Our minds can change over time–because our brains are literally being rewired throughout our lives. Time, space, external media and internal memory are interconnected through our neural circuitry. Understanding this is important for anyone who deals with art, media, technology or society.
To explain this, I’d like you travel with me to 1907. This is the year that Proust published Swann’s Way
The surprising thing here is that Einstein had only just made his first publication about relativity in 1905; and Herman Minkowski didn’t integrate the concept of space-time mathematically until 1908–a year after Swann’s Way went to press. This got me thinking: how often do artists intuitively arrive at an idea that is later born-out by the scientific method?
It turns out that I’m not the only one. Jonah Lerher, a neuroscientist and author (who also worked in some world-class restaurants) wrote Proust was a Neuroscientist, a book that shows how the artistic process can sometimes prefigure scientific theory. More recently, he released another book called How We Decide, which deals with the strange and surprising ways that we make decision. I just had the pleasure of finishing them both back-to-back.
One of the more interesting insights from Proust was an explanation of how we develop certain musical tastes. I’d often wondered why music taste tends to shift between generations; my parents couldn’t stand what I listened to–a phenomena most people have experienced. Is it simply a matter of the generation gap, or is there a biological basis for it?
A personal experience with music: since the mid-90’s, I had made several attempts to listen to Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Mails–with little success. It sounded like chaos to me. At the same time, my friends kept telling me how great it was. Eventually, I found a song that I really liked (Hurt, a “cross-over” hit), and that acted as the gateway to a lot of his other music. Slowly, even the stuff that previously sounded like noise started to sound really good. Now I consider myself a fan.
Why is this? Jonah Lehrer explains how music has the power to rewire our brains. When something is unfamiliar, it sounds like noise. In the early twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky caused a riot with Rites of Spring, a symphony so full of dissonance that the audience went berserk and he was literally chased out of the opera house. People weren’t ready for him yet. Three decades later, Rites of Spring was one of the pieces chosen for Disney’s Fantasia. What had once been a cause of pandemonium was now popular entertainment.
I’m left wondering how much this rewiring process is going on across culture all the time. There’s a time and place for any type of media; but sometimes people’s brains literally aren’t ready for it. If you are interested in how the mind works, then I recommend both of Lehrer’s books.
