“The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. My parents had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the result of musical perception. … I see my life in terms of music.” —Albert Einstein
Einstein considered playing an acoustic instrument not just an important hobby, but perceived it as vital to how he approached life. He used this perception to intuitively develop a process that leveraged his ability of playing an instrument into a cognitive tool for his work. Einstein did this by playing the violin or piano if he was stuck on a physics problem. Then afterward he would go back to working on physics. This process was not done for rest and relaxation, but to stimulate his creativity.
Instead of striving to continually increase academic knowledge, Einstein discovered that this process of playing an instrument was the most direct path to access his imagination. That’s why he said: “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” At that time, Einstein’s heavy reliance on playing an instrument was not understood. But now his process can be explained because it’s becoming recognized that the strongest way to stimulate creativity is through art and music. Both are connected because they are the exact same vehicle but in different form; art is frozen music and music is liquid art. Within this vehicle, the use of physical motor skills alongside a cognitive purpose results in a tangible self-reinforcing creativity loop. That’s why creative acts of expressing art and music can continually stimulate more creativity. But the increased physical and cognitive engagement correlating to playing an acoustic instrument makes it more powerful than art. (Click here for more in-depth information on how much Einstein used and was impacted by playing an instrument.)
More importantly, playing an acoustic instrument stimulates creativity the strongest because that action is what induces the strongest emotion. The component of emotion is essential because it’s the foundational driver behind all creativity. So the more emotion that is induced, the more potential there is to stimulate creativity.
There are two aspects involved—the physical and the metaphysical—regarding the relationship between acoustic instruments and emotion. The first aspect deals with the physical vibrations of an instrument being able to interact with the quantum vibrations of matter. This is due to the smallest element at the quantum core of all matter being a Planck length frequency vibration, of which liquid matter specifically has the greatest vibrational elasticity. As a result, the unique complexity and diversity-depth of the physical vibrations produced by acoustic instruments are able to energize and amplify the quantum vibrations of biological and botanical bodies (i.e. life). This is because those specific bodies are mainly comprised of liquid. Furthermore, those bodies are also affected to different degrees by different instruments, which produce different complexities of vibrations. Brass instruments produce more complex vibrations than percussion. Woodwinds produce more complex vibrations than brass. Bowed string instruments produce more complex vibrations than woodwinds. The reason the highest complexity vibrations are produced by string instruments is because of the bow movement along the strings and the unique physical construction of the instrument itself, which was originally designed through golden division geometry centuries ago. The totality of these factors produces vibrations from string instruments that resonate in consonance with quantum vibrations.
This brings us to the metaphysical second aspect of emotion. Emotion is induced within the body when the vibrations of acoustic instruments energize and amplify quantum vibrations. To understand this aspect, we need to examine emotion through a new breakthrough paradigm.
Emotion:
- Is a completely separate component from life that exists outside life while interacting with it.
- Drives nearly every action of life and is the main framework through which life communicates.
- Empowers the mind with the capability, speed, agility, and perception that the mind can never even come close to duplicating by itself.
- Guides the mind to aggregate and connect old information in new ways to create new information, which is the process of creativity and innovation.
- Acts as a beacon, with stronger levels of emotion signaling greater, threats, opportunities, and amounts of new information created and understood.
While neuroscience is correct in observing that emotion can be induced by neurochemicals, in most instances emotion is being induced by cognitive and physical interactions between biological bodies. After emotion is induced, it then uses the concurrently produced neurochemicals as a carrier to stay in the body. That’s why an interaction-induced emotion continues to stay in your body, connected to neurochemicals, long after the interaction is over. The stronger an emotion that is induced, the heavier the dose of neurochemicals produced, the longer your body is intoxicated with them and the more difficult it is to break free of that emotion.
Emotion can also be induced by vibrations. The vibration-induced emotion is elastic and temporary. That’s why even a short segment of acoustic music can take you on a rollercoaster of radically different intense emotion and then leave you in a neutral state after the music ends. Depending on the characteristic of the vibrations, our minds can discern the type of emotion induced. The fast/high vibrations induce a wide spectrum of positive love-based emotion. The slow/low vibrations induce a wide spectrum of negative fear-based emotion. Neuroscience has observed this effect but does not yet understand the model behind it. That’s why the current neuroscience model of the brain/mind dynamic is outdated. Within their model the intense emotion that people experience of hope to despair, passion to aversion, joy to sorrow, compassion to rage, and every emotion in between, is only a chemical by-product of a neurobiological function. This outdated model is no longer adequate or valid. (Click here for more in-depth information on an advanced model of the brain/mind dynamic.)
The main takeaway is that emotion is not an incidental by-product. Emotion is an independent component that has a purposeful role within life. In turn, the sporadic condition of life exists because there is a structured cosmos to accommodate it. Essentially, our cosmos is designed so that emotion can interact with itself through life. (Every religion has its own version of the ‘Holy Ghost’. It’s just explained here through a science-based paradigm). At its core, the interaction of emotion has the effect of being a health and survival mechanism. But at the highest level of sentient life, emotion becomes the foundational driver for creativity and innovation. That’s why successful creative people always have a lot of emotion for the work they do and why Steve Jobs said, “You have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing because it is so hard.”
Yet having emotion when you need it is not controllable because it comes and goes. Even when you have emotion, if it’s working through neurochemicals then it is controlling you. The reality is that either you are using your emotion or emotion is using you. That’s why the controllable action of playing on an instrument to induce emotion can be the process that empowers you to use your emotion as a tool for creativity. Within this process, the elasticity of vibration-induced emotion can then be channeled into anything the mind chooses to focus on.
Even listening to a large group of acoustic instruments, in the form of symphonic music, can induce strong emotion. (This was at one point even labeled as the “Mozart effect.”) Think about it: Hollywood and the gaming industry specifically choose to extensively use symphonic music in their movies and games to impact the viewer. They know that it’s the symphonic music that induces emotion, which then imbues the images with feeling and the verbal dialogue with context. If, as a viewer, you were to turn off the symphonic music, the images and dialogue within movies and games would come across as cold and incomplete. This is because you would lack the emotional experience that is otherwise induced by the music. Yet few people realize how much they are actually engaging with symphonic music or the creative impact that sound is having on them and modern society. (Click here for more in-depth information on the breakthrough paradigm on how emotion is the origin of intelligence and why that impacts society.)
However, just listening to symphonic music will not be enough to stimulate the level of creativity required in the future. Everyone that strives for professional and personal success will need to start playing acoustic instruments. This is because soon the era of human labor will be ending and the era of human creativity will begin. In this new era, a consensus will begin to develop about how humanity’s unique potential for creativity will be the only advantage over technology, no matter how powerful technology becomes. At that point, the hard skills learned through standard education will become useless without people also having the ability to stimulate creativity. That means, for people to be relevant in the future, they will have to bring something new and creative to their work and learning every single day. Within this type of thinking there will be nearly unlimited potential for self-growth, which has been labeled by psychology as a “growth mindset.” The people that have creativity will be able to use all advancing technology for their benefit and the people that don’t have creativity will be made obsolete by that same technology. (Click here for more in-depth information on the future requirement for creativity.)
Einstein understood 100 years ago that playing an instrument was required to stimulate creativity. In the future, this simple process will be recognized for its potential impact. Consequently, everyone will understand that playing an instrument will be a required cognitive workout in order to be successful in business and science—just like it is currently understood that lifting weights is a required physical workout in order to be successful in sports and athletics. (Click here for more information on an advocacy for music programs in education.)
