Letter to Malcolm Gladwell: British Outliers and Rock and Roll part 2

This is second half of my email to Malcolm Gladwell regarding British Outliers and rock music.

Trauma

The BOs were raised in a traumatized society. 326,000 soldiers and approximately 62,000 British civilians died in WWII.  An estimated 85,000 civilians were seriously injured. War, no matter who is involved (troops or civilians) takes an enormous toll on the survivor’s mental health. The after-effects of depression and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are not easily treated. In the past, people turned to religion for emotional and spiritual comfort. But after two horrific World Wars in less than three decades, many British soldiers and civilians felt abandoned by God. Technology had taken warfare to a level of devastation never seen before. 

The human mind does its best to cope with trauma, but WWII left gaping holes in the collective British psyche. When the human psyche is faced with fear, terror, and/or rage, (all emotional by-products of war) and does not have an opportunity to process these intense emotions, according to Dr. Peter Levine, they can become locked or “frozen” in the body.  

Levine claims that traumatic symptoms are not caused by the “triggering” event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits. PTSD symptoms develop when we cannot complete the process of moving in, through, and out of the “immobility” or “freezing” state.  For most animals, the response to trauma is to energetically release it and move on. The release may be to shake or to close down for a short while. But the central point is that animals release their trauma and don't go on through life with them.  

Levine studied how animals deal with extreme stress (such as a gazelle narrowly escaping a cheetah’s grip) and found that they have an innate ability to literally “shake off” trauma. If a person is unable to move, run, or process intense emotions, this often leads to a loop of arousal, unsuccessful escape, experience of fear and helplessness, and immobility. Body sensation, rather than intense emotion says Levine, is the key to healing trauma. I wonder if “shell shock,” characterized by jerky, gross motor movements prevalent in WWI vets, was an innate attempt to shake and discharge the residue trapped in the soldier’s nervous system.

During the course of writing this to you, several incredible synchronicities led me to another pioneer in alternative healing, Dr. Bradford Keeney, who considers the oldest medicine on earth to be the ecstatic shaking of the human body. After his own spontaneous shaking episode at age 19, he’s spent the majority of his life studying and living with numerous shaking cultures, including the Kalahari bushmen and the Spiritual Baptists of St. Vincent island in the Caribbean. Keeney discovered that various forms of physical shaking within a community are used to help bring forth profound therapeutic benefits.

Like Levine, Keeney investigated the full spectrum of the healing cycle that occurs when moving from ecstatic arousal to deep trance relaxation. He illustrates how the alternating movement produced while shaking brings all the body’s energetic systems into balance. Keeney says, “…it is not just our bodies that need to be shaken; our words and meanings must also shake. When the spirit moves through us, everything will shake--our understandings, actions and experiences. Shake in order to set free your mind, body, and soul.”And what musical instrument is frequently employed for this shaking healing purpose? The drum. 

Rock ‘n’ Roll to the rescue

If shaking is an innate way for animals and humans to process trauma, perhaps teenage Brits turned to rock music as their new religion and were unconsciously drawn to drum rhythms in order to heal from the aftershock of WWII.  Rock musicians embody movement both physically (when they’re moving and jumping on stage) as well as vibrationally, since sound is comprised of air molecules that move and vibrate.

I realized long ago that the very words “rock and roll” reflect movement. “All Shook Up,” “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and “Good Vibrations” are just some rock song titles that imply shaking. Even the rockabilly bands that pre-dated skiffle were called “spasm” bands.   Rock music, with its driving beat, helped the BOs feel emotions and vibrations they hadn’t felt before. Instinctively, humans know how to heal. We’ve just had it beaten out of us by modern, technological, left-brained logical thinking.

We’re a species cut off from our natural rhythms. Western religion, dominated by rigid, dogmatic beliefs, was the antithesis of African and other indigenous cultures whose connection to spirit and healing came through music and movement.  Rock music, drawing upon these ancestral rhythms, got us back in touch with our bodies, and as Keeney noted, shook us up to free ourselves from the limitations of our collective past. 

