A personal story of my professional path.

Exhausted from my first overnight bus trip, wandering the streets of Shinjuku just after dawn, alone in a foreign country for the first time. Getting lost in Yokohama after trying to navigate the confusing streets by the position of the sun, before finally making my way to the venue of the first big concert I've ever attended. An hour or two into the rush and energy of excitement, seeing singer after singer come up on stage to cover my favorite jpop anime songs, cheering and shaking my dimming dollar store light sticks, a certain song begins. The swell of the crowd overtakes me, as I lose the sensation of being "me", and become one with the people around me in the audience, the performers on stage, the blasting music, and the very hall we all share together. And at the peak of the chorus, a single voice unconsciously erupts from the mouths of every single person:

Eternal Blaze!

It would be over ten years later that I learned the term collective effervescence and was finally able to dedicate my life to the research and creation of these moments. But I'm getting ahead of myself, mixing up causes and effects. My story begins years earlier, to another crucial moment in my childhood, and explains how I went from a biomedical engineer studying workload in flight simulators to a music neuroscientist.