Trying to Escape

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDzFQwdwuDM

So far we've looked at We All are Chemicals, Gimme a Beer!, and Just a Shy Guy from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs. By the way, this 11 song collection is available for download from tenthdimension.com/digital, thank you to everyone who have already checked out that link.

To recap: these songs were written for a live theatrical show which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan back then, and the subject of this particular song speaks to the eternal problem of being a teenager and trying to figure out where you fit in. Using alcohol or other drugs as a means to escape the pressures of life? Our hero becomes the victim in this song.

Also to recap: these songs feature my friends Cal Harle on drums and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. Since we were recording this in our basements and living rooms using a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 four-track cassette machine back in the pre-midi, pre-ProTools world of 1983, creating a song with this many individual parts and only four audio tracks was a time-consuming process involving lots of sub-mixing and bouncing: both Cal and Jack went above and beyond the call of duty to help me create this album, and Jack and I spent many many hours working on the overdubs for songs like this one.

As I mentioned last time, Cal continues to work as a professional drummer, and also works for my studio as a foley artist. His experience and natural feel make him one of the best in the business at both of those jobs. Jack has become a nationally known guitarist, his main focus has been on R&B, but he's proficient at a great many styles: you'll see what I mean if you check out his music for sale on his website.

With Trying to Escape, we never discover the fate of the song's central figure, a boy named Jimmy Smith. Last time, with Just a Shy Guy, we talked about how these songs relate to the idea of our fifth-dimensional probability space, which is a way of thinking about the quantum superposition of different outcomes that are pre-supposed by Everett's Many World Interpretation. Is Jimmy Smith like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive but both simultaneously, until we observe him? The truth for that famous cat is artificially simple. For Jimmy Smith and all of us, the possible outcomes from any particular moment are immense, and understanding that none of us are trapped into a single path is the power of this approach to visualizing the dimensions.

TRYING TO ESCAPE
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape

Jimmy Smith was a young boy
Never did so good at school
You know his momma always told him
“Jimmy boy, life is cruel
It’s push and shove and give and take but mostly it’s just give
All it takes is one mistake so careful how you live”
Folks in town started talkin when he went to the doctor
Doc said he could see what the problem was

He was trying to escape…

Jimmy Smith at a party
He was like a boy possessed
He would drink down a twelve-pack
You know his momma never guessed
All the jocks never liked him much cause sports just weren’t his thing
Didn’t fit in with the stoners cause he just liked to drink
Sometimes it felt like he was caught in the middle
Sometimes he felt there was nowhere to go

He was trying to escape…

Whadaya think he was thinking of
What was goin through his head
The night he went out on the highway
When he left the road he was goin a hundred and ten…

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape

Next: Livin on the Edge of the World

Just a Shy Guy

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzdAhrFEY-4

As we continue to look at songs from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs, the song this time is called Just a Shy Guy. Alcohol is sometimes referred to as a "social lubricant": for somebody who's Just a Shy Guy, alcohol or other drugs can be what they use to get themselves loosened up enough to be more outgoing in potentially tense social situations. As the middle section of this song discusses though, sometimes the popular media's portrayal of the effectiveness of these substances is not realistic (despite what Charlie Sheen may be trying to tell us): no big surprise there!

Many of the songs on this album tie into my approach to visualizing how our reality is formed, which as I've said before began for me when I read Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful book "A Wrinkle in Time" at the edge of eight. Both this song and the next one we'll be looking at (Trying to Escape) tie nicely into the idea that we are each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space, gradually becoming one version or another of ourselves through chance, choice and the actions of others. These songs, written for a show aimed at teenagers, are about how for teens that probability space may seem more obvious - we go through our adolescence trying on different hats, different personas, trying to decide which version of ourselves we are going to try to be. This probability space is a constant theme in my book and this blog: read Are Bees More Sixth Dimensional and Entangled Awareness and OBEs for some of the more recent explorations of this concept.

Let's talk about the process of creating these songs a bit. They were recorded back in 1983 on a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 Portastudio: this was an innovative four-track mixer/recorder that used standard cassette tapes. I had become convinced at the time that this was the breakthrough everyone was looking for: finally, a machine with good enough recording quality that it would allow you to record in your basement or living room and create something that could be good enough to play on the radio! Nowadays, with people making high quality digital multi-track recordings in their bedrooms using powerful but inexpensive computer-based systems, this accomplishment may not seem as notable. But back then, in a pre-midi, pre-ProTools world, attempting to record fully-produced pop music without going into a recording studio was still pretty much unheard of. Recording a full band with multiple overdubs to four track also required lots of "bouncing" from track to track or machine to machine, and of course every "bounce" adds to the tape hiss, so this is not an easy thing to do! The fact that songs like Just a Shy Guy and Courage actually made it to being playlisted on our local FM rock station back then is still an accomplishment that I'm very proud of.

These songs feature myself on vocals and keyboards, Cal Harle on drums, and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. The three of us have played together in a number of bands over the years, and we're still good friends. Cal is also one of the best foley artists I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and he continues to do foley for all of my studio's film and television work. Jack has built a very successful career for himself as a guitarist and composer, check out his website at jacksemple.com. Recording these songs took many hours and I'm grateful for the time these guys put into this ambitious project. Here's the lyrics:

JUST A SHY GUY
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Sometimes I don’t know what to say
Sometimes I don’t know what to do
Sometimes I don’t know how to act
And the fact is I’m scared that you’ll find out too
I don’t wanna be a big star, but I
Don’t wanna have to play the clown
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
The other people in my neighbourhood
They same to do just fine
Everything seems understood
There’s no one wastin time

But I just don’t know where I stand
And when I stand it’s always wrong
And when I try to play it cool
As a rule it’ll end up I don’t belong
There’ll be someone with a new name
That they made up to hang on me
Tell me why can’t they see that I am just a shy guy
(He’s just a shy guy)
I’m just a shy guy
What if I was a little more
Like all those TV shows?
The kind of guy that the girls adore
The guy sayin anything goes

It’s a different world on my TV
They’re all working on some new cocaine deal
Life’s a never-endin party
Fine wines with their Cheerios
Sometimes I just can’t believe it’s real

And so I guess I’ll carry on
I’ll keep on runnin in the race
To a space where I feel like I really belong
I’ll keep on looking for myself now, tryin to
Find the one I think is me
Someday I might find out who I am
Someday I might find out who I am

Next: Trying to Escape

Dancing in the Tenth Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYiJZzENLkU

Remember the dance music video we looked at last month in Dancing in the Omniverse? Here's another one a friend just pointed out to me, this is found on a YouTube channel called hororium. Unfortunately, I haven't heard back from the person who created this video so I can't tell you much about them, except that they come from some place abbreviated as CS. According to wikipedia, this might mean the person is from Czechoslovakia, or they could be from Serbia/Montenegro.

