Category: ideas

“Whenever people discuss the familiar plight of classical music in America — financial problems; aging audiences; above all, a loss of cultural authority — someone is sure to bring up the museum analogy. Classical music, we are told, may be old and valuable, but it is as remote from contemporary life as an old fiddle. Its culture is a museum culture. The public doesn’t care about new works, and the old ones have been worn out with reuse like antique coins with faded faces. But the museum analogy shortchanges both the music and the museum.”

“How heavy is information? Most of us know that computers represent all types of information–e-mails, documents, video clips, Web pages, everything–as streams of binary digits, 1s and 0s. These digits are mathematical entities, but they are also tangible ones: They are embodied and manipulated as voltages in electronic circuits. Therefore, every bit of data must have some mass, albeit minuscule. This prompted DISCOVER to ask the question: How much would all the data sent through the Internet on an average day weigh?”

“A computerized instrument that allows people to play music with the tip of their nose could give those who suffer from physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy, the chance to experience music’s positive effects.”

“Can a CD actually make you high? This is the bold claim of the people at I-Doser.com, whose Recreational Simulations CDs are said to ‘synchronise your brainwaves to achieve a simulated state of mind’. Each track contains ‘advanced binaural beats’ mixed with a ‘carrier tone of white noise and ambient soundscapes’, producing in the listener a range of altered states including ‘mood lift, euphoria, sedation and hallucination’.”

“The connections that paintings and dance performances, movies and novels and music make to us beyond our conscious perceptions of them are primary and transporting. Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we’re carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.”

“Scientists have discovered a way to convert the DNA patterns that code for proteins into rhythmic piano notes that sound pleasant to a musician’s ear. The conversion method could not only make the otherwise daunting field of genomic coding more approachable to the general public and even children but could also provide scientists — including those who are vision-impaired — an entirely new way for analyzing proteins.”

“Certain differences seem to be inherent in male and female brains: Men are better at maintaining and manipulating mental images (useful in mathematical reasoning and spatial skills), while women tend to excel at retrieving information from their brain’s files (helpful with language skills and remembering the locations of objects).”

The business of picking hit music is a strange alchemy. So could computers really bring some order to the process? Malcom Gladwell explores the idea…

“For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality…. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. … Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case.”

Western Civilization is awfully fond of itself and its accomplishments, which, taken as a whole, are considerable. But “how did the West emerge… out of what was once a diverse set of has-been or backwater cultures of a relatively small geographic region roughly contained in the boundaries of modern Europe? This is no mere academic question. That transformation is one of the great phenomena of world history.”