168 - Art in the Brain with Captain Frodo

What if a performance could borrow your memories and hand them back changed? We dive into the hidden link between music, juggling, and dance by exploring the brain’s precuneus—the region that lights up when art stops being “out there” and becomes personal. When you like a piece of music, your brain flips from hearing to identifying. That same switch can flip for movement arts, turning clean patterns and intentional transitions into visual music that feels like your own story.

I share why difficulty and risk are only the front door—and how depth begins when patterns breathe long enough for the audience to anticipate change and feel it in their gut. We talk about intrusion versus belonging: why unwanted sound feels like tampering, and why trust, pacing, and context invite people into a receptive state. From a tightwire’s held breath to a 40-minute pole sequence, the work is the same—sustain intention, reveal structure, let the audience do the meaning-making their brain is built for.

We also get practical. How do you help non-experts read complex movement the way they read music? Offer onramps. Start with motifs. Pair gestures with sound that supports the narrative. Use language that points without pinning. And above all, commit to flow—because a single drop or restart can break identification the way a pianist stopping mid-phrase can eject you from the piece. When connection holds, even familiar phrases like follow your dreams shed their cliché and land as real prompts for action.

Call it showmanship, visual music, or embodied storytelling—the test is simple: did it move the watcher? If the answer is yes, they’ll leave with new memories that feel self-authored, which is the quiet magic of live art. If this resonates, tap follow, share the episode with someone who loves performance, and drop a review to tell us the last time a show truly changed you.