Hopefully the person who created this music will eventually write back to me so I can tell you more about them. And in the meantime, pump up the volume and enjoy this dance track which once again features samples of my voice, this time from the original animation that started it all, and in this case quite a bit more manipulations have been performed on my speaking parts.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Neurons and Extra Dimensions

Dancing in the Omniverse

A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_bqkKRQxno

This music was created by Scope DJ, a music producer from the Netherlands working in the musical genre called "hardstyle". If you listen to the piece at about 0:59 and again at about 2:15 you may recognize the voice that appears: yep, it's me. I've been sampled by Scope DJ, immortalized in a slamming dance track that might give a few people something to think about while they party on the dance floor. Scope DJ's music is available in MP3 and WAV formats at www.hardstyle.com/scope-dj.

Here's the original video that the sample came from: one of my more popular YouTube videos, called Imagining the Omniverse.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6D3CgF8_qk

Scope DJ's real name is Dennis Koehoorn. I contacted Dennis and asked him how he came to use my voice and the "omniverse" concept for his piece, and here's what he said:

I've always been extremely interested in the phenomenon of multiple universes, dimensions et cetera. It makes so much sense to me that I can't figure out why they shouldn't exist. Your vlog gave me more insight on this topic. Since I was always interested in topics like these and also always wanted to make a track about it - even though the main audience may not learn anything about the topic from just listening to the track - I decided to use your vlog as a source.

I am glad you are taking this well, I can imagine someone NOT liking someone else using their voice without asking...

Best regards,
Dennis

Hey Dennis, by all means, I put my vlogs up on YouTube because I want to get these important ideas out into the world. But I do own the copyright to these videos, so I trust that if you make any significant money from your mp3/wav sales or licensing of this track that you'll do the right thing and shoot me a small cut of your profits as a licensing fee, fair enough?

Last blog entry was called Thinking Bigger, and Scope DJ's "Omniverse" certainly fits into that vein. We're going to continue with related concepts in our upcoming blog entries: Extra-Dimensional Geometry, Just Geometry, Thinking Biggest, Psychedelics and Spacetime, and Tangential Thinking.

Finally, just a reminder that the long awaited followup to my first book is still available. "O is for Omniverse" is a collaboration between myself and visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson. Go to http://www.omniverse.tv for more info.



Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Alexander's Time Illusion Game

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxsu8BPK-S0


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6VC6NjPNk

This video for my entry "Time and Schizophrenia" did generate some controversy when it went up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. Some people simply could not get used to the "echo" laid in to demonstrate the concept we're talking about in this video. Why do I have "echo" in quotes? Because that's not quite what's happening here. In addition to my voice, there are five other copies of my voice, each one offset a different amount, and if you watch the five shadowy mouths that are around my head you will see that each is also offset in the same way: starting at the bottom left mouth and working around the semi-circle clockwise, the first one you're seeing/hearing is one second early, the second is .5 seconds early, the third is .5 seconds late, the fourth is 1 second late, and the fifth is - you guessed it - 1.5 seconds late.

As I pointed out in the comments section at YouTube, these echoes do, of course, tie directly into what I'm talking about in this particular video and that's why they're there. If you, like some of the viewers on YouTube, find them too distracting, the answer is simple - turn your speakers down a bit. Because the main voice is 20 dB louder than the echoes, you'll still be able to hear what I'm saying but the echoes will be less noticeable. Same goes for the people who wish the echoes were louder, just turn your speakers up more and the echoes become more noticeable. :)

In this blog entry (Time and Schizophrenia), we looked at studies suggesting that schizophrenic symptoms could be related to the brain not properly "time-stamping" incoming information - a schizophrenic could be watching television, thinking about certain products, then within seconds seeing those products advertised. Did the TV read this person's mind? No. Their subconscious is seeing the products being mentioned, but other parts of their mind are lagging behind, giving them the disturbing impression that the TV knows what they are thinking and is responding to their thoughts!

Another of the things discussed in this blog entry was an experiment reported in a New Scientist article on Schizophrenia written by Douglas Fox. Here's two paragraphs from that article again:

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players' performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

The next day after the above video was posted, a YouTube user named Alexander, who calls himself WASDsweden on Youtube, posted a simple but effective java game he had just created to demonstrate what it would be like to play a video game where your input is delayed by .2 second. If you have java on your computer (most computers do) then you'll be able to play it right away: just click on this link to download the game.
bit.ly/db01k6

Here's a screen shot from the game:

You are the red ship at the bottom of the screen, and you use your mouse to move back and forth across the screen trying to avoid collisions with the green aliens. A check-box at the bottom, when turned on, introduces a .2 second delay in the way the ship responds to the mouse. Try it!

I suspect you would have to play this game for quite a while in .2 second mode before the effect noted in the article above would come in to play, but this is really great that Alexander took it upon himself to create this demonstration. Bravo, WASDsweden!

To finish this entry, let's look at one more just-published video that ties into this conversation: it's based upon my text blog entry, "Time and Music". In this entry, we look at a split-screen video of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse, performing with different band members in different geographically-separated studios. My friend Paul Hoffert, keyboard player for the band, sent me this vintage clip and described how he had to play roughly 200 milliseconds ahead of the music he was hearing from the rest of the band (coincidentally, the same .2 seconds we're talking about here) in order to compensate for the latency introduced by the digital hookup that was available for this experimental performance. Trust me! This is not an easy thing to do, and I am fascinated every time I watch Paul playing in this video.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCKDcjBsw1Q

Enjoy the journey!

