It's incredible how much music can make you feel. Vibrations floating through the air and stimulating a bone in a hole in the side of your head, which sends electronic pulses to the brain, or something. Then again, what is a feeling? How does the brain work? It'd be neat-o to know. But then, maybe understanding our feelings and emotions might detract from how powerful they can feel. Ignorance is bliss?
Gonna buy a new computer sometime. Sachio spec'd me a decent machine, I'll buy the parts when I get my criminal-compensation-jazz through, then he said he'd help me build it. Such a nice guy.
I need a new guitar tuner. My dad claimed it was MIA in my messy, messy room, I claimed that he had misplaced it with his senile mind. I tidied my room; no tuner. He has yet to reconfigure his brain.
GEOFF SAYS: "LIGHT UP!" - got to make that t-shirt. I love my dad, but he pisses me off so much. It's a strange relationship. Sometimes we talk like old mates, sometimes we argue like worst enemies. Probably because we are so similar. He bought the new Willy Mason album, so gotta love that.
BUT YEAH - my acoustic is all out of tune, and tuning it aurally to a keyboard is eeeeffffooooorrrrrrtttt (still, I imagine I'll do that later). God damn I cannot wait for July. Komasket is going to be siiiiiick, not to mention the rumors I've heard about this rave after it.
Drugs? Acoustic guitars? Beautiful scenery? Lovely weather? Wonderful people? Lack of responsibility? I'll take four weeks, thanks.
And Reading, kaloo-kalay, managed to get a ticket in the end, thanks to Alissa. Also, got a green-car-park-pass: no boat for me THIS year.
I haven't made any music for a while, should get back on that.
Shit, 14 weeks 'til July. That's far more than I anticipated. Well, best do some drugs, get rid of that consciousness for a while.
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4 comments:
Learning the exact physical properties of the brain as any feeling passes through it would be no more useful to life (aside from possible medical benefits) than telling a drowning man that the water he's in is two parrts hydrogen one part oxygen. But then you like physics, so you probably have some weird obsession with how stuff works no matter how more exciting its effects are regardless of the technicalities. "Understanding our feelings and emotions might detract from how powerful they can feel" - nah; i remember my English teacher once saying something like "...love is basically a chemical imbalance in the brain, which is quite sad when you think of it like that". But it's not, cos what else would it be? Some kind of magic or divine intervention direct into your skull? At least admitting it's just a mental process recognises that it's something real and inside you (albeit uncontrollably) rather than just wandering into faery territory.
Perhaps no more useful to your life. Medical benefits are too significant to be put in an aside. You could fix schizophrenics. But lots else. Knowing how the brain works would be the first step to artificial intelligence.
It might also allow me to have an extra field of vision (with the help of a computer implant), and some virtual limbs to put in it (I think I've mentioned this idea before - I want to be able to walk down the street using my normal field of vision to see where I'm going, but play the organ at the same time with my virtual limbs in my virtual field of vision (I would have two unconnected fields of vision)).
My brain would be able to cope with new limbs. There was a story very recently about scientists who gave drosophila a gene which made it trichromatic, and hey presto, the brain rewired itself (straight away, not in a few generations) so the flies could see in tri-colour (like RGB).
"maybe understanding our feelings and emotions might detract from how powerful they can feel"
I doubt it very much. That is similar (but not identical) to Keats "who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors". As Feynman retorts to a claim that scientists miss the beauty of a flower by studying it:
"The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower. The color of the flower is red. Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do they have an aesthetic sense? And so on. I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds."
Sorry, mice, not drosophila.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,782,New-clues-to-why-we-see-red,Melissa-Lee-Phillips
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