Take the opportunity to re-wire your brain to see the good in the world...at a music festival.

"The simple idea is that we we all want to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience, love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the brain? It’s really important to have positive experiences of these things that we want to grow, and then really help them sink in, because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become neural structure very effectively."

"The problem is that the brain is very good at building brain structure from negative experiences. We learn immediately from pain—you know, “once burned, twice shy.” Unfortunately, the brain is relatively poor at turning positive experiences into emotional learning neural structure."

"In terms of our need for satisfaction, of experiences of gratitude, gladness, accomplishment, feeling successful, feeling that there’s a fullness in your life rather than an emptiness or a scarcity. As people increasingly install those traits, they’re going to be more able to deal with issues such as loss, or being thwarted, or being disappointed."

"On the one hand, due to modernity, many people report that moment to moment, they’re having fairly positive experiences, they’re not being chased by lions, they’re not in a war zone, they’re not in agonizing pain, they have decent medical care. And yet on the other hand, many people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated, driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive experiences that we’re having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.

For me, by repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life is hard." - Dr. Rick Hanson

 http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/how-to-build-a-happier-brain/280752/

We can all benefit from taking a moment to learn from our positive experiences. I stand by my assertion that in addition to music itself being good for the brain (making all those neurons fire at once, decoding sensory input in pleasing and healthy synchrony, and filling our synapses with all natural, good-feeling neurotransmitters), that having the positive experiences with other people at music festivals is really a crucial learning experience for everyone.