Ghatam Quartet (Clay Pots)

Dancing is fun, and good for you, too.

Danielle Friedman, Yes, Even You Can Dance, NYTimes.

For many people, dance feels more like play than exercise, which helps to explain its enduring appeal as a workout.

What began as “aerobic dancing” in the 1970s has evolved with exercise science (and contemporary playlists) into today’s cardio dance classes, which are typically high-energy sessions that engage the whole body. [...]

In recent decades, a growing body of research has found that dance may be just as beneficial for cardiovascular health as other common forms of aerobic exercise, when performed at a moderate to vigorous intensity.

Studies also suggest that dance can be an effective way to cultivate strength, balance and coordination, and can help to manage chronic pain. [...]

Dancing can have powerful psychological and cognitive benefits, helping to improve mood and memory. A 2024 review study found that, for some people, dancing was more effective for improving symptoms of depression than any other form of exercise.

When you dance with other people, you may also experience the many health benefits of being social, said Erica Hornthal, a dance therapist based in Chicago.

The article goes on to explain how you can create your own dance workout.

Or, you can just move to the music. Think about how you danced when you were a kid, Ms. Hornthal said, shaking off stress, letting loose and having fun.

“I really believe anyone can dance,” said Sadie Kurzban, founder of the cardio dance franchise 305 Fitness. “You can have no rhythm and still dance. You can be seated and still dance.”

About the clave rhythm, central to Latin music

The clave rhythm developed in Cuba from the African bell pattern brought to the Americas via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The rhythm is used to lock in the many rhythms of Afro-Cuban music, as well as other Latin music like the bossa nova of Brazil. This video focuses on three claves -- rumba clave, son clave, and the Brazilian clave.

The Sound of The Ancestors: An Authentic West African Drum Solo

YouTube:

Akinmola Boluwatife Samuel is a dynamic musician, vocalist, and drummer who blends traditional African rhythms with contemporary expression. With a B.A. in music from Lagos State University, where he was awarded Drummer of the Year in recognition of his exceptional talent. Boluwatife leads the _African Folk Band_, infusing Apala tradition jazz, and call and response vocal form into his music. As a husband and father, family inspires his artistry, fueling his commitment to storytelling through rhythm and melody. His work celebrates Africa's rich musical heritage, captivating audiences worldwide.

Listen carefully to how he has tuned the deums. 

The drum solo of drum solos, Papa Jo Jones

Coleman Hawkins Quintet 1964 "Caravan" | Papa Jo Jones Drum Solo | Harry "Sweets" Edison | England

Coleman Hawkins - tenor
Harry "Sweets" Edison - trumpet
"Sir" Charles Thompson - piano
Jimmy Woode - bass
"Papa" Jo Jones - drums

West meets East Heavy metal meets konnakol

From YouTube page:

If Meshuggah were from India.

V Shivapriya and BR Somashekar Jois perform rhythmic phrases set to Mishrachaapu Tala. Remixed by Andre Antunes

I've seen the video on the right side of the screen. The guitarist listened and figured out how to follow. Amazing. I don't follow heavy metal at all, but I do know the music is into odd meters. But this goes way beyond that.

There's more!

And more!

Extreme Math Nerd Music [Konnakol]

From the YouTube page:

The South Indian tradition known as Konnakol uses some of the most extreme mathematics to create complex music full polyrhythms, geometric patterns and metric modulations. It's possibly the most Extreme Math Nerd Music there is, and I love it! Special thanks to Rohith Jayaraman.

Back when I was researching my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil, a family friend, Jon Barlow, arranged for me to sit in on a konnokol class taught by Ramnad V. Ragavan, a mridangam drummer, who was on the faculty at Wesleyan (pp. 124-125 in the book). Fascinating.

Rick Beato interviews Mohini Day, an insanely excellent bass player from Kolkata

From her Wikipedia entry:

Dey was born and brought up in Mumbai. When she was born, her parents were struggling to make ends meet, as her father worked as a session musician. He noticed his daughter's musical talent before she turned three and began to nurture it. Dey received her first bass guitar when she was nine or ten.