Transcript

Seed Idea: Music As Medicine

The Precuneus And Liking Music

Intrusion vs Belonging In Sound

Is There A Network For Juggling

From Audience To One Audience

Visual Music And Dance Parallels

Experience, Memory, And Identity

Can Juggling Trigger Deep Introspection

Skill, Flow, And Intended Change

Beyond Difficulty To Feeling

Botticelli, Beauty, And Depth

Inviting Novices Into Patterns

Context, Framing, And Onramps

Rhythm, The One, And Payoff

Craft Needed To Play Visual Music

Why Art Must Move The Spectator

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the Way of the Showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo, and I will be your host and your guide along the way. And if you haven't already, follow us. Follow us wherever you're listening to this podcast now, just while it's still running and I'm still talking to you, just click follow. I would love to have you as one of my subscribers and friends and whatever it is that they call it. Um today um I this is a kind of follow-up episode to the two episodes uh that uh I recorded together with uh Jack Denger, and this takes me back to December 2024. I was in Christiansand in Norway, and I was reading a book that is called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, Music as Medicine. It's a book by Daniel J. Leverton. He's a neuroscientist who works uh particularly within music. He's also a musician and a producer and whatever, but he um wrote this book. And this isn't so much about the whole book, but because the book is about music as medicine, it's about how closely linked we are to music, and thereby uh how closely we identify and and quite physically how we get affected by music. So it's a deep insight and deep look into how um art really manifests in us, and in this book he's specifically looking at how then this could be uh used in um many different ways to improve your well-being and quite literally improve your health. Uh but be that as it may, this was what was going on in my head when Jay Gilligan sent me a message saying you should check out um Nice Catch, uh Jack Denger's uh podcast, which, you know, when you go and look at it, it's a rather infrequent uh thing, not so many episodes. But um just because there isn't that many episodes don't mean that there wasn't something that was really interesting there. Because what he had done in this uh first episode called Redefining Progress, which is a great title, you know. We talked a little bit about that in the last episodes, but redefining progress, it's like what does it mean to be progress to somebody who is just exceptionally good and talented at um technical juggling? What does it mean when you then redefine progress to be something else than whether you could do more catches, more throws, more difficult things? So that and he uh writes that uh podcast, and in in um uh then Jay Gillian sense makes a little group where we could talk because it's interesting, and because I was really interested in having this seeing this connection of how we are like physically and biologically and neurologically actually affected by music. Um I have some ideas and uh we're on a roll, so I just start um typing out not typing, I'm writing them on a on paper, and I have those notes in front of me now of things that I was thinking, and it all comes down to one simple uh fact about the brain. So this is not talking so much about um it's just based on the fact that uh in the book in an early relatively early chapter, maybe third chapter or something, I can't remember, in I Heard There Was a Secret Chord by Daniel J. Levantin, he mentions that there is a specific uh network, a particular part of the brain where music gets processed. This is called the Procunius, and that made me Google it. And just from this tiny little sentence where he talked about this, um, it gave me a whole bunch of insights. Some of them which I wrote down back then and recorded uh in a just WhatsApp message, basically like a long talk which set us off. But um I would like to go through all of those um notes with you now and um add in a few more things, um uh just some facts about uh this particular area of the brain. And um as you know, I really like to look at showmanship or look l the world through the lens of showmanship and uh my speculations and what I have here is that uh all the other things as well that we do, juggling and dance and whatnot, perhaps they too can get processed somewhere or in the same area or whatever. And spoiler alert, it turns out when I then started to Google that, uh it uh turns out to be right. But um I found that these things um gave me a interesting insight into what it is that we do, and by understanding a specific area of our brain and what that does, um that um gave me um some nice insights. So I want to share some of that with you now. So let's go. So um originally the headline of this was just to Jack and Jay. And it uh says uh in uh notes that uh I um first heard this stuff uh on um I heard about Daniel G. J. Leventin's book. I heard there was a secret chord from Neil deGrasse uh Tyson's uh podcast. So uh so check that out. If I remember it, I will post a link to it. If not, Google. Uh I heard there was a secret chord sacred chord, uh and uh Neil deGrasse Tyson on anywhere and you will find it. So the first part of the notes just shapes out what I just said, and that is that there is a network in the brain that switches on when we listen to music. Interesting though, it is that it switches on when we listen to music that we like. It's not just random music or whatever, and this is this I think is important. Because if we like it, meaning that we then sort of open you know in a sense, this I've talked about this many times that we're sitting on the cans and you make them like you as a performer. I'm sitting on the cans balancing with my feet behind my head in a show at the end. Usually I do that at the end. And if they really like me now, then they have laughed at my other jokes and laughed at all the sort of stuff, so when I all of a sudden then say something important, they like me and uh they listen to me then with open hearts. They stop using their brain to just uh shut down and critically analyze everything, and you can then say things that really matter and they can have a strong effect on them. So that means that this sort of in a weird way kind of backs that up. So it shows also the lens of how I think of things, that there is a network in the brain that switches on when we listen to music that we like. And when this area switches on, this puts us inside the music. It resonates as uh with us, as if the music is part of ourselves, like that the music is somehow being generated that the we identify with the music. And this means that the emotions the music then has becomes our emotions, like for real, so that our sadness from music becomes indistinguishable to us from the sadness that we get from a real broken heart. It's really interesting here. When you are opening yourself to the music, that's when you uh uh you let it become part of you, and it switches on all