Spontaneous Cognitive Fluctuations (Pink Noise)

Hearing Things 

In order to play or write music you have to cultivate the ability to translate sound you hear internally into the language of music. In my experience, this process results in something completely different that how I originally imagined it. Very often I'll "hear" 1, 2 or 4-bar loops (why not 3 or 5?) in dreams, and once I flesh it out on a guitar it is vastly different. As it is in remembering a dream, fragments get stitched into a narrative, similar to to how footage in a film shot out of order gets re-sequenced by the screenplay. Memory, in many ways is a confabulation in order for its fragments to have a linearity. Music works because of strict linearity: we don't have to take one fragment from different points in time in order to hear it as music, but what if we could do that?

For those with perfect pitch and/or synesthesia, an F# is a palpable experience. But if there is a D-natural that is sounding in the area, does that result in major third, and is it the perfect kind? I tend to think it's the latter. In fact, I can hear a perfect third in my head, but also the ET version. All the senses have a memory, even the sense of smell. You know what an orange smells and tastes like because you can conjure it from memory. I can hear a G-natural in my head because I'm so used to hearing the open G on a bass.

Years ago I had the idea that municipalities should sound chimes (digital chimes) like the civil defense sirens. It is only until relatively recently that I realized these sirens actually have a calming effect (at least to me), with their perfect and just-tuned intervals. But the problem is that once people associate that timed monthly event at 10AM as a warning, we can't hear them as chimes or church bells. Sometimes they are beyond hearing thresholds, and like the emotional feelings in dreams, can effect us nonetheless.

Brian Eno talked about this in his talk at the Exploratorium in 1988, with Charles Amirkhanian:

"When you sit outside and listen, you hear some things loud 'cause you're close to them. It's just an accident. It's not because they're more important. But if you listen, you hear things that you know are actually loud but they're just on the edge of your earshot. I wanted to make a music that placed you in a field of sound and implied that the horizon wasn't the end of it, that it continued right around the edge, right around the globe. Music that puts you in context."

When we hear music in our heads it is in fact like a dream, and when we give it a narrative it becomes physical sound. Music is a narrative.

 

Sensing Things 

The recent spate of Havana Syndrome incidents has piqued my interest because I had also been intrigued by the various infernal "hums" that people have experienced around the world since the 1970s ("Taos Hum", "Bristol Hum"). Not having experienced it myself, I see it as benign at some level. It reminds us we have a nervous system which may be sensitive to things beyond our ken or umwelt. They are perhaps paresthesias of the auditory nerve that are sympathetic to bone induction of sound:

"One theory even posits ultra-low frequency radio signals used to communicate with submarines in the depths of oceans might be interacting with soft tissue in our skulls that stimulate the auditory nerve – a phenomenon known as the “microwave auditory effect”, which, incidentally, has been studied by the Pentagon for use as a sonic weapon." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/07/the-hum-mystery-noise-says-a-lot-about-modern-life

I recalled hearing about this shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 where they found that extreme bass sounds produced a range of bizarre effects including anxiety, extreme sorrow, and other sensations. Low frequency sound is also naturally produced by storms, seasonal winds, and earthquakes. (National Physical Laboratory in England)

Similarly, conspiracies give one the impression that they heard something that seemed real because they were conditioned through repetition. Perhaps these are in fact warnings--a momentum noise created by our own simmering collective paranoia. 

 

From a recent article on "spontaneous cognitive fluctuations":

Scientists have been telling us that the background noises our brains make are random and unimportant for almost a century; hence, they have filtered and averaged them out of their studies. Yet increasing evidence shows that this "noise" is neither random nor unimportant. 

The most interesting positive finding we have so far is that these spontaneous fluctuations are neither random nor deterministic, but have an unpredictable "fractal" structure. A fractal is a pattern that roughly repeats across scales — like a tree whose few big branches have many smaller branches with even more leaves that look like tiny branches. Scientists have found that spontaneous neural activity follows a similar branching pattern throughout the brain, and has a related proportion of a few slow and strong frequencies to more faster and higher frequencies scientists call "pink noise." With this discovery, researchers are now starting to observe changes in these fluctuations related to aging, consciousness, mental health, experiences of art and nature, and memory.

When we take a walk outside, the fractal rhythms of our heart synchronize with the fractal rhythms of our lungs and our fractal gait. Researchers have also shown that our wandering bodies make our minds wander too. On a walk, our brain waves slow down. The underlying spontaneous fluctuations bubble up more easily, creating experiences of spontaneous thoughts and associations that seem to come from nowhere. We often call them "moments of inspiration."

 

Postscript: 

Not only does the brain create noise, various noises and sounds either distract or focus the brain. I find that playing music in the background helps me with visual tasks, or things that are repetitive, and don't require a lot of analysis. To help with things that are repetitive, you can listen to music on repeat, which is a form of noise. Music can be noise even if isn’t noise. I always found it interesting that I could listen to loud drone metal and feel that it was soothing at some level.