Sentics
A few days ago, I stumbled on an article about teens showing up at doctor offices with weird tics, which were attributed apparently to watching TikTok videos of young people with Tourette's Syndrome. This stands to reason in the sense that they are reacting to something rhythmic, and watching other people do it makes you want do it--like crying or dancing in certain ways. Playing music (or dancing) requires a rhythmic "coupling", or a form of imitation or mimicry. Sometimes odd rhythms can make you want to move your body in certain ways, for example when a groove has a snare hit on the fourth sixteenth note in a bar, or is otherwise irregularly syncopated. This reminded me of a somewhat esoteric book that came out in the late 1970s, Sentics . Marvin Minsky had referenced it in Music, Mind and Meaning : "In his book Sentics [l978], the pianist-physiologist Manfred Clynes describes certain specific temporal sensory patterns and claims that each is associated with a cer...