kinds of things in the brain so that you're actually empathetically or whatever you want to call it, you are feeling what the music is doing. And uh so the interesting thing though is that um if this network doesn't switch on, it's because we don't um like the music. The music feels as other, it feels like something else than us, and it gives us the feeling of intrusion or interference. So this is kind of you know, makes me think of how uh I think it was in the UK where they had problems with youth or people hanging out outside the stores of 7-Elevens or whatever. And uh things are in America too, anyway. They started to play classical music out um through the speakers, and this made people for one, I thought they sort of calmed down, but also walked away. Like it wasn't an wasn't an area that was now conducive to getting worked up or to hassle people or whatever, because the this uh sweet uh Baroque uh calm lamentations are coming out, and it wasn't the vibe, just like you know, you people get themselves worked up in their cars or whatever, turning on the the right music to get themselves into a worked up state whilst you know if the classical music is there. And but the second thing was that people actually they left from around the stores that didn't want to be there anymore. So this is this is kind of um some science behind that. It's that the music feels like it's other than us, it gives us the feeling of intrusion or interference, like it's sort of your emotions are being tampered with with someone that you don't like. And this is I also reminds me of the difference between a f like um a friend and how they make us feel, and a bully or an enemy or whatever. Like if you're sitting together with somebody who you don't like, somebody who's uh you know, for whatever reason is grating on you or have done something that uh you don't like or whatever, then all of that like all of that would um yeah get in the way and it would make you feel like it's some sort of intrusion if you're sitting there with someone that uh stresses you out for whatever reason, might be an ex-partner or someone who you have a strong disagreements with or somebody who has done anything to annoy you, then they take over um parts of your um of your mind. Like you it's a part of you now can't um can't relax. So this then, I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but as as as we will look a little bit more at what um what the brain actually does, uh what that part of the brain actually does, then we will see that you know I believe it it is the same things. But um, yeah, so this has to do with sympathy and antipathy, and uh and uh I am then asking uh when I was uh sending this to Jack and Jay, who both are exceptionally skilled jugglers, so I then frame this about uh juggling, and I was wondering, is there a network for juggling? Like this is the network for music. And when I sent this, I hadn't looked into the procunius area uh particularly much. So I'm just sort of questioning it here. So I thought I'd just uh read you a little bit more about what what it was that I talked to them about, and then we can um look a little bit further afterwards. So I'm asking, is there a network for juggling? A network like this, not an uh an area which has evolved uh specifically for juggling, of course, but since there is a music network, then I'm wondering and guessing that this might be also be related to, for instance, to dance, like how we feel watching dance, tribal ballet, seductive dance, modern dance, all these things. I believe that dance goes back, uh must arguably go back at least as far as um as music. And dance too can make us feel all these interesting things. Um and so maybe we you know, because we can feel then that the dance and the dancers are talking directly to us. Music, dance, art, and thus showmanship, as like that's uh what we call it here on this podcast, um has had its fundamental uh uh part in the or the aim of it is to directly engage us and make uh individual spectators feel like the art is talking directly to them. That that's what we want. It's like it's you want to connect directly to them, not like they're sitting on the outside watching me do my uh jokes and whatnot, and just sort of go, here's a guy doing jokes, but to really be in it and hang on your words or to be nervous that you're gonna fall off your balance or whatever it is. I'm not just doing this uh stuff in front of people, but I'm doing it because I want to connect with people. And um, and in a sense, you can then directly straight from my heart, that's how I want the feeling to be like face to face, heart to heart. I want I want to actually touch you. And um that's why I say that I want to make the audience into one. This is something that I write about in um in my book now. Like that's what sort of happens when you make them into one audience. They're not just individuals anymore, but they're one audience, and I am talking to them as if they are one. They are partaking in one event, one show, all together tuned into me as their guide along the way of this experience. So music ties us quite directly together, and we get a shared sense of belonging through music, and that's through this area in the brain where when you do that and you make the music part of yourself, like you like the music, so now it starts to trigger all these things which this area triggers, and when you share that experience with everyone around you, um like your tribe, or in this case the concert goers, or where I'm asking is if this is also possible for dance and for um for potential other arts, then we are actually becoming a group. So these things that I have talked about previously in the second season and uh and that I'm writing about uh in my book, that's uh um it all then this is sort of backing it up or gives it some interesting um interesting food for thought um and you know have some data behind it. So I'm just um asking the question to them. I quite literally wrote in my notes, can juggling connect with this musical part of the brain, so that by my extrapolation, dance network, so that we sort of have it as visual music. And when I then looked a little bit more into this, it turns out that um the same area actually does uh connect to dance as well. So when you're watching dance, it does connect to the same stuff. And maybe here um I'd just like to look a little bit because the procunius is a part of the brain that is most um most known for internally oriented mental processes. So it's like stuff that has to do with how you feel about it's not primarily made for um listening to music or whatever. We have the auditory cortex in in the brain, which is specifically listening to this, where we then have Broker's area specifically dealt dealing with uh with speaking and and Wernica's area specifically dealing with receiving sounds and whatever. But what's interesting here is that it this uh area, the procunius, becomes strongly engaged when music goes beyond sound and turns into experience. And this, like so memory, imagery, self-reflection, and emotion. So uh this word experience