Here's her website, and her YouTube page.

This next clip starts out as a bass solo, and long one, she cues the drummer at about 4:23, the rest of the band at about 4:42, and then things get really interesting at about 5:10 where she leads the band in call and response rounds of konnokol syllables, first vocally, and then instrumentally.

An 18-beat Greek rhythm from the Roman era

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Sayesha Chowdhury TABLA WIZARD

From the YouTube page:

A Tabla duet by Pt. Pandit Keshab Kanti Chowdhury & Sayesha Chowdhury (grand daughter & shishsya at age of 7) performing on the occasion of CA TV California Festival on 15 Jan 2023 in the Church of Scientology of Los Angeles under the direction of Shuvananda Puri Maharaj Ji who heads the media broadcasting channel CA TV California.

Thanks a lot Shuvananda Puri for giving us this opportunity to showcase Delhi Gharana original Tabla in a duet form.

Sayesha Chowdhury, age 7, is learning Tabla since the age of 1.5 years and have been performing for the last 3 years in national and international level. She has been awarded by CATV California, Sarb Akal Music Society Calgary Canada, Born to Shine ZEE India, Sangeet Kala Kendra Agra and many more.

Listen to the vocables that they utter while they're playing. 

Review of empirical research into musical grooves [Born to Groove]

I just got off the phone with Charlie Keil. He told me about a recent review of the empirical literature on the groove: Takahide Etani, Akito Miura, Satoshi Kawase, Shinya Fujii, Peter E. Keller, Peter Vuust, Kazutoshi Kudo, A review of psychological and neuroscientific research on musical groove, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 158, 2024,105522, ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105522.

Highlights:

• Moving the body to music is an activity that is universal and ancient.
  
• The pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to music is called groove.
  
• We review work on related musical features and psycho-neurophysiological processes.
  
• Open questions and future directions in empirical groove research are discussed.

Abstract: When listening to music, we naturally move our bodies rhythmically to the beat, which can be pleasurable and difficult to resist. This pleasurable sensation of wanting to move the body to music has been called "groove." Following pioneering humanities research, psychological and neuroscientific studies have provided insights on associated musical features, behavioral responses, phenomenological aspects, and brain structural and functional correlates of the groove experience. Groove research has advanced the field of music science and more generally informed our understanding of bidirectional links between perception and action, and the role of the motor system in prediction. Activity in motor and reward-related brain networks during music listening is associated with the groove experience, and this neural activity is linked to temporal prediction and learning. This article reviews research on groove as a psychological phenomenon with neurophysiological correlates that link musical rhythm perception, sensorimotor prediction, and reward processing. Promising future research directions range from elucidating specific neural mechanisms to exploring clinical applications and socio-cultural implications of groove.

I've been reading around in the article. It's a real head-twister. That is to say, it's dense with information which is difficult to integrate into a coherent overall picture. I keep wishing I could hear the musical examples being talked about. I'll be the authors of the article would have liked that as well. Some examples involve just drums, others just a piano, others some kind of ensemble; but this is just a review article, so the authors aren't listening to those examples.

In view of Charlie's interest in participatory discrepancies (PDs), this next summary paragraph seems particularly pertinent, though the author's don't use Charlie's term. They write of microtiming, where PDs would be a kind of microtiming:

In summary, the studies that have been conducted on the relation- ship between the groove experience and microtiming except one (Nelias et al., 2022) suggest that microtiming is not necessarily an important factor for eliciting the groove experience, while there are conditions of microtiming (i.e., small microtiming) that are comparable to quantized rhythms. However, it is important to note that microtiming has positive effects on rhythmic behaviors such as stabilizing sensorimotor syn- chronization to rhythmic stimuli (Hove et al., 2007) and enhancing the degree of synchronization of body movement to music when dancing (Kilchenmann and Senn, 2015). These results suggest that microtiming is not necessarily systematically related to deliberate conscious aspects of communicating the groove experience, but it might be relevant to the effects of the music on movement induction and stabilizing sensorimotor synchronization. Further research is necessary to elucidate how and under what conditions microtiming could contribute to eliciting the groove experience. In addition, musicians have been insistent about how important microtiming is for the groove experience and the feel of the music (e.g., Berliner, 1994, p. 151–152), so there is a discrepancy between practitioners’ opinions and what research has found. To date, manipulations in research on relations between microtiming and the groove experience have involved displacing events in time without changing the properties of the sounds. However, recent studies have found that microtiming displacements are also associated with changes in timbre, dynamics, and attack times (Danielsen et al., 2019; Caˆmara et al., 2020a; Caˆmara et al., 2020b). This highlights the need to take into account these aspects when investigating the relationship between microtiming and the groove experience in the future.

Read that whole paragraph with care. Note, in particular, the discrepancy "between practitioners’ opinions and what research has found." Practitioners (of anything, not just music) don't always know what they are in fact doing, especially when much of what they are doing is largely intuitive and preconscious. But the research is far from conclusive on its own terms. That is to say, there's more work to be done. Skipping over a lot of stuff I find:

These results indicate that the average groove experience also differs among musical styles. In particular, music belonging to African-American music, such as soul, R&B, funk, and jazz, seems to receive high groove ratings in general. This may be because music belonging to African-American music is typically characterized by drum patterns with a moderate degree of syncopation, as well as a moderate tempo around 120 bpm. Although less is known about the groove experience in other musical styles, it may be relatively consistent and present in concentrated form in African-American music.

Yep. Not surprised. But the part about 120 bpm is new; that's roughly double an average heart rate.

There's much more in the article and I'm far from done with it. But let's look at a couple of concrete examples of the power of the groove. While the whole video has some value in the "slice of family life" category, I'm interested in what happens about about 7:35. A little guy – between 18 months and two years I'd guess – is listening to music on a smart phone.

Watch him start moving to the beat. My guess is that it's not a matter of active willing. He just does it. He can't help himself. The way I read it, mom notices his movement, he notices mom's attention and utters, "Whoa!" Mom answers in kind, and then he stops grooving and starts walking. I want to know the microtimings involved in that, but the meso-timings as well. How long after he starts listening does his body start to move? Notice that he moves from the hips. Is he in synch from the start? How closely? Etc.

On a different tip, be amazed by the young bass virtuoso, Mohini Day, playing Coltrane's solo on "Countdown." LOL!

 

Propulsive as hell. But a groove? Yes? No? Maybe? Sorta'? How's it work? How'd Coltrane get from "walking the bar" with RnB bands in Philly 1954 – hardcore groove music, though playing with Dizzy Gillespie to THAT?

Clave like it's 2999!

Three Against Two the Tumbuka Way

I'm bumping this to the top on the principle that I need to do more posts about music. This doesn't actually add a post to the blog, but it brings one out of the past and into the present.

 

Western music is based on so-called duple rhythms, patterns of two or multiples of two. There are triple rhythms as well, the waltz for example, but they aren't as prominent. What Western rhythm rarely does is superimpose the two.

Not so in much of the third world, where three against two is a way of life. Here's a passage from Beethoven's Anvil (pp. 116-117) that describes a technique for learning three-against-two that is ascribed to an origin myth. Imagine that, a culture that makes rhythm part of it's origin myth.

* * * * *

The Tumbuka of Malawi, in southeastern Africa, have an origin myth that is coupled with a thigh slapping routine. The myth concerns Mupa, who discovered the rhythms used in vimbuza music, the music played for the trance dancing central to Tumbuka healing. Mupa discovered the rhythms while slapping his thighs. He began with a simple alternation—slap the right thigh with the right hand, left thigh with the left hand, in even alternating strokes—but that quickly grew boring. So he began figuring out more interesting ways to generate rhythms. I won’t recite the whole story—you can find it in Steven Friedson’s book, Dancing Prophets—but I will briefly describe the thigh-slapping routine that Mupa developed.

First, take a comfortable seat with your feet resting on the floor. Gently slap one thigh (