Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

From the Carnegie Hall website: The origin of the joke will probably always remain a mystery, but the best explanation we’ve heard comes from the wife of violinist Mischa Elman. One day, after a rehearsal that hadn’t pleased Elman, the couple was leaving Carnegie Hall by the backstage entrance when they were approached by two tourists looking for the hall’s entrance. Seeing his violin case, they asked, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Without looking up and continuing on his way, Elman simply replied, “Practice.”                                                               I think many of us have been moved and inspired by a musical performance. Virtually without exception, the musicians we’ve enjoyed listening to have invested many hours practicing their craft. While the musicians also spent innumerable hours ...

Street scene in Mysore, India A couple summers back, I began to notice that more people were mumbling and that conversations were fading into the din of background noise. While I knew the world was becoming noisier and enunciation wasn’t as popular as it used to be, I could scarcely believe how fast the world was changing. Thankfully, years of teaching and practicing yoga had helped me learn to read body language pretty well, and I also seemed to have a knack for reading lips. On the continuum of problems, slight hearing loss didn’t seem too pressing, and I embarked on various regiments of self-healing. I’ve long believed that food is medicine, and I began to mess around with my diet. Historically I’ve gotten pretty plugged up when I ate dairy foods and gluten, so I assiduously parsed these from my diet. This change in diet seemed to help a bit, though I still relied heavily on context and body language to figure out what was being said. I then began looking at other food...

I think we all can look back at our lives and identify decisions that didn't turn out very well. And I think most of us can also identify decisions that turned out well in ways we couldn't have imagined. Every so often, it seems like there are decisions that are a little bit of both. Toward the end of my undergraduate years, I began to recognize my mind as a minefield of distractions and errant perseveration. As a complement to my daily yoga and meditation practices, I started to look at the daily activities that fanned the flames of my oscillating mind. It became clear that the music I chose to listen to was far from calming; it actively fanned the flames of my monkey mind. And in the manner of a young man, the pendulum swung in revising my musical tastes. I set aside The Specials and Psychedelic Furs, and began listening to instrumental and New Agey sorts of music. While some of the CDs I purchased in this swing-of-the-pendulum phase now make me cringe, I still enj...