is what I think. It's like uh this is what art is, but this is what we do. The showman is a curator of time and attention. The audience gives us their time and attention, and then we curate that, and the result of this is an experience. It's uh we form memories. This is connected to memory. Like when people leave my show, my art lives in their memory. It lives in my memory too, but it's you know, primarily we're interested in um their experience of what it was that happened. Their memory is not the same as the what the show was, it's an recording of it, which will be subtly different or greatly different in all the different people. And this part of the brain not only deals with uh the fact that it uh you store or you store experiences in your brain, like in as memories, it's also this specific uh core function uh of uh memory that happens in the Procunius is is that it's connected to autobiographical memory. So things that you remember from your own past, you know. And I find that interesting when I'm listening to music or whatever, that's uh i i things just come up from your from your past, whether it was when you actually listen to it, but more also like you whether you listen to the words, you listen to the music, it does bring up these things uh inside me. It also, as it turns out here, that like um when I just looked at ChatGPT here, the to summarize these things, because I don't know anything about this. I'm just uh shaping it in your head in the way that it's been taking root in my head, that the main things that it's involved in is five different things, um, but only four of them that we're interested in here, because one of them is too much brain in so one is autobiographical memory, two is that it's connected to mental imagery, so visual and spatial. And if I'm sitting there listening to music, I can totally just uh dream out the way when you sometimes when you listen to if you listen to ambient music, you can really have this feeling like you're actually in some sort of landscape. It's just sounds, yet all of a sudden you can see this large flat landscape or uh or or extraterrestrial. Maybe you're on some other planet you get, or you're in some fantasy world, or like you just uh you get these mental images also when uh this this is the stuff that happens in the Purcunius. And it is also self-referential processing, which meaning that you when it's uh self-referential, it's like uh um that it has to do with your uh identity. This is what we talked about in the beginning, which is sort of started my whole thing that you actually the music connects with you and your concept of Who you are and your identity and all of that seem to be specifically about you. And this to me is that is exactly what I'm hoping that happens in a in a performance. So and then it's perspective taking and simulation, which is the last sort of uh last of those uh things, which it's really interesting that it's it we make it makes it basically means that it makes us introspective and and gives us reflective listening and it's uh we it uh absorb it into our own emotions. And um it uh specifically this part of the brain can also then um in this process of us becoming introspective, we sort of lose awareness of what's going on around us. And those who have heard me talk talk about this quite a lot. Um, it's what happens when you get fully engaged, when you fully get pulled into the area of interest that is what's happening between the showman and uh audience, it you lose uh you lose awareness of how you yourself are externally. Your mouth might fall open and you're sitting there with frozen gestures going, oh, I'm so excited, and then your hands are lifted up halfway to your mouth, something happens, if something scary happens, someone's going out on the high wire or something. You you feel these things. So it's really interesting for me to see that basically when we look at what the procrunius does, it's the it it it is it's great to hear that there is a specific area which where music where it really sort of activates the rest of our body, and that has so many uh so many of the features of this is the features of the experience of art, and as I've now learnt it's that this is has to do in general with art and not just with music. So um um as I'm gonna go back to my notes here and talk about what I continued on um uh ranting at um to Jay and and uh Jack. Um you can keep that in mind, but at this time when I'm writing this and that, I didn't fully know those things that I've just talked about um to you now. So can we so this so I'm just exploring this thing that me and Jay have talked about before, then that we could juggling be a kind of visual music? Can we, like what happens with music, let the experience of watching juggling give us this particular kind of introspection that happens, that music does. Listening to music brings up memories, like a song maybe with lyrics about heartbreak triggers an almost certain uh sort of referential bit of something, like there's something that's in in your head from your own life that mirrors this. You hear it a heartbreak in the song and then you connect it to something so that you get the feeling that the song is about yourself. It's triggering things, almost like when you're reading a horoscope or something, like it when you read the text thinking that it is about you, then uh it you see uh different things and you connect to it. So it's not necessarily that you're thinking those things in a drawn-out narrative. Oh, when Johnny Cash says of heartbreak, that means that was the time when I was out on a boat and uh like it's not like that. It can be just an emotional in sort of flashes. Um rather than can be very specific or not. It can be go back to a dream that you had or a picture that um you had, you know. You know, a picture tells a thousand words, so you get this picture in your head, which we now know from here that it creates mental imagery, so it can just come up with this one picture and you it feels like it has all this uh stuff connected to it. Um so you can just get this image in your head. So it's interesting, you know, that that feels to me like what it is, and and and can we then in our performance, whether we do juggling or we do whatever it is, like we should take a leaf out of music or out of dance to to um make sure that we reach in and activate uh these things in people. And now we know that the stuff that I've uh been going on about of how I want them to become one and how we want that that there is actually this is a real thing. It's uh it's my experience. I only have made it up from doing thousands of shows and paying close attention to it, and now very importantly, needing to write it down so that and this is you the l listeners to the podcast knows that I've been going on about this book for the last four years. Uh so it's uh yeah, it's not as easy when but when when you write it down and and you're gonna take your this is what I think, this is what I feel, and then I find this and I go, ah, it is a backing up of this stuff. So I'm asking in the in the notes to them, I'm going, can we? Um, and I believe it is possible, and I did that even then before I looked into all the stuff we talked about now. How can we make the watching of patterns, like juggling patterns, and make them feel like they somehow are relating something, something about themselves? Like, how do we do that? Um so um how can we make it feel like they it's these patterns are somehow speaking to them and about them? Uh and I said, I think we can hijack that network. The dude on the so and then I referred to I saw a guy that did a show where he um uh w went in, it was an amazing show, but it was a guy that went in and climbed up on a pole and then did a 40-minute show where he was on a Chinese pole, you know, they climb up and down and do all these amazing things. And when we were doing that, I uh had one experience, and my daughter, who had been watching several of the other shows at this circus festival, just leaned and leaned in and said, This is boring. It's just doing the same thing over and over. And for whatever reason, then this was like grating on her. She was not having a good time, and later on going, like, can I leave? And I'm going, no, no, no, you have to stay or whatever. Um and um the interesting thing there though was that as as what didn't get triggered in my daughter, so she was feeling like this was grating on her something negatively, like an enemy trying to grab your attention or hold your attention, just like we talked about before. But I uh this uh piece made me think about um life and uh my own life and my family and my relationship to my daughter and uh uh and uh Jay at the time had insinuated that I this is what happens in me because I am um because I'm a nice guy. But it is because this kind of stuff is what happens in my brain when I'm an exposed to art that lets me breathe or that gives me room to enter into it. And you know, I take the expression seriously, and all of a sudden a man just going up and down on a pole and and I can't remember how long it uh was, uh, but he's like it's like he's trying to get down onto the ground uh and doing um so many different things and getting tired and more and more sweaty and more as he's climbing up and not getting to go down on getting off the pole again. And to me, it just now it's because I'm then liking it, I'm starting to see it as uh the struggles of life and all that sort of stuff, which when I say it now sounds trite. It's also like not placing it properly in my mind, but it is that one picture. All of a sudden I'm looking at it. You know, I get it when I'm watching David Lynch's movies and seeing an image of something that's happening, and it's got this dream logic, and I invest myself in it, and all of a sudden, in flashes, I go, I understand Mulholland Drive now, yet you know, when you have a conversation with somebody, you go, no, no, I had an understanding. It's not that I've in any way understood the movie so that it is finished. You watch it again, then you go, oh, there's more to it, or whatever. But there you go, an example of uh of us uh liking it or not liking it. Um because to get to this point, um, you need to uh of of being um being pulled into it and and triggering all these things. You need as an artist, you need to have the intent to and to have put in the work to to actually create something which is visual music. And you need to be able to go from the beginning to the end. Um without uh, you know, that's why I'm meaning here in in juggling patterns. Like if you are to make them become visual music, you need to be so good that you can actually keep the patterns going so that the people start to see the pattern emerging. And that was why I watched a guy climb up and down for 40 minutes on the pole, and and there was no no error, no fault. Everything was just smooth and it was not just trick, trick, trick. It was like became existential. And if you juggle and you're doing difficult patterns, which at the time I didn't hadn't seen uh Jack uh Danger juggle and then uh and I had talked about visual music with Jay because Jay is so good technically that he could s put together a piece of juggling that would draw you in and and uh he could actually execute the patterns that he wanted to without uh having things drop, uh which would in a way then sort of pull you out of it potentially. Uh so um uh it if for this to happen, I think you need to really buy into the person and to for the abstract process, just like if you're having listening to somebody play music, you need them to be expressing themselves through the music, whether they are a rock band or it's uh somebody playing Bach, if they keep going, oh excuse me, because you they just played the wrong one. I'm just gonna take that from the bar before or whatever, then you you don't trigger this. It needs to be then a flow that you can let yourself into, and that which means you have to be very good to be able to um uh yeah to be able to truly connect to them and for them to connect to you and for you to activate the procuneous area. This is my thesis anyway. So you need to be good enough uh at doing that, you need to be able to manifest your will and let that be in a flow so that they feel that your will is involved in it, so that when somebody's playing music and they change the chord, that they go with this because this is what you wanted, and that is also then somehow becomes what they wanted. And this is very difficult if you're juggling three or five balls and you're juggling one pattern long enough for them to sort of see that and let that pattern, this shape, or you're doing dance moves doing the same uh motion again and again. When that changed, they need to feel like this was what was intended so that they can let themselves be moved by what you do. Um so that the so that they invest themselves in this abstraction, in the experience of art. It's that it triggers other memories in you, and then when you then change the chord, you change the pattern, that they get the feeling like, ooh, now this pattern is working on me differently, the pattern of sound, the pattern of music, the pattern of movement, of dance. Because art is only art when it creates change in the experiencer. If the music, if you don't like the art, then we're at the Pacuna saying this is something from the outside, an enemy or whatever that is irritatingly trying to grab you. But if the art becomes part of you and there is change in the art, then this creates a change in the experiencer. And I that's art is only art when um it moves you, when you are actually moved by it. So, you know, with music, we quite literally start to move. Like I am that's easy for me to start. So what do we do as as juggling artists or as whatever we do? It affects the spectator, and this affect is the cash value. This is the true fundament bedrock of the artistic experience, and this is triggering then in so many ways, triggered and it's connected to this part of the brain that does all this stuff. So, in a sense, talking about this part of the brain is making me think that I'm talking about and understanding more about um what