During my Master’s degree in musicology at Utrecht University, I took the course “A History of Modern Listening”. This blog post is based on an essay I wrote for that course, and published in response to a Tweet by Elise Cordaro.
Deciding on topics for the assignments of my studies in neuropsychology are an easy task for me. I took up this learning because I wanted to understand the autistic brain. Now that we are in the modules regarding aural processing, it feels only natural that I – as an autistic musicologist and musician – write about the autistic brain on music. Hashtag “cognitive music science” or “psychology of music” or “neuromusicology”. But what exactly do those terms mean?
As an aspiring polyglot and a student of neuropsychology, I have a sweet spot for untranslatable words (from foreign or historical languages) that describe emotions, psychological states and/or behaviour. Because I got so many positive reactions about my work on hiraeth, I decided to share this interest with you by means of a new category for this blog: “Lost in Translation“. This first entry will be about the Korean concept of Nunchi, as I was recently interviewed about this by journalist Annemieke Riesebos for the Dutch magazine Grazia.
Two and a half years ago, my partner and I went to EuroBicon, the European Bisexual Conference in Amsterdam. There, I presented a paper about queer mermaids, hosted a workshop on the bisexual mermaid, played games both analog and digital, went to an awesome 80-90’s disco, had fabulous food and… met Robyn Ochs. As an academic cum activist, Robyn immediately made an indelible impression on me. Therefore, I am very happy that she invited me to write for her grassroots publication Bi Women Quarterly – aka BWQ – and that my writing even made it to the front page. Thank you so much, Robyn! With her permission, I publish the integral essay in this website.
For me, one of the most puzzling aspects of autism is still the “road-to-overload”. Sometimes the day seems like a four-lane highway that you smoothly cross over, another time you feel like rope dancing over an abyss… through snow and blizzards! But quite recently, I encountered the hashtag #spoonie, that refers to people who use the so-called “spoon theory”, a metaphor that enables users to concretise their energy levels. As it helps me, in this blog post, I share it with you in the hope that it may help you too.
“What’s your resolution?” Facebook asked me. And I thought “Umm, just 1024 x 768, why?” . Oops. But of course, I do have many wishes and dreams for the year(s) to come! And as a student of neuropsychology, I might be able to help others to achieve their goals by giving some tips. Therefore, I talked about this with journalist Robbert Minkhorst for a story in “FIT”, the health supplement of various local and regional Dutch newspapers (the Noord-Hollands Dagblad, Haarlems Dagblad, Leidsch Dagblad and de Gooi and Eemlander). And worked out an English version of my rambling for this blog. 😉