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I just figured out that what I hear in my mother’s age 9 black berry story is the same rhythm, the SAME BEAT that later appeared in the rhythm of the litany chant of my ‘crimes’ she screamed and roared as she beat my body in time with the beat of the chant.

I have no doubt that the tapping rhythm of the beat that was the basis of the words in my mother’s age-nine story — even as I can feel this chanting in ‘BLACK berry BLACK berry BLACK berry BLACK berry’ like a heart beat behind the words — grew into my adult mother’s screaming, roaring chanting of the litany that she used as she brutally beat me all through my childhood.  I believe the direct pattern of beating-blows-litany-chanting happened for the first time that day during her beating of me when I was 20 months old.

I found this fascinating article on this webpage on ‘Music and the Brain’ – and I believe in the case of my extremely violent mother, the regions of her brain involved with both speech/language and with motor patterns (beating me) were changed during her earliest development in an environment of trauma.

The Neurosciences Institute website [http://www.nsi.edu/index.php?page=xii_music_and_language_perception]

“Our approach reflects the belief that research on music has the potential to illuminate fundamental aspects of human brain function, including language, the active nature of perception, and the processing of complex sequences that unfold in time.”

“Both music and spoken language feature rich rhythmic and melodic structure.  Furthermore, both emply a finite set of basic elements (such as tones or words), which are combined in principled ways to create novel, hierarchically organized sequences.  That is, music and language share the crucial feature of being syntactic systems.

“Given these similarities, are music and language largely independent brain functions, or do they have an important degree of overlap?  We have addressed this question in three different areas:  the relationship of syntactic processing in music and language, the relationship of music to the melody and rhythm of speech, and the relationship between musical tone deafness and speech intonation perception.  Our research has reveled [sic] a significant degree of overlap between music and language processing. 

“Perception is not just a passive registering of what is “out there” in the world, but a constructive process involving active interpretation, as well as integration across brain systems.  The phenomenon of a musical beat nicely illustrates this fact.  Every human culture has some form of music in which listeners perceive a regular beat, and in every culture, people move in synchrony with the beat of music.  Musical beat perception and synchronization may seem like simple abilities since they are so widespread, but appearances can be deceptive.  Humans are the only species to spontaneously move in synchrony with a musical beat, and can extract a beat from complex rhythmic patterns.  This raises the question of what aspects of our brain support this remarkable ability.  We have studied musical rhythm perception to examine the coupling between the auditory and motor system, and how this coupling differs from the coupling of visual and motor systems.  In addition, we have studied brain mechanisms of beat perception, suggesting a possible role for the motor system in how we hear a beat.  Understanding how the auditory and motor systems are coupled in beat perception and synchronization could help in the development of treatments for certain motor disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, in which rhythmic music is known to help people initiate and coordinate movement.

“We believe that understanding the fine temporal details of brain responses to sound is important for understanding brain mechanisms of auditory processing.  We have developed novel methods for tracking stimulus-related brain activity from the auditory cortex as it unfolds in time using magnetoencephalography (MEG).  Using the method of “frequency tagging,” we have studied how brain activity evolves over time as a listener hears a melody, organizes complex incoming auditory information into perceptually distinct sources, or pays selective attention to an auditory stimulus.  Our results indicate that ongoing timing patterns of activity are influenced by melodic structure, and are also modulated by cognitive processing.  For example, we have found that selective attention to an auditory (vs. simultaneously presented visual) stimulus has a modest affect on the amount of neural activity associated with that stimulus, but a large effect on the timing of brain activity associated with that stimulus.  Specifically, when an auditory stimulus is attended, stimulus-related activity in distant brain regions becomes highly temporally correlated….  Thus the auditory and visual systems may have fundamentally different mechanisms for selective attention, suggesting that attention disorders in the two domains might need to be treated with different approaches.”

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I believe that verbal abuse during brain formation during early human development can cause changes such as what happened to my mother.  Any blog reader who suffered screaming along with beatings that probably included the chanting of a litany can understand from inside their body what I am talking about!

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If you read my mother’s age 9 story and FEEL the rhythm in the piece you will be able to identify the beat-in-the-language — that later found its way into the patterns of how she beat me while chanting/screaming/roaring her abuse litany of me and my ‘crimes’:

Once there was a black boy who was picking black berries and putting them in his black bowl for his mother to prepare for his black father to eat for his black berry supper but a big black bare came a long and while the black boy was looking he ate all the black berries from the black berries from the[she repeated this]  black bowl. The black boy soon filled it up again, so the black bear wasn’t satisfied so he took all the black berries on the bush besides in the bowl [the following was added between the lines] then the boy began to cry then the black bears heart was sofftened and he told the black boy that he was sorry the black boy wiped his tears. The black bear then took the black bowl between his teeth and filled it from a nother black berie bush and gave it to the black boy, and the black boy thanked him and went home and his black father had his black berry supper.

Mildred

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