That to Which Shiri is Listening
One of the few shows I watch with any sort of regularity during the summer months is Perception. Because neuroscience is cool and because the extremely nuanced portrayal of Dr. Daniel Pierce by Eric McCormack, as a high-funcioning individual with schizophrenia, is the opposite, and thus a very positive step, in the way people with mental illness are usually given life in mainstream media.
In last weeks episode, Bolero, our protagonist encountered a man he diagnosed with a type of frontotemporal dementia that causes aphasia and memory loss but also gives the individual an obsessive drive to exercise their creative powers, often focusing those energies on a particular work (in the case of the episode, the character copies the same painting over and over and over again). During the course of explaining the disease process to Moretti, his FBI partner, Pierce mentions that Ravel is thought to have suffered from the same condition and had a period of intense creativity and composition during his illness; this was the period in which he composed Bolero (which some scholars and brain folks think may be part of the reason Bolero is so pattern dependent and repetitive — yeah, yeah, I got that from Wikipedia, but I confirmed).
And I thought, damn, it’s been a while since I listened to Bolero.
So that’s what I’ve been doing.
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