News, Facts & Gossip about Stage Fright

Making music reduces mental aging

We all get old. Old age is accompanied by reduced physical and mental capabilities. Moving gets harder, pain arises in several body parts, and the memory worsens. Recently, scientists have found that people who played an instrument for many years have superior memory and auditory abilities. Hearing is another problem with increasing age. Auditory organs wear off and we become less capable of distinguishing words from surrounding noise. The scientists found that people that have the same general auditory capacities can vary in their abilities to understand spoken words. The reason is that the brain can, differently well, filter out the meaningful signal from the poor auditory input. In this respect, musicians have a clear advantage since they trained their brains to filter and recognize sound patterns from noise. Music and speech processing seem to utilize similar neuronal links. Memory is another factor where long-time musicians were shown to have superior abilities. This was especially found in auditory instead of visual memory categories. So people, get your out guitars that you put away years before and practice playing again!


How I overcome Stage Fright - A Guest Article

It is funny how you are good at something and yet the fear of being appraised gives you the jitters. I have been unable to understand why I get stage fright. I am an otherwise confident person who believes in herself, yet whenever it comes to public speaking I shy out. Perhaps it is because I am afraid of not being able to meet the expectation people have of me. So how I deal with it is really simple. I don’t stop myself from thinking about my rendezvous with my fear, since I know my efforts are going to be in vain. So I let the fear consume me till its time. And then when confronted with the worst, I try to be myself. And as soon as I begin, nothing else matters because when I am in my element there is no stopping me. This is how i overcome my stage fright. - Jane, Montpelier


Michael Jackson suffered Stage Fright!

Stage fear is one of the most common problems faced by people. Even our celebrities are not immune to this feeling. Can you ever think of Michael Jackson suffering from stage apprehension? Yes, this is true. He was unable to set his foot on stage in 2006 at World Music Awards. He was performing after about nine years to the United Kingdom audience. News had it that Beyonce went backstage to encourage him. It was such an uneasy situation for him that he made his spectators wait for more than thirty minutes. He didn’t sing the song live due to his stage fright, instead he sang to a backup tape. He was supposed to give a live performance following the award acceptance for the singer with the highest number of albums sold. Lindsay Lohan hosted the show that night. However, it was not an easy come back for Michael Jackson due to the stage panic he suffered at that time.