the artistic experience actually is. So when you see somebody juggle, then skill difficulty and risk are what you see first when looking at juggling, and it's the easiest to notice, then it's so powerful that uh people a lot of people uh might not even be able to see anything else. Like my mum was talking about um seeing seeing something that I'd posted of Jay juggling or whatever, and she sort of said, Yeah, no, it's weird because you're just sitting there and w and and watching it, and then uh it's like you you just forget how difficult it is, like you keep forgetting how difficult this stuff is, and I'm going, well, that's actually that's actually like the thing that he hopes. He hopes that you can see something else in it and just took start looking at the juggling in the same way that you hope that you aren't constantly when you see a pianist play Rachman and of that, the only thing you go, oh, that was really difficult that when he played G sharp. So impressed by this guy. If you're thinking of that, then I mean any experience during the music is uh uh valid, of course, but uh that's usually not the kind of emotions that they go where you're just sitting there looking at their fingers, being uh interested in just how good they are at pushing the buttons. You hope that it transcends the pushing of buttons into getting the feeling of the music. When we are doing a juggling act, or if I'm showing somebody a sword swallow, they're the disgust and all these things uh come in strong with the sword swallow and the skill difficulty risk is you can't see past it. So our job as uh artists as opposed to jugglers is to invite the audience to go beyond this first level of the sword swallow in my act where I talk about it as a as as a ritual or or as a as as a way of becoming part with the sacred that I've done doing an act at where that's the angle of what my sword swallow is. So to do that though, you have to let them have these first levels first and then invite them to see through the juggling like uh so that their experience is, I didn't know that juggling could be like that, or that it could make me feel like that. So in some of the um in the episode uh that uh of uh nice catch from Jack Denger, he talks about uh feeling as one of the criteria that he wants, he wants people, one of the criteria that he wants uh included in his act. But it's also one thing that he goes that maybe other jugglers or people might be skeptical to these uh things. But I tell him, I told him back then, that those skeptics are wrong. Feeling the emotions we have uh watching or experiencing something is the whole point of doing it and watching it. Even this also goes if you watch uh something like a movie or whatever. If you're just watching it to have watched it and you just sit there and have no emotions, then there is no point in watching it. Then you gotta start watching something else. If you watch something and feel nothing, you might as well watch paint dry or rock, just watch a rock exist, you know. It's um it's only if paint is drying or whatever that and you care about that, then um then then even that might be interesting. So emotions and feelings is what actually makes the experience. But um any artistic experience that uh makes us feel good or you know bad or sad or impressed or horny or whatever it is, this is what we're after. So skill difficulty risk is like the level one of an art of the juggling experience. We hype the crowd and juggle seven balls and end it with a neck catch. That's impressive. Wow, holy shit, that kind of stuff. Um it's the naked lady, like on the cover of a magazine, something that's just like really easy attraction uh things where they just go, oh, it arrests you, and it has a very simple story, you know, these things. But the bigger feelings, ambivalence, and and there is there's more feelings and more stuff in art. So, for instance, like the difference between a magazine and A Birth of Venus by Botticelli, which is also a beautiful naked woman, but it's so far removed from glamour shots or porn or like it's it's much more than that. And it's it's beauty, it's mythology, it's composition, it's colour, it's there's elements of that that famously is uh not anatomically uh correct or not atomically normative, and you know, Venus is not in this picture. Venus is not just a beautiful girl. That and if you say that, that doesn't really cover what the picture is and what the experience of seeing that picture is. If you let that, if you sit there a moment and and watch this picture, then you're watching the birth of Venus, but you're also in a sense watching the birth of beauty, like you watching how the colours and how the shapes and all the elements of the picture. So when that washes over you, you are experiencing beauty and and the emotions that you then feel as you as you watch this is um that's the experience of art. So I'm um uh when I'm doing this, I'm kind of um responding to something old. So this I don't know how this uh actual episode of what I'm doing right now, whether that is making sense, but um I'm kind of having um yeah, I'm I'm having fun doing it. So thinking back to juggling there, the skill difficulty risk is the lowest common denominator, and perhaps the fact that um the the attraction that the uh that the naked uh female body uh has on not just on men but just in in general, that that this is a beautiful thing, that this is not uh a coincidence then that of course that um that Botticelli chose to paint the naked female form because it has a certain attraction. Uh and this no doubt is one level at it in the same in the same way that skill difficulty risk is the first level of juggling. Somebody juggles five balls and catches it and whatever. That the first thing you go, oh wow, just like you see there's a part of you that goes, Oh, there's a naked, beautiful naked woman on the inner. The painting. I mean it's yeah, that that's that's a part of it as well. But you and I think Botticelli certainly does it, and that's what we hope to do with juggling, or even if you're doing sword swallowing, that's the way that I think it uh is best presented, that it goes beyond the f fact that hello everybody, I can swallow a sword. Would you like to see it? Now swallow the sword. That's what we that's what I can do. Good on you. Now let's um I can do something else too. You know, when you want to move into moving, having more emotions and whatever, then um I think that's really important. So if you want your juggling to be music, you wanted to trigger the musical um uh brain reception network, the procunius, then you must have that intent. You need to need to feel and know that how you know how serious you are. They need to know it. That's um how you want them to watch. I want you to watch this like music, and I will continue, and you can just you can let yourself get into it. That's your invitation to the audience, so that they can actually be able to glean and pick out and see the patterns long enough um to understand it. Because the general population are novices when it comes to experiencing juggling. Everybody