Notes on the Brain

Research, insights, and syntheses of music and neuroscience from Alex Gittelman, music educator and Ph.D. student.

By Alex Gittelman

· Launched 2 months ago

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Mental practice produces real gains!

🧠 Skilled musicians can run a piece through internally with full timing details, including the structural arcs and metric placement they would produce…
4 hrs ago•Alex Gittelman

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Warm-ups are the configuration step that brings the brain's coupling architecture online.

🧠 The insistence on warming up isn’t just about muscle temperature or finger exercises.
Jun 23•Alex Gittelman

Slow practice is the window in which precise fast timing can encode before phrase-level binding locks it in.

🧠 The insistence on practicing slowly before playing fast describes a real architectural constraint.
Jun 22•Alex Gittelman

Schizophrenia may reflect a breakdown in the theta-gamma address system.

🧠 A substantial body of evidence implicates disrupted theta-gamma coupling in schizophrenia.
Jun 19•Alex Gittelman

Patients with advanced dementia can still sing along to songs from their youth.

🧠 Patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease can sing along to familiar songs from their youth long after they cannot hold a conversation or recognize…
Jun 18•Alex Gittelman

ADHD is a coupling mismatch, not a power problem.

🧠 The classic neural signature once thought to characterize ADHD — an elevated theta-beta ratio in EEG — has not consistently survived investigations.
Jun 17•Alex Gittelman

Dyslexia may be a problem with tracking the rhythm of speech, not the letters.

🧠 An account of developmental dyslexia, developed by Goswami and colleagues as the temporal sampling framework, proposes that the underlying deficit…
Jun 16•Alex Gittelman

People who stutter become fluent when they sing.

🧠 One of the most striking observations in the speech-disorder literature is that people who stutter typically become fluent when they sing, when they…
Jun 15•Alex Gittelman

Notes on the Brain

Research, insights, and syntheses of music and neuroscience from Alex Gittelman, music educator and Ph.D. student.