Francisco and Marin County. A lanky, bearded man, he runs up and down Mount Tamalpais, not far from his home in Marin, at least four days a week and is an expert fly fisherman who travels to Christmas Island in the central Pacific for bonefish. Though he has never experienced serious stage fright (“The first time I played Newport Jazz in ‘64, I looked out and there were ten or fifteen thousand people; I was a little nervous”), he has come to understand it.

Music has always been his main portal to a state that he calls “merging.” His first such association—the toddler almost becoming one with his parents—was soon followed by others. He remembers as a child waking up early and going downstairs to play the piano, eventually noticing, out of the corner of his eye, that his mother had followed him down and was sitting and watching, quietly listening, refraining from comment. Her presence floated across the room to join his, generating a force that spurred him on in some unidentifiable but pleasurable way.

When Zeitlin speaks about the merger state, he means the dissolution of individual boundaries, a spontaneous
transformation of becoming part and parcel of everything and everyone around him. Merging is a way of taking on different aspects of the world and becoming whole with it. On the bandstand, it is triggered when he loses himself in the music and experiences a synesthesia of sounds, where the notes have tastes, textures, and colors, and B, for example, is purple, A is red, D is yellow, and F is green blue. “When I begin to get those experiences, it’s a signal for me that I’m on the verge of entering that merger state.” Musicians and athletes call it “the zone”—a place where the music seems to happen independently of the player.

Denny Zeitlin
(Courtesy of Josephine Zeitlin)

Music is still the primary portal. (“When I play my best, I often have no idea who’s creating music. I’m aware there’s
music happening, but I am not aware I’m playing the keyboard. I could just as easily be playing the drums.”) But it’s not the only one. There are many kinds of mergings: physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual. When running in the mountains near his home in Marin County, he finds himself flooded with sensation, merged with the wind, light, and landscape. A related feeling comes upon him at the office when, as a psychiatrist, he enters into a profound sense of understanding with the person sitting in the chair across from him. “There is a tremendous commonality between improvising music and working with patients on a deep level,” he says. “It’s entering into a merger experience at its most intense, where the boundaries dissolve out of choice, and yet a part of oneself remains available to observe and comment on the process. In the office, the patient is the protagonist and I’m the accompanist. It’s analogous to what I do as a pianist when a trumpet player takes a solo. How can I support the story this person is trying to tell? How can I try to enhance it or give it some meaning?”