In a heartbeat

The rhythm of music is my prosthetic for balance. I don’t have a preference ..just whatever moves me at the time. In fact, I find dancing easier than walking ..that’s probably why I go to the drum circle at the park every chance I get. Following a rhythm has helped me learn to walk again ..just as it helped me learn to ski when I was a kid. It puts me in motion so I don’t have to think about every step ..or anticipate every move. I suppose I have my early experience to thank for that ..those teenage years spent at rock concerts. Dr Oliver tells me that stroke victims, people who have lost the ability to speak ..can still sing. When they begin putting their words into a melody ..they can express themselves fluently. What this tells me is that ‘keeping the beat’ is a deeper, more fundamental process, than constructing sentences.

Turns out that most children with dyslexia don’t have a problem with vision. What they have is a gap in their auditory system ..they cannot identify the sound of the words they see ..and until they can do that .. it’s hard to progress much further. That’s why we have to go back and treat dyslexia using auditory training. Now, I don’t know what the church of scientology thinks about this .. I can’t find any of their literature ..only proclamations made by Tom Cruise. But according to Dr Goswami [link] the first language we learn is the sound of our mother’s heart beat. It’s like an internal metronome ..setting the tempo that helps us follow the sound of speech during early childhood. Lately I’ve been pushing the boundaries of my theory ..to the annoyance of those around me. I’ve come to think of it as the rhythm that helps us follow the events in our life. Without it ..everything we see and hear would simply appear as though they were coming out of nowhere ..and disappearing into nowhere. No coherence ..nothing helping us string them together.