Lois Svard

Category: Mirror Neurons

  • Myth or reality: mirror neurons and music, part VII

    A few months ago I wrote several posts about the importance of mirror neurons in the study and performance of music.  Mirror neurons, as you recall, are the cells that fire both when we act and when we see someone else making the same action, and multiple studies have been conducted that specifically explore mirror neurons in musicians.…

  • What you see is what you hear: mirror neurons and music, part VI

    Robert Schumann wrote in a review of a Franz Liszt concert in Dresden in 1840: “It is unlikely that any other artist, excepting only Paganini, has the power to lift, carry and deposit an audience in such high degree. . . In a matter of seconds we have been exposed to tenderness, daring, fragrance and…

  • Listening as practice: mirror neurons and music, part V

    I still remember Sue’s performance of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata on her senior recital.  I knew from hearing her earlier in a masterclass that her concept of the sonata was epic – distant machine gun fire in the opening repeated chords, various musical depictions of war in the first movement, death in the second, and angels in heaven in the…

  • Setting the stage for auditory mirror neurons: the auditory-motor loop

    Ohad (Udi) Bar-David, cellist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, says that when he first began playing with Arab musician Simon Shaheen, it was difficult to play the microtones that are prevalent in Arab music. “But,” he says, “when you start hearing it, your fingers just take you there.” Your fingers “just take you there” because of…

  • Mirror neurons and music, part IV: mirroring vs. mimicking

    Mirror neurons are imitation neurons, but does how we imitate matter? Forty years ago, long before mirror neurons were known about, psychologists Seymour Wapner and Leonard Cirillo were interested in finding out at what age children develop an understanding of right from left in terms of their spatial development. They conducted a series of experiments in which children…

  • Mirror neurons and music, part III: imitation learning

    Pianists seem to be used as research subjects more often than any other musicians – perhaps because there are so many of us, both amateur and professional. I once met a well-known singer who, upon finding out that I was a pianist, remarked that pianists “are a dime a dozen.”  Not the most gracious comment when…