experiences music, you know, all the time. Now, now that we have recorded music, which we have had for a few hundred years, but before that, the musical experience was um was something that was only related to specific situations. There was a where, you know, it might be a wedding or a party or whatever, and there was would be people there sitting there playing that music, and it would have a function, and now music is kind of everywhere with it. So everybody has a relationship to music and thereby can more easily let themselves go into it and juggling. So we have a little bit more of an uphill battle if you're doing juggling or even, you know, say you're doing magic or whatever to fully engage uh this area. Yet I still think we are doing it. So we've always had this from nursing rhymes and all this sort of stuff up. Music is like what we know what music does to us, and particularly if we then help the audience, you know, explain, set the scene for them about the music, then you might already be tuned to go into it even faster if you haven't heard it before when you're hearing a concert or whatever, and we need to do that too. Uh, you know, when I watch David White, one of my favourite poets, when he does his uh readings and uh that, then he the little stories and the little things that he tells beforehand and afterwards about the poem, and he reads them a couple of times, reads this poem. It really helps me delve into it. So I often find that when I then hear him do another reading, even of an old poem, all of a sudden, and I might have read that poem alone myself, but then when he he's like he makes it come alive by triggering all these things, and that's the sort of stuff that we could do with the juggling that I we we spoke about with Jack in the last couple of episodes, too, of like that little white card that explains next to a picture, that puts some context into what's going on, that gives you inroads into the heart of the experience and and can trigger other different things. So we do things to invite the audience into it. Like if um jugglers just go straight to the crazy um just go straight into juggling hard without uh you can sort of leave them behind. Like if you they don't know how to understand it, you might it's like maybe you like you're juggling. If you just go straight into juggling and they don't know how to deal with it, they might just be left on the outside and watch you do that and it's now just a it's like a fourth wall thing where they're just waiting for you to finish or to make to bring them in. But if you manage to bring them into the juggling and go, okay, you can quite literally, because we are almost like we're in such primitive levels of this, um like in the way that Botticelli uses the naked lady, and the way that Bach is using beautiful melodies and harmonies and contrapunctal connections between the notes that you can feel. Um, this brings you into the music. Whilst if you just jump into juggling and did they are not sure what it is that they're watching, chances are it's like you just jumped into a concert uh where they're playing crazy atonal uh sort of music with that where there's uh no patterns discernible and it's just randomly happening, and they don't you don't know what to deal with it like. And there is music that is like that. Contemporary classical music, there's a lot of it that feels like that. It's just going and all, and you don't know that, oh yeah, this person uses only 12 notes and they keep repeating in these kind of patterns, and there's like you're gone, but you can't actually discern it, it just sounds like an atonal um wall of sound. So it's impossible it's possible with music too, and for most people then it's uh when you do it and go to a program of classical music, they might have some contemporary classic, but it's sort of nestled in as uh song number four out of uh seven or whatever that it comes in when you sort of accept and you you know you you pulled in. So there's something. We are now in a primitive state with juggling and with a lot of the circus arts where you might need to invite people in, give them some little anchors to hold on to. It was just like we've skipped. If we just jump straight into juggling and go on, juggling just it speaks to you the way that it is. And if you if you expect that, then that's great. But a lot of people will be left behind because if you just go into that, it's almost like you're playing, you skipped past 2,000 years of music history and just went straight to Bartok and Schoenberg and John Cage or Harry Potts, which has made their own instruments with their own tunings, so there's almost nothing left to hold on to for you to re so when you're juggling for jugglers, you could probably just jump straight in and they will really understand it. Just like magic for magicians is also a bit different than what it is to see magic for um just for um for lay people. Totally different things are there, and juggling for jugglers and music for musicians when they understand what's going on and you're jumping off or Indian music. You know, I was listening to my friend Ben Walsh and uh and Bobby Sing play, Bobby Singh being an unbelievable tabla player, and there's stuff there that they do where there's patterns that repeat, and I can't remember how long it is, but it's like 30 every 32 beat is a one. And I can like I I have trouble after four, I think. By the time it's five or nine or so that it repeats itself, by the time it's thirty-two, it just you forgot that there was a one. But um then you hear them jam over a long period they're sitting him, Ben doing the drumming and um and uh Bobby Singh playing the tablas, and it's just like they're both just almost just hitting away at their instruments. So you can feel that they're related, but you don't, but all of a sudden the one comes and they both hit it and they both go in at the same time. And and and uh I would like to say that it just feels like you were just waiting for it, and then you go like the beat drops when you're listening to electronic dance music when I watching Chemical Brothers play, and then the beat drops, and I was just waiting for that one because I could feel it. And maybe I'm just not educated enough then in Indian raga music or whatever, so that I can't feel it. But imagine how it is if you've just been waiting for the one for 32 bars or whatever, and they do a four-bar build-up to the huge drop of the one when it's uh incredible when you do that. Yeah. Anyway, so finally, my final comments to him at the time, this is of course uh yeah, it is that um if you want to pursue this uh idea or present the idea or present visual music, then you must have the necessary skill to be able to to play the music. You need to physically show the patterns really clearly. And this doesn't need uh well it you know maybe it needs kind of Guinness Book of Records level of uh of uh skill to be able to do that because it is because it is so difficult with um uh so difficult with juggling to do these things. Um and I'm saying this I think the reason why I said this was