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 certain common emotional state. For example, in his experiments, two particular patterns that gently rise and fall are said to suggest states of love and reverence; two others (more abrupt) signify anger and hate. He claims that these and other patterns–he calls them 'sentic'–arouse the same effects through different senses–that is, embodied as acoustical intensity, or pitch, or tactile pressure, or even visual motion–and that this is cross-cultural. The time lengths of these sentic shapes, on the order of 1 sec, could correspond to parts of musical phrases."

Watching someone play rhythms--or dancing to the rhythms becomes infectious--a rhythmic virus transmitted via mirror neurons. In a sense, reinforcement algorithms are "sentic" in that they track emotional curves derived from data and feed us more of it. Social media in many ways is a form of therapy where we can flow with its own rhythms and feedback loops, and perhaps showing up as Tourette's-like movements. (Or perhaps is simply a message that emerges from the medium of TikTok a la McLuhan).

Social media gives us access to the dynamics of "momentum noise", which deafens the inner voice (intuition as well as reason), so we turn off the reasoning part of the brain--which is a good thing when you want to do something using the body without having to use too much pre-frontal cortex. But it's the latter that goes missing when people are entranced by algorithmic rhythms.