Runners’ brains may be more connected, research shows

The primary component of a runner's high is attributed to a category of neurotransmitters known as endocannabinoids. Endorphins become the primary component of a runner's high when the body becomes structurally damaged, like when marathon runners struggle to remain standing and lose the ability to concentrate (note the similarities to heroin consumption). The feelings of well-being and the Zen-like state that comes about from running a few miles is almost entirely due to endocannabinoids, similar to when someone has consumed cannabis.

I run five days a week. After a hard run i feel tired. If i made a good time with a low heart rate, i feel slightly happy about it. I don't feel anything i could ever describe as a runner's high, and never have on any type of run.

- drumming often lead to learning things slow. Focusing on minute details that are ignored, also meditative (you have to be slow and low energy but it's dense, you pay attention at the 10th of a second so you're constantly mentally and physically active)

- limb independance is akin to meditation for me, playing patterns involving all limbs massages my brain. It's like trying to balance on a virtual wire. It's a game of doing more with less and abstracting the motion of each limb into another form of data. You must not think of one limb in particular. You feel rhythm and accents, and you distribute to some limbs... I feel like a live compiler.

- oddly technique also required revisiting my understanding of physics. It's all about angular momentum, shifting gravity center and inertia. Also doing less with more by distributing the effort on every possible muscle. Makes you reflect on a global basis about each hit. Oh and I forgot, to do lengthy single hand rolls with accents, you don't rotate your wrist, you wave your forearm, hand and stick (it has to be smooth like low basketball dribbling, you'll see if you look for moeller technique later) accents are just a blip in amplitude at the forearm wave; the hand wave will keeps as it is so you'll keep time and won't feel tired because waving doesn't require much energy (half the energy comes from sensitivity and reusing the response of the skin to let the stick go up).

It was through this that I started to "see" music. I played bass too, and along the way melody and harmony started to make sense at the intuitive level (I only took 1 year of accelerated formal theory training on piano as a teen, taught me approximately nothing about "music")

All in all, I'm a brainiac (for better or worse) .. different people will see other things in drumming.

ps: One last thing, at first drumming felt like an immense beast to tame. Famous drummers did things I could barely see, even less understand. My mind skipped to conclusion thinking to reach that level I had to do more and play like a fighter jet. It's the other way around, it changed your view about your perception and interpretation of the world through your senses. As I told before it's all a game of economy, but you have to experience each cymbal, skin, sticks, subtle space and time placement to finally see that just a few strokes well placed are enough to recreate that "complex" thing. It's a bit like when you finally understand a software architecture, you realize how small it is, but you connected the dots and see how much it can do.

Both require 'synchronising' the left and right sides of your body (and also, presumably, the left and right hemispheres of your brain). Although, occasionally, they require 'un-synchronising': for example when the beat is syncopated. As a pianist, it's such a strange feeling when a syncopated piece 'clicks': it almost feels like your left & right hands (and brain hemispheres) are operating completely independent of each other; almost like it's two separate people playing two separate pieces at the same time.

Also, both are arguably percussion instruments :)

When I was working out, since I was out of shape, I used the music "slowness" as a guide to doing push ups. Always going slow, very slow, and very smooth.

Even on every day chores, I realize that anything done in this fashion is relaxing, body and mind wise.

Might a modern pentivium add numbers in n-dimensional space (matrices / calculus), or a sextivium explorations and representations of infinity? Or would these fall under the subsequent study of philosophy? How about parallel/concurrent systems? It certainly seems to me as a layman that large swathes of research mathematics and theoretical physics are approaching subject areas traditionally ascribed to philosophy. I wonder what the latin word for GPU would be.

I believe that this "explains" more about music than 10 years of music theory classes.

ps: That's why I'm often thinking we should teach math to kids with actual activities. Involving your sense is to me critical to internalization of concepts. Later on you can drop the notation.

pps: indeed that's the kind of brain rewire I never expected. It opens your mind to other sensations too; and also, even pushing it, it change my view of European geometric explanation of everything. If people, cultures didn't have written music but understood music as you describe .. who has the knowledge here ?

All instruments are different though. Guitars require quite a large amount of time to adapt your left hand (neck). It's easy to never make progress there. Bass guitar is a tad easier because you play melodies and not a blend of this + chords, which are demanding in dexterity and stamina.

The frustration, abort, guilt cycle is hard to avoid. Even guys who took lessons as kids have off days. They told us on boards that when they struggle to play, they just take it easy and make it a rudiment day. Stupid patterns at slow pace, just to keep warm.

Do not ocmpare yourself to kids, it's mostly masochism. It's like comparing the speed of a fresh windows 95 install vs a 2 yo one. They have natural excitement and smoother fingers, I believe their brain is just a nasty pattern cruncher and most things end up intuitive the next day. That says nothing about your own ability to learn or take pleasure. <= pleasure which should be the goal.

One question, do you use a metronome ? everytime I struggle, 2 minutes of metronome backed practice suddenly realigns my hand and my ears and everything gets smoother. Not perfect but it helps to get properly warmed up and enjoy the feeling.

Since we're on HN, I could suggest you to search "clojure music" on youtube. There are a few talks about a dude revisiting music theory from wave freq. all up to Bach all in a few pages of clojure code. Very Very very cool.

That said, I think this is introductory work on the topic and definitely justifies further inquiry.

Is it really true though that running doesn't require precise motor control? Every time I run, my feel "automatically" skip over imperfections in the road surface, placing my foot down early just before the big crack in the sidewalk, sidestepping the dog poop on the sidewalk, leaping off the curb while my eyes are focused on traffic.

And unlike the guy that plays golf where he's only focusing for a few minutes per hole, my feet are active for my entire one hour run and my mind is guiding my feet for 10,000 steps throughout the run.

It may be a different part of the brain than deciding how to hit a ball to reach a target 300m away, but there's still a lot of eye-foot coordination in running.

My right knee does need to have a professional look at it; I've just been putting that off. Same professional tells me I need more exercise (I eat healthy so that helps me not be _too_ bad, though). I see there's some avoidance there now that I'm typing all this. :)