because after having spoken about this and his uh lofty uh dreams of what his act wanted to be, and I hadn't seen him juggle, uh I didn't know that this was fully within his uh scope of being able to really pr present uh visual music. So um anyway, those were the things that I was uh thinking back then, and uh the things that I'm uh thinking now is that it's really interesting that there is a specific area in our brain, it's called the Purcunius, and it the things that it does is that it triggers autobiographical memory, it activates this so that uh all kinds of episodic things, uh little bits and things from our past or anything that has attached itself to us in the past gets gets really triggered. It's like now you sort of um it's um what is it called there? Like it's just hot wired, or it's like it's just it's so easy for it to happen, like uh sudden emotional anything can be recalled tied to any life events uh earlier. So um, so that it really has music really then can trigger you making it feel like what you're watching is a personal narrative rather than a background sound, which of course then goes into this stuff that I can't remember if I've talked about it here, but I talked about it with Peter Buffano one time in uh in a conversation we had about how music, how important music can be for us who tour around and do lots of different gigs and whatever and can't bring too many staging or whatever. The music that we use behind us can really amplify if we are in tune with the music that's behind us, uh as the soundscape or whatever to what we do, we can really hopefully use that to anchor ourselves further into the you know, making the audience feel like um it's connected uh directly to them. Also, the second thing that the Burcunius does is that it activates mental imagery and visualization. So this is I think this is probably more when it so it does with music and with dance that it that you get these um sort of abstractions, and why I am talking to Jack and Jay about this is because mu um um uh juggling also has this kind of abstraction. Of course, um it is possible to get that level of abstraction uh when you're doing tightrope, for instance, but there too. You need an incredible level of skill, not just for the tight wire act to be um it's overshadowed by skill difficulty risk. They could fall down, they oh and it's so difficult and uh and it's so skillful or whatever, like wow, this but so you can't see the the dance, like in Norwegian and uh tight wire walker, you would you call it the Lina Dancer. It's a it's um tightwire dancer. So that's uh interesting, maybe. But um, yeah, you need to have this uh skill to and maybe this level of abstraction where when I'm doing a lot of my stuff which has words in it, you know, if I am too concrete, here I have this, now I take that over there, and here I do this, then if that's just this level one um uh of um of of um of script, then maybe this gets in the way of the mental imagery or so. But if you use more poetic language, then you will trigger that as well. This is a thing that I don't actually know. Does the Procunius how does that activate with poetry? I would say it would probably be right there with music, because poetry is in a sense the language that is most closely related to music. So the third thing is that it uh like uh it makes us feel like it is about me. Not just that uh it triggers a memory in you, but specifically that this is about uh this piece is about me. And that was what we said in the very opening of this thing here, is that uh you actually start to identify with the music so that the emotions and stuff becomes part of yourself, and all of this means that it increases emotional depth and introspection, like you uh you just become introspective when you watch art and when the procunius gets activated. So and that I think is uh you don't want them to become so completely introspective that they sort of completely fall out of what's going on. Or maybe, you know, in in certain parts you you might want that, but for them to be just they lose them, they get completely absorbed in what's going on, and uh but they're listening and watching you uh in a receptive state, you know, when we're going back to me climbing up on the cans, and I've just been making you laugh all the way. So when I say follow your dreams, because you can be whatever you want, this when I say that, this is always I say this, this is the straight out of a Hallmark card, and it is cliche, but there is super strong power in that because when you say that and that's truthful, that's what like love conquers all, totally trite or whatever, but in the right movie, in the right story, or whatever, when love finally gets to flourish, it can be just the most cathartic thing. Uh but it's so true and so commonly known that we think it is a cliche. So it's a powerful emotion that has basically fossilized. So you say it and it's empty. But when you say that right, then when a procunius is fully flaring, then you have uh follow your dreams. It's like it goes it triggers something that you've wanted to do that you didn't get to do, and a visualization part of it makes you kind of see that, but also see the possibilities of how your life would be if you did that now. Because when you're watching it, you get the fact that this is about me, it's fully self-referential. So this makes like it's not just that I'm speaking to you, but it is that this is part of you and this is your actual decision that you want to, you know, do whatever that thing was that was triggered in you. Uh so um in this introspective uh reflective listening state and complete emotional absorption that you have of it, there is a chance then that um you have actually been moved, you have actually been changed, so that when you leave the theater, if all of these things have been activated in you, the experience, although I did it when I was on stage, Jack Denger or Jay Gilligan did it when they did the juggling, or uh uh the pianist made you feel those things. When you go out, those will feel like it's your experiences and it's your thoughts and your and it and you've actually had it, and then you don't need any other proof because you just actually went through it. So in that way I see that's how I see that art moves you you know, through your emotions and through your thoughts, it can actually then transcend into action because you become one not just with the audience who's receiving it, but you also sort of become one with the performer that you are now sharing this experience. So at least this little diatribe on on some part of neurobiology that I have no understanding of, but uh I think it's still valuable to uh share these uh tantalizing uh interesting findings uh from neurobiology. Uh chances are of course it's that I like these because they fully back up what it is that I already think, but um this isn't a science podcast, this is a podcast about art, the philosophy of it, and this is all that I had to say about that. So until next time, take care of yourself, those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.