Next: Flow and the Now

Monkeys Love Metallica

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82zjaUNmvj0

Photograph: Andy Fossum/Rex Features. As seen in The Guardian UK article referenced below.

Sometimes we talk about ideas that seem to contradict each other. In a number of entries, like Jumping Jesus, Evolution's Fast Lane, and The Stream, we've looked at mounting evidence that we're in a constantly accelerating meme-space, where ideas are connecting together more and more quickly, and the amount of information that each of us is asked to process on a daily basis is constantly increasing. In Placebos Becoming More Effective? we talked about an editorial the New York Times published earlier this month called "Old Fogies at 20". This article suggests that university age students are seeing a generation gap between them and their high-school aged siblings: particularly in the world of technology and the internet, trends and expectations are changing so quickly now!

It can be hard to perceive an acceleration when you're within a system where everything is accelerating, but we do catch glimpses. So on the one hand we talk about The Stream, The Singularity, Transhumanism, Artificial Intuition, Conscious Computers, and so on. On the other hand, we talk about time being an illusion and parts of each of us being connected to patterns that exist well outside of the limits of the "now" of our 4D spacetime. How do the two ideas fit together? First of all, let's look at some recent examples of these big picture patterns.

We've talked a few times about the deep underlying connections of sacred geometry and how the Golden Ratio has been considered a thing of beauty for thousands of years. Like fractals, shapes and patterns such as these occur naturally, and perhaps that's why we're so attracted to them, because they represent deeper connections to reality that are outside the limits of our observed spacetime. Here's a Science Daily article from earlier this month that extends this idea even further: it suggests that scientists have now discovered evidence of the Golden Ratio in the quantum world!

Music and sound also seem to connect us together in powerful ways that speak to a more timeless perspective. In The Big Bang and the Big O, I referred back to sections in my book where I discuss how certain sounds seem to reach us at a primal level: could the dreaded chalkboard squeal connect us to genetic memories of some ancient flying predator who swooped down from the sky making a similar sound? Here's a great TED Talks video featuring sound consultant Julian Treasure, it's called The Four Ways Sound Affects Us. It speaks very effectively to the idea that we are all connected together by the ways we react to sound. Watch this five minute video:

A direct link to the above http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRepnhXq33s

Julian is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, hotels -- on how to use sound and music more effectively. This leads us to the title of this entry, Monkeys Love Metallica. Okay, I admit it, "love" is overstating the case for dramatic effect but here's a link to a New York Times article my friend Pete Chema of Ten Feet Deep sent to me a couple of weeks ago, please check it out: "Music for Monkeys".

The Guardian UK also published a related article this past September that goes into more detail about this research, here's a link to that: Scientists create music that helps monkeys chill out. Both articles are linked to a study, published this past September in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, that (to quote from The Guardian article):

...will help psychologists understand the evolutionary roots of music and its effect on the brain, the authors said.

"The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary perspective, we are finding that the note patterns, dissonance and timing are important for communicating affective states in both animals and people," said Chuck Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Now, what Dr. Snowdon is talking about here seems to easily connect to ideas we've talked about in entries like The Geometry of Music and Disorders of the Mind: music, like the the other patterns we've just looked at, connects in ways that go beyond the limits of our 4D spacetime. But at first glance, the results of Dr. Snowdon's study seem to contradict the ideas he tells us he was exploring.

In the study, 14 cotton-top tamarins were played clips of music while the researchers noted any changes in behavior. Pieces included Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, a soft piano piece from The Fragile by Nine Inch Nails, Metallica's Of Wolf and Man and Tool's The Grudge.

According to the Guardian article, the monkeys didn't exhibit any clear response to these piece of music one way or another, except for the Metallica song,which had the unexpected effect of calming them down.

Interestingly, the New York Times article claims the scientists saw a similar soothing effect on the monkeys with the Tool song, but most of the other articles I found reporting on this study appear to only single out Metallica. Frankly, I have to suspect that most reporters covering this story grabbed on to the "Monkeys Like Metallica" angle because it makes for a more memorable story. Unfortunately, singling out Metallica from Tool does create some misperceptions here, though.

The monkeys did not respond one way or another to the other pieces of music. Does this mean that farmers who play classical music to their cows to keep them calm might be kidding themselves? Shouldn't Adagio for Strings have made these monkeys sad? If animals are part of the same continuum that we are, shouldn't they respond in ways similar to we humans to the joy, the sorrow, the anger, the range of human emotions that we can hear in a powerful piece of music?

Perhaps what we're talking about is more related to this accelerating generation gap we looked at above. Are our more subtle responses to music mainly cultural, mainly a learned behavior? In the same way that a young child might now expect that all viewing screens are multi-touch displays, perhaps our varying emotional responses to the music of the last four hundred years or so is something we've been trained into through repetition?

The key here is understanding that the monkeys responded to the highly rhythmic music of Tool and Metallica, and didn't respond to the long phrases and more free tempos of the other two pieces. What is the common denominator behind the development of music? Repeating structures. The drum. Patterns that can entrain the heartbeat and breath, that make a creature feel a certain way when they move along with the music. Adagio for Strings, then, is just a too subtle for our monkey friends to hear as a communication of emotion: this a generation gap of a different magnitude but similar nonetheless.

But where this gets even more interesting is when Dr. Snowdon brought in David Teie, a cellist with the American National Symphony Orchestra, to create some pieces of music that were inspired by (but to be clear, not specifically based upon) the sounds these monkeys use to communicate to each other. Here are a couple of the pieces: first, one inspired by the sounds these animals commonly produce when things are fine.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2009/sep/02/monkey-music-calls-example

This second piece has melodic and rhythmic connections to the calls the tamarins produce when they are anxious or alarmed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2009/sep/02/monkey-music-calls-science

Certainly, this music sounds odd to our ears, but the tamarins responded as you might expect: they lounged around and ate more when the first piece of music was playing, and became upset when the second piece played. Any film soundtrack composer exercises their creativity in plugging into these same underlying connections, finding ways to soothe us, or ways to upset us with the palette of sounds, the melodic shapes and the rhythmic structures they choose. Clearly, Dr. Snowdon would have to experiment with a much larger range of musical compositions that are generally agreed to communicate a variety of specific emotions to humans, and I'm certain that such experiments would help to reveal what is primal and what is learned in modern humans' reactions to music of all kinds.

