Pianist. Photo © Alan Cleaver, via flickr and Creative Commons; strangebritain@gmail.com

Hermann Neiweler loved jazz.

His jazz club, a cozy venue that has operated on View Street for 29 years, was a labour of love for him. It allowed him to host—and see—the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Dewey Redman, Loudon Wainwright III, Judy Collins and David Francey, and provided local musicians with a place to perform. It fed his desire to hear live jazz and to share the jazz experience with others.

Nieweler died last month, just as the Victoria International Jazz Festival was about to kick-off. He was 79.

Playing saxophone. Photo © woodleywonderworks, via flickr and Creative CommonsHis commitment to his club speaks of music’s power to enrich people’s lives.

We groove and move to music. We listen. We appreciate. And some of us make and play music. It seems simple enough on the outside, but inside the blackbox we call the brain, much more goes on when the music starts playing.

Brain scans show that listening to music engages a sweep of different areas within the noggin. And if just listening to tunes does that, playing those same tunes on an instrument is like sending your brain to bootcamp. Playing music exercises the parts of the brain that perceive and analyse sound, sight and touch. It drills the parts of the brain that control movement, behaviour, decision-making and expression, as well as memory, emotion and reward. It also stimulates neuron development between the brain’s regions, strengthening neural pathways and making those connections more efficient….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Checking email. Photo © www.buzzfarmers.com, via flickr and Creative Commons

Photo © www.buzzfarmers.com

When he was younger and had more hair, Nature Boy often marked this time of year by resolving to break annoying habits. These included snacking between meals, spending too much time onscreen, sleeping until the last possible minute before getting up and getting ready for work, and so on.

Year after year, he resolved to get smarter, fitter, faster or just get up.

You could say he was beginning to develop a habit of making resolutions to break bad habits.

Alas, as with so many resolutions made by so many people, a resolution-making habit does little to squelch the habits prompting the resolutions….

 

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

 

Camping at San Josef's Bay, Vancouver Island. Photo © Madeleine Holland, creative commons flickr

We lose an hour of sleep this weekend, and over the next couple of weeks will be adjusting to that shift to Daylight Saving Time. This coming week, we’ll be waking up before sunrise again and eating later in the evening, because we’re just not hungry for supper at six o’clock. Everything will be just a little bit off, as our internal body clocks try to catch up with the regimented requirements of modern life.

But no matter. We’ll have more daylight in the evening, when we’re awake to appreciate it. This will help us prepare to fine-tune our inner body clocks—every one of them—to longer, brighter days.

It was once thought that the brain controlled our body clocks. That any human-caused shift backwards or forwards on the sundial meant we had to reset that part of the brain that woke us automatically at 6:30 every morning, or at 2:30 a.m. if we’d jetted over to Hawai’i for the February break.

Research over the last decade suggests that the brain is indeed involved, but more as master networking device than a solitary systems timekeeper. It would seem many organs within our bodies measure the passage of time according to their own internal cellular timepieces, quite independent of what HQ in the noggin or the clock on the wall dictates. Cells within each of these organs track time throughout the day, and accordingly produce and release different amounts of enzymes and molecules at different times of day….

Read the rest of the editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist.