In Mind & Matter in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal Review Section (6/17/2017), Robert Sapolsky discussed the fact that, in a massive universe in which stable events such as planets revolving mathematically around a star, compare with unstable events such as asteroids randomly smashing into helpless moons, our brains do the very best they can to impose structure on what is otherwise seen as entropy.
Relating that brain structure to an experiment associated with music, Sapolsky writes about an experiment with individuals who were provided 32 rhythmic patterns recorded on a snare drum with twelve beats about five seconds long, spacing between the beats standard, but the strength of each beat totally random. Each of the students was put into a chain of eight students and was asked to repeat the pattern on a snare drum as accurately as possible and then pass that recorded beat on to the next student.
By the time it had gone from the first student, who attempted to mimic the totally random beat strengths, to the eighth student, what ended up getting recorded was a beat motif that represented the universal rhythm: beats over downbeats and internals between beats in multiples of two-hundred milliseconds.
The experiment appears to confirm what most of us intuitively understand: rational individuals tend to look for pattern and structure among events, impressions, or simple sentiments which otherwise appear random, and then to apply that structure to better understand what happened.
Click here for the link to Robert Sapolsky’s article published on WSJ.
Image source: the-open-mind.com