So, do Monkeys Love Metallica? Definitely a gross generalization, even if it's fun to use as a headline! But can monkeys respond emotionally to some kinds of music? This scientific study points to "yes".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Noein

Time and Music

We've been talking a lot about time and consciousness with the last few entries, starting with Life is But a Dream, where we looked at a video outlining some of the connections being drawn between the quantum wave function and the role of an observer in a system. In Time and Schizophrenia, we looked at scientific research indicating that schizophrenics have trouble processing the arrival times of different events through their senses, and that this can contribute to the hallucinations they experience. And in Time is in the Mind and Consciousness in Frames per Second, we looked at various theories proposing that our consciousness is not continuous, but rather divided into "frames" of awareness.

At the end of our last blog we talked about the speed of sound, and how that can complicate things for a musician. There are many other factors that can also affect a musician's timing, and in this modern digital world one of the factors we sometimes have to deal with is "latency" - time lags introduced by the time it takes a computer or the electronics of a system to process or respond to our input. This is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it, but playing a note and then hearing the instrument respond in a delayed manner introduces a whole different kind of experience, a challenge which requires a musician to adjust their mind in a way that I would say is more fifth dimensional, since it requires the performer's consciousness to operate at an additional "angle" outside the limits of the "now" of our 4D spacetime.

Now I'd like to show you a video that was provided to me by my friend Paul Hoffert, an award-winning digital visionary and one of the founding members of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse. Before I do, though, I'd like to let Paul tell you about this little video we're about to look at:

The clip is from a conference that was held in Toronto, InterActive ’96 (1996). The bass player and drummer were in Montreal, the guitarist was at York University, Toronto, the horn players were in a downtown Toronto club, and I was at the Bravo! TV studios. The network latency (delay) then was high - about 0.2 second. We each had to play ahead of the beat in order to sync with each other. It was very difficult and, in rehearsals, we could not do it. However, the adrenalin of the live performance plus our previous practices resulted in a synchronized demonstration of the potential of collaborative performances.

For the record, we used a few techniques to help bring it off. 1) The mental compensation required to physically play ahead of the beat is common in musical performances, but usually for much smaller latencies. Certain instruments, such as harpsichord and pipe organ, produce sounds that significantly lag the keydowns and players need to adjust what they play to what they hear. An orchestral example is that percussionists are usually at the back of the orchestra and the speed of sound is a significant factor that would make all their playing sound behind the beat if they followed the conductors baton beats. So percussionists routinely play "ahead of the stick" in order to sync with the sound coming from the fiddles. In these case, the adjustments are usually milliseconds or tens of milliseconds. .2 seconds is 200 milliseconds, a much longer and more difficult adjustment. 2) after the first run-through, I suggested that we use a technology tweak to assist and I think it was helpful. Since the bass and drums were in the same room, we turned down their playback tracks of the other instruments and suggested that they "drive" the rhythm without much regard for our monitor feeds. That kept the groove tight. In Toronto, we had to do most of the adjusting, but at least we were playing to a constant delay because the rhythm section wasn't wandering.

As a keyboard player myself, I watch Paul on keyboards here, playing 200 milliseconds ahead of the beat as he's striking these syncopated chordal stabs, and I feel a certain amount of wonder at what Paul and his talented group of musicians were able to pull off back then. Paul tells me that the band participated in another similar experiment a few years later which showed how much the technology had improved, to the point where dedicated fibreoptic links provided almost no noticeable delay between geographically separated groups of musicians who were then able to jam together quite comfortably. For me, though, I like to watch the following video as a celebration of the indomitable human spirit, where a healthy mind is able to interface with the reality around it in ways that can really be astonishing. Have I built this video up enough yet? It's only twenty seconds long, check it out!



What these musicians achieved is really no different than the delays subjects playing specially rigged video games were forced to deal with in the scientific studies we looked at in Time and Schizophrenia. With a healthy person, having to "re-tune their interface with reality" so that a physical impetus to strike a note connects with a sound they hear back 200 milliseconds later is demanding but not impossible. I wonder if the members of Lighthouse might have experienced the same disconcerting effect as was reported in that video game study, where the return to instantaneous response momentarily gave participants the impression that their observed responses were preceding their actions!

I'd like to thank Paul for providing me this video, apparently this is the first time this clip has ever been put up on the internet. And I'd like to add just one more thought here, about frames of consciousness and the quantum observer. Let's return to the idea that our consciousness is really not continuous, but rather it's divided into a certain number of "bings" per second (to use Dr. Stuart Hameroff's term).

In entries like Slices of Reality and The Statistical Universe we've talked about the important idea that just like consciousness, our reality is also not continuous: rather, it's divided into what loop quantum gravity theorists call "atoms of spacetime", and these tiny slices are the "quanta" of quantum physics. As reported at this web page on the Planck Unit, we see that the duration of these planck-unit sized "frames" calculates out to 1.855×10⁴³ of them per second.

Now, let's look at the equally non-continuous nature of consciousness and pick a number - let's say that on average we operate at about 50 frames per second (as we've been discussing, this number is generally thought to be between 30 and 90 frames per second and may vary for individuals during their day, and will also vary according to their current state of health and their overall state of mind). This would mean that we can divide those planck frames by 50 and end up with this astonishing fact: for every "frame" of our consciousness, there are about .0371 ×10⁴³ different branches of possible outcomes encapsulated into that "frame" of your consciousness.

Next time you're feeling like you're trapped into a situation where there's no possible way out, think about that number. Roughly speaking, that's 371,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible choices encapsulated within every observed frame of consciousness! Wow.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Flow

Consciousness in Frames per Second

For a direct link to the video go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txSqMO4OrOY

Last entry, in Time and Schizophrenia, we looked at studies indicating that schizophrenics can have a great deal of trouble properly organizing the information coming in through their senses and associating them properly with their own thoughts: a schizophrenic who hears a sound that is before or after a visual cue can have trouble determining which event came first. In my life as a sound designer and composer for film and television this is something I do every day - how late was that car door? how early was that guitar note? - and experience shows me that with practice a normally functioning human being should be able to tell whether a sound is a thirtieth of a second early or late to a visual event, which just happens to be about equal to a "frame" of video.

Much less of an offset than that, though and we get into stranger territory. In Time is in the Mind, we returned to the work of Dr. Stuart Hameroff, who tells us his research shows that consciousness works at a rate of between 40 and 90 frames (or "bings" as he calls them) per second, and that this number varies as to the situation and the person's frame of mind. In that same entry we looked at an article from New Scientist magazine called Timewarp - How Your Brain Creates the Fourth Dimension. This article includes a description of research done in 2006 by Rufin VanRullen, a neuroscientist at the University of Toulouse in France, who reached the conclusion that "the continuity of our perception is an illusion". In that case he saw evidence that human consciousness operates at about 13 cycles per second, even slower!

For me, that number seems too low to be supported by other evidence. For instance why does 20 hz tend to be the lowest vibration that we interpret as a sound? Why was 29.97 frames per second selected as a video frame rate that was fast enough for us to start to see continuous motion, and why are many people able to tell the difference between films shot at 24 frames per second and video shot at the faster 29.97 fps? There is something that is happening in this area with our consciousness, where events make the transition between being perceived as individual "events" and instead become a continuous stream. If our consciousness really were at 13 frames per second, then wouldn't events any closer together than 1/13 of a second appear to us to be simultaneous? Watch an animation at 15 frames per second and tell me how continuous the motion looks to you. But in that magic range somewhere between 20 and 40 cycles per second, we do indeed seem to have just such an experience, where things start to blend together into a seamless stream.

Also in Time is in the Mind, we looked at a study conducted by neuroscientist David Eagleman to determine whether dangerous situations cause the frames per second of consciousness to accelerate, which would explain the common feeling that "time slowed down" that people often report from intense experiences such as car crashes or bungee jumping. While Dr. Eagleman reached the conclusion that this effect may have more to do with our data-rich memory of such an event rather than the frame rate of the mind, great musicians do deal with fine gradations of time on a regular basis, which leads me to conclude that some humans operate at a more accelerated "frame rate" than others, and that our frames per second experience of time is directly related to our state of mind and our health.

Let's throw one more wrinkle into this equation - the speed of sound. The speed of sound is roughly 1 foot per millisecond. This means that if you saw someone clap their hands and they were a 1000 feet away from you, it would take about one second before you heard the sound associated with the action you had seen.

How does this relate to the frame rate of consciousness? There is a tendency, as events get closer together for our brains to meld the two into a single event. We usually do this without even being aware of it! Have you ever sat at the front of a movie theatre and then moved to the very back? Clearly, with the time it takes for sound to travel, the sound and the light from this movie are arriving at your brain in quite different relationships depending upon where in the theatre you sit, but the "frame rate" of our consciousness tends to correct for these differences. For musicians trying to play complex timings, though, being thirty feet apart from each other could make the difference between tight and sloppy playing! The ways that the human brain corrects for such delays and allows groups of musicians to create complex and exciting music together is where we'll go next with this discussion.

Here's one final thought - do you know what the Nyquist frequency is? In digital audio, a sound cannot be properly represented unless the sample rate is at least twice the frequency of the sound being recorded. So a CD, for instance, with a sample rate of 44.1K, cannot represent any sounds pitched higher than 22.05K (and in fact does an increasingly less accurate job of properly representing waveforms as they approach this 22.05K limit as well). What happens when we try to apply the logic of digital sampling to the "bings per second" of consciousness? Here we see a fundamental difference between the two concepts. With digital audio, each of those frames is very precise, and nothing between those frames is captured. With consciousness, each of those frames tends to encompass everything that happens from one frame to the next - and this is how our brains can end up assembling events that were not directly simultaneous and perceiving them as having been so, and how we end up perceiving a reality around us as being continuous when it most certainly is not: go back to entries such as The Flipbook Universe, Slices of Reality, and The Holographic Universe for more about all that.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time and Music

Polls Archive 38 - Do musicians have more empathy?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gVNysRC6l4

Poll 38 - "Learning to play a musical instrument can rewire your brain in ways that make you more empathetic, more sensitive to other people's emotions." Poll ended April 27 2009. 91% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

This poll was created as a companion to a series of blogs created in March that focused on empathy, and in particular an entry called "The Musician", in which I quoted from an article written by Hazel Muir which appeared in the March 5th edition of New Scientist magazine:

Musicians are fine-tuned to others' emotions

Musical training might help autistic children to interpret other people's emotions. A study has revealed brain changes involved in playing a musical instrument that seem to enhance your ability to pick up subtle emotional cues in conversation.

"It seems that playing music can help you do all kinds of things better," says Nina Kraus from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Musical experience sharpens your hearing not just for music, but for other sounds too."

To read a longer excerpt from the article, please refer back to my blog entry The Musician. Based upon the above poll results, the idea that learning to play a musical instrument might heighten a person's ability to feel empathy seems to have already "struck a chord" with visitors to this blog, so I'll not belabor the point here. For further reading, here's a collection of some of my previous blog entries where we explored how empathy fits in with this way of visualizing reality:

Connections
Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?
Local Realism Bites the Dust
The Big Bang and the Big O
The Comedian
The Musician
Where Are You?
Illusions and Reality

To finish, here's a song about vibrations, entrainment, and empathy: "Positive Vibes".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzUIpJzCjNI

Next: Polls Archive 39 - Can Memories Be Transplanted?

The Musician

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXYuhCsWq0E

In entries like Magnets and Souls and Positive Vibes, we've talked about the Steven Strogatz book Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. Dr. Strogatz talks about entrainment as being one of the underlying factors that can create order even within seemingly random systems. In entries like Unlikely Events and Timelessness and Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about other ways of seeing how order can be found in patterns that may appear to be chaotic, and in Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse we talked about how seeing those patterns may have more to do with the filters or selection patterns being used to observe these complex systems that exist simultaneously within timelessness... because Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation tells us that the patterns themselves continue to exist whether we're aware of them or not.

That's all quite lofty sounding. But in very simple terms, what we're talking about are the kinds of things that connect us together with each other. Seeing those connections is one of the most basic functions of the human mind - as I've said in entries like Auras, Ghosts and Pareidolia, and Do You Believe in Ghosts, our brains are all about finding the patterns with the noise. Once we find those patterns, we tend to lock in on them and a feedback loop can make those patterns appear stronger and stronger to our pattern-recognizing minds.

This takes us to our last entry, The Comedian, where we talked about how charismatic individuals can enthrall a live audience, and "take them on a ride". How can this happen? It's a form of entrainment, similar to the ones discussed by Steven Strogatz. To use a more emotional word, we can call that entrainment "empathy".

Empathy is usually thought of as a one-way street - an empathetic individual tends to be more sensitive to the emotions of others. But the effect is even stronger when it works both ways: an individual performer who understands, through their own empathy, what affects the hearts and minds of others, can then use that awareness to make their performance that much more emotionally engaging for others, and the more empathetic the audience the stronger the feedback loop. When that loop is in place, both the performer and the audience become transmitters and receivers, both tuned into that channel we call empathy.

The topic of this entry is "The Musician". So. Rather than re-hash the old sayings about the power of music to touch people's hearts, which is the most obvious connection to empathy and what we've been talking about here, I'd like to quote from an article written by Hazel Muir which appeared in the March 5th edition of New Scientist magazine:

Musicians are fine-tuned to others' emotions

Musical training might help autistic children to interpret other people's emotions. A study has revealed brain changes involved in playing a musical instrument that seem to enhance your ability to pick up subtle emotional cues in conversation.

"It seems that playing music can help you do all kinds of things better," says Nina Kraus from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. "Musical experience sharpens your hearing not just for music, but for other sounds too."

Earlier studies suggested that musicians are especially good at identifying emotions expressed in speech, such as anger or sadness. But it wasn't clear what kind of brain activity makes the difference.

Trained brain

To find out, Kraus and her colleagues recruited 30 musicians and non-musicians, aged 19 to 35. Entertained by watching a subtitled nature film, they repeatedly heard a baby crying through earphones (hear an example). Using scalp electrodes, the team measured the electrical response to the sounds in each volunteer's brainstem, which links the auditory nerve to the cerebral cortex.

In the musicians, the response to complex parts of the sound, in which the frequency rapidly changes, was especially high. But the musicians had lower responses than non-musicians to simpler sections of the baby's sound.

"It's as though the musicians are saving their neural resources for the complex portions, which the non-musicians didn't respond to particularly well," Kraus told New Scientist.

Both more years of musical experience and learning to play an instrument at a young age increased a musician's response to the complex sounds. That suggests music practice makes the difference, rather than simply having a natural talent for music in the first place.

Therapeutic tool?

"It used to be we thought sensory systems were pretty passive – they took the sound and just passed the information to the cerebral cortex where all the hard work and thinking was done," says Kraus. "But now we're understanding that as we use our sensory systems in an active way, this feeds back and shapes the sensory system all the way down through the brainstem to the ear."

The results suggest musical training might be useful for kids with dyslexia, some of whom have trouble processing sounds.

Often, these children have trouble processing the complex sounds for which musicians develop an especially good ear. Autistic children might also benefit, if improving their responses to complex sounds helps them interpret emotional speech.

It may also be possible that measurements of brainstem responses to sound could help diagnose autism and language disorders in an objective and reliable way.

For me, the idea that learning music can rewire the brain and repair potential problems relates nicely to the newly growing science of epigenetics, which we looked at in entries like Changing Your Genes 2, The Placebo Effect, and You Have a Shape and a Trajectory: isn't it amazing that scientific studies have now proved that changes in lifestyle and attitude can switch good genes on and bad genes off? One of the important themes from my project is that there are a lot of things about our bodies and our lives we have been traditionally taught cannot be altered, because they are a part of the "hand we've been dealt" and there's no way to change them. New ideas like these show us that things are much less locked in than we've been led to believe. Since I'm a musician myself, I have to admit to some personal bias here - but I think the study talked about in this article shows some exciting implications for understanding the power of music to help re-organize the brain and improve its all-important pattern-matching skill-set. The more we can see how Everything Fits Together, the better we are able to function within the world.

In the long run, though, I believe discussions of empathy still have to come down to understanding what makes us all be individuals with unique points of view, and at the same time what draws us all together: like a performer and an audience, we're transmitters and receivers of the patterns of information that we are all navigating through and traveling within. We're going to talk about that more next time in an entry called "Where Are You?"

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

PS - Here's a song that ties into all this as well - about how our constant process of taking on new patterns as we move through our lives, and how the traditional viewpoint that we are powerless to overcome the "hands we've been dealt" by our physical bodies and our circumstances denies us knowledge of how much control we have (not an unlimited amount of control, but certainly much more than many of us have been led to believe). The song is called "Change and Renewal".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blVNWkbPlII

Next - Where Are You?

You have a shape and a trajectory

George Harrison, born February 23rd 1943, would have been 66 years old today. Happy birthday, George, wherever/whatever you are right now.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZAMtmHkKg

I've talked many times now about Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful book "I am a Strange Loop". Coincidentally, both my book and Hofstadter's put forth the same idea: traditionally, it was believed that each human being has one indivisible soul. While there is indeed something unique about each person's individual experience, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space.

What are some of the ramifications of thinking of things this way? In entries like The Big Bang and the Big O we've talked about how sexuality provides connections across the history of life on this planet and perhaps even beyond. Music is also very much part of the same discussion, and we've looked at music as patterns that connect us together in entries like Music and the Dance of Creativity, The Geometry of Music, and Disorders of the Mind.

Music and sex are examples of the kinds of patterns that can connect us together. There are other patterns we can look at that show us how each of us is on our own individual journey within our physical bodies, each with our own unique pattern within the whole. In entries like Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory we've looked at how those patterns can be easily affected by adjusting our physicality, and in Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes 2 we've looked at the surprising new science of epigenetics, which shows that changes in lifestyle and attitude can cause "bad" genes to be switched off and "good" genes to be switched on.

For about fifteen years, back in the 70's and 80's, I was the music director of the local professional theatre here in my home town of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I recall a casual conversation I had with a young actress who said she was having trouble identifying with the character she was supposed to be playing. I asked her this question: what kind of music do you think this person would like to listen to? The actress immediately got what I meant: music has a physicality and emotional drive to it that can cause a person to change their body stance, adjust their mental attitude, and this is why certain people like certain kinds of music. If you're trying to "get into somebody else's headspace", so to speak, then imagine yourself liking the same music that they do.

Are you depressed? Put on a song that you associate with happy times and your mood will be elevated. Or, put on a song that resonates with your depression, at least you won't feel all alone. With people walking around with headphones and personal music players all over the place, this might seem very obvious; but physicality, mental attitude, and music are intimately tied together, and people who understand how much music affects them can use music very effectively as a way to enhance their activities throughout the day. This is also why it can be so annoying to be forced to listen to someone else's music if you don't want to: it's like their extra-dimensional "shape" is impinging upon your own.

So. Actors, whether they do this unconsciously or consciously, deal with these shapes and patterns that make each of us unique all the time. Watching an actor "become" someone else is a big part of the magic of that profession. An actor can change their physical stance, their body language, their internal rhythms, even the part of their body or face that their voice is "coming from". In other words, they find a way for what we might think of as their "soul" to adopt a different shape and trajectory, and that is something we as human beings recognize and are fascinated by.

Does this all sound too airy-fairy to you? Here's a link to an article from a few months ago in New Scientist Magazine, it was called "Voice Impersonators Use Brain to 'Become' Characters"

WHEN impersonators mimic an accent, celebrity, or do a voice-over for a cartoon, they may use areas of the brain not normally activated during speech, enabling them to "get under the skin" of their target.

Sophie Scott of University College London and colleagues asked seven people to impersonate 40 celebrity voices and a selection of foreign accents while lying in an fMRI brain scanner. Only regions normally activated during speech lit up.

In contrast, when British voice impressionist Duncan Wisbey did a range of impressions in the scanner, many more brain regions were active. The researchers say that this additional activity may reflect greater skill at impersonation. They presented the findings last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington DC.

Several of the regions in question are associated with vision and motor control. Scott suspects they light up because Wisbey thinks about what his target looks like and then imposes their features onto his own body to improve the voice.

Interestingly, Wisbey seems to produce the same pattern of brain activity even when the impression doesn't have to involve a specific individual, for example when mimicking accents. "When we asked him to try a Chinese accent, he said he was thinking about a woman who sells herbs near his house," says Scott.

Isn't that interesting? This is something I've seen myself with my son Mark, who has learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and is now learning Serbian. Each language causes people to hold their mouths and place their voices within their "mask" differently - in a sense Mark is becoming a different person as he speaks these languages.

Why are simple visualization techniques so effective in changing people's trajectory, putting them on a better path? Back in "Information Equals Reality" I talked through this as one way for people to move themselves to different trajectories within their fifth-dimensional probability space.

...imagine a warm ball of energy starting at the base of your spine, gradually working its way up your back, making you sit up straighter, creating a radiant glow out through your shoulders and the top of your head that opens your eyes wider and makes you feel more alert. Do you feel it? It really is that simple to change your energy, because it's all just information.

For people trapped in negative loops of self-destructive behavior, the idea that they can change their trajectory and that the way out is "just around the corner" in their own probability space could be what saves their life some day. To close, here's my song about that idea: it's called "Addictive Personality".


A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Creativity and the Quantum Universe

The Shaman

Before we start this entry, here's a new video we posted on YouTube yesterday which is attached to a blog entry from a month ago: "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?". I'm posting it here for all the subscribers to this blog who wouldn't have seen this video back when that previous blog entry was first released.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U. And now, on with today's entry!


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHO2h_NPkE8

I've quoted author and psychobiologist David Jay Brown before, who had some very kind things to say about my book:

Rob Bryanton's Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered. Bryanton presents a uniquely compelling model of our 10-dimensional universe, that allows one to visualize and grasp the topography of the higher dimensions in a step-by-step manner. This is must reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of physics, shamanic exploration, or the nature of reality.

Last time we talked about Augmented Reality, new technology which allows us to visualize things that aren't part of our physical world. This time I'd like to look at David Jay Brown's suggestion that my way of visualizing reality is useful for people interested in shamanism. There's an extensive article on this subject in wikipedia, here's one sentence that I think is key:

Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.

The idea that our reality is created by extra-dimensional patterns and shapes is, of course, central to my project. Whether one thinks of those as "invisible forces" or something more metaphysical, I've been insisting, may have more to with point of view than what it is we're really describing. Regardless, though, a shaman's viewpoint has to embrace the basic idea that I've been promoting here: that there is much more to our reality than the 3D world we see around us, and finding ways to visualize how that could be requires us to embrace a perspective which is "outside" of time, and "outside" of space. What I think is remarkable, though, is that this same "timeless" viewpoint has been central to the theories of many of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century: we've talked about this before in entries like Wormholes and Dimensional Folding and Scrambled Eggs.

Black Elk
Ever hear of Black Elk? He was a Lakota medicine man who lived from 1863 to 1950. While there appear to be varying opinions on whether it's proper to call Black Elk a shaman, I would say there are strong connections between this man's transcendent viewpoint and what is referred to as shamanism in other parts of the world. There's a well-known book called Black Elk Speaks which recounts his visions and insights, in what some are calling "the most famous Native American book ever written". A YouTube visitor named "crazedmystic" posted the following quote from Black Elk Speaks on one of my video blogs a few weeks ago:

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all.

I love this quote, not just because it speaks to the enfolded nature of reality which I am constantly going on about, but because it states it in such a beautiful way. I've tried to portray similar ideas about the connectedness that we all share, and the beautiful hoop, the "zero" that holds all other possibilities in so many other entries: Going to the Light, "t" Equals Zero, Imagining the Omniverse, and The Big Bang and the Big O, to name just a few.

Drums and Trance
What else is central to the shamanistic experience? It's impossible to generalize too much because shamans appear in various cultures throughout the world: still, music, trance, and altered states of consciousness can all play a large role. Have you ever been in a drum circle? This is one of those things that comedians like to make fun of, but there really is something there - the power of the drum, the shared experience of a large group of people becoming physically and mentally entrained through just drumming together, and the trance-like altered states of consciousness that can spring from such an experience can be surprisingly uplifting. One of my favorite books about all this was written by Mickey Hart, well-known musicologist and drummer for the Grateful Dead, called Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

"Altered states of consciousness", of course, can be brought about through various natural means, including dance or meditation, or through more traumatic experiences, but for many people the phrase makes psychedelics spring to mind immediately.

Psychedelics
We started this blog with a quote from David Jay Brown. As we discussed in David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, David is a respected expert on psychedelics and their serious study: he is also sometimes a guest editor of the newsletter published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelics Studies, which you can find at maps.org.

Which brings us to Terence McKenna, who some have referred to as a modern shaman. Here's a very interesting video showing Terence McKenna talking about shamanism in a way that seems very related to what I've been talking about here: McKenna tells us that a shaman would have to be able to tune into the "bifurcating trees of possibility" (McKenna's words) that are coming towards them from beyond the solid reality they see around them. I'd like to think that McKenna would have appreciated the connections between what he's talking about in this video, and the way that I've portrayed the fifth dimension as being part of our probability space (in entries like Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses and Predicting the Future). In entries like The Holographic Universe and Slices of Reality I've also described the fifth dimension as the place where we can see the underlying patterns of our reality are springing from, another related idea. And speaking of Augmented Reality, in a fanciful moment I find myself wondering if we'll ever get to the point where certain psychedelic experiences could be simulated using an augmented reality interface to superimpose those effects over top of the world we see around us? Now that would be quite the software program.


A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=S_qx5Pd9Z-M


It really is too bad that Terence McKenna passed away in 2000, well before the advent of YouTube, as he has some fascinating presentations out there that are finding a new audience through the medium of streaming video, but without his participation in the dialog we are deprived of the instant feedback loop that can make YouTube and its comments sections so interesting. To close, here's a couple more of Terence McKenna videos that relate to all this:

You are the center of the Mandala:

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=MHsB3RviFN4

Changing your operating system

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=ctjNqQPnAk8


Next, we'll continue this discussion with an entry called "Modern Shamans".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Crossed Wires in the Brain

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=VGbIgllpUUA


The above video is connected to a recent New Scientist magazine article about "synaesthesia" (click here for the article).

This is one of the things I have talked about here from other perspectives: each of us has our own unique grid of awareness - a way of observing that makes us each who we are. In my book I talked about the difficulties this causes for science fiction stories of mind-melds and personality transplants:

Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind” shows how many small processes can be linked together in hierarchies and feedback loops to create what we think of as “the mind”. These processes start in the womb and become increasingly multi-layered and intricate as we approach adulthood. But there are many, many ways to achieve that network of mental processes that becomes a functioning individual.

A common fallacy, then, is to presume that everyone sees and hears the same way you do. The fact is, each person has different ways of processing the data that is entering through their senses. What would it be like to drop into the mind of the dinosaurs we saw in the film Jurassic Park who (as explained in the movie) could only see things that are moving? The science fiction idea of dropping into someone else’s mind or trying to download someone else’s memories (ideas explored a number of times in the writing of Philip K. Dick) could be just as alien as trying to enter the mind of a T-Rex. For instance, some humans have a great deal more difficulty processing foreground sounds if there are too many simultaneous background sounds. Others will focus to the point where they may not even be aware that other sound sources (or echoes of the foreground sounds from surrounding reflective surfaces) are there. Some people experience a condition called synaesthesia, where their senses are mixed in surprising ways: they taste textures, or they see sounds, for instance.

In my book I also talked about the marvelous book by Dr. Oliver Sacks, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat", which chronicles various examples that show us just how strange and complex the process of consciousness and "mind" can be. Recently in my blog entry David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked a bit about the idea that hallucinogens might also be able to reveal information about how our consciousness and the underlying patterns of reality are inter-related. And in blog entries like Magnets and Souls and Daily Parrying I've talked about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight", which reveals some fascinating truths about how our interface with reality is so strongly mediated by separate and distinctly different patterns or grids of awareness that co-exist within what we've traditionally called "the mind".

Here is a link to a story from the UK's Daily Mail a few weeks ago about some other exotic examples of crossed wires in the brain. Persons mentioned in the article:

- Richard Murray of Birmingham, England, who 3 years ago suffered a stroke, had to re-learn how to speak, but mysteriously now finds that he speaks with a French accent.
- James Wannerton, a synaesthete who can taste words.
- Tommy McHugh, a builder who suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 2001 and suddenly became a prodigious artist.

Looks go back to where we started. Here's that opening animation again, all by itself:

As it suggests at this CalTech page about this animation, just try clicking the animation over and over, and see if you think you hear a sound (obviously this test is best done in a quiet environment, free from other distractions). For that small percentage of the population who actually have some forms of synaesthesia, the effect should be immediate and obvious. For others like myself, they might be able to convince themselves that they hear a faint "hissing sound" associated with the motion after repeated viewings, but this is where the line between imagination and perception can become very tricky. In the above New Scientist article, it's suggested that synaesthetes who hear sounds associated with visual input might even have a certain advantage because of their blending of the senses: the article reports that most of us are better at remembering sound patterns than visual patterns. In a test that compared persons known to have sound/visual synaesthesia with a control group, everyone was about 85% accurate on the sound trials. With visual patterns, however, the control group remembered only 55% of the visual patterns correctly, while synaesthetes remained steady at 85%. Clearly, people who can "hear" visual patterns can actually be helped by their unusual ability in certain situations.

In items like Music and the Dance of Creativity, The Geometry of Music, and Information Equals Reality, I've tried to tie all these ideas into what the power of music reveals about how our brains are so finely tuned to memes that connect across time and space. "Crossed wires in the brain" give us another way of thinking about the patterns that create our reality, and how important our participation as quantum observers is in that process.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, September Report