Based upon many research studies, the incredible ability that music has to affect and manipulate emotions and the brain is undeniable, yet still largely inexplicable. Music impacts not only our emotions, but also our physiology. "For reasons that aren't entirely understood yet, music is wired to the motor areas of the brain," according to Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University and author of This is Your Brain on Music. “That part, the motor cortex, is the same part of the brain that helps us move in a willful way, for example, to jog or type. When music hits our eardrums," he says, "part of the signal flows up toward the motor cortex and creates a connection." Rhythmic music makes us want to move, which is the process by which Levine and Keeney claim we can heal trauma.  

America’s Imprinting

Though American teens may not have needed to recover from trauma to the same degree as the Brits, adolescence is still a challenging period of life in modern society. When I considered why American teens became so obsessed with the BOs, imprinting came up again. White British rock musicians played ancestral drum based rhythms during the imprinting window. If a baby duck can imprint a moving red boot or pig as “Mom,” then perhaps teenagers can imprint a moving, shaking rock star as “shaman” or tribal medicine man. 

In Keeney’s research, shaking medicine was often woven into the community and not separate from everyday life. Could teens and young 20-somethings have instinctively gathered together at the BO’s rock concerts to shake up their consciousness, and release old emotions that no longer served them?  I recently read that if there is an increased level of stress (which might also be excitement) at the time of the original imprinting, the learning is stronger than normal. Rock concerts often put teens into an excited state, thereby intensifying the imprint. This may be why decades after puberty many are still compelled to attend concerts. Some research claims imprinting is irreversible and retained for life, so it seems we’re biologically programmed, like the ducks, to follow an imprinted leader for generations. 

This theoretical musical imprinting window appears to be an important factor in the BO’s tremendous success. In 1950, the US population was three times that of England. By 1965, the US had nearly four times as many people as Great Britain (194 million vs. 54 million). Many US baby boomers hit their 15^th birthday in 1965, and the musical imprinting window flew wide open providing the BOs a huge, captivated listenership. The British Invasion peaked between 1964-1966, just as the 15-19 yr old US population surged from the birth boom. If America hadn’t become a baby making machine after the war, the BOs never would have enjoyed such huge success due to England’s lagging birthrate. 

Unfortunately, the older British generation may have emotionally benefited from rock’s rhythms since they were the primary recipients of trauma, but they were too old by the 1950s and 60s to become imprinted with the music. 

Conclusion

The decline in religion and lack of spiritual leaders in England left an opening for the BOs to take on the unconscious role of shaman/healer. Much of Britain’s population was traumatized after WWII to varying degrees, and since one way to heal trauma is through movement, the human psyche is innately drawn to drum based music during teen years in an attempt to heal from emotional wounding. Since imprinting is enhanced during times of stress (or excitement), the BOs and other rock musicians’ success was ensured so that fans would support them not only during their teen years, but for decades to come.

Based upon my personal experience, I sense much of this is true. I’ve worked in radio research, publishing and advertising, but in 2002 I had a spiritual awakening with a famous American rock band that I’d followed since I was a teen (yes, I got imprinted shortly after my 15^thbirthday). Their music eventually shook-up some deep-seated trauma I’d experienced during my early teen years, and this allowed me to finally heal from my past. I wrote a book about my journey of self-discovery with rock ‘n’ roll, and I discuss the idea of musical imprinting in it, but it didn’t occur to me at the time that British musicians might have been innately drawn to rock as a way to heal their own troubled psyches. Overall, it's been fascinating for me to see various elements stand out as I searched for factors that contributed to the BO's success, and I hope you find merit in my conclusions as well.  

Thank you so much Mr. Gladwell for your time.  

Sincerely,

Laura Faeth
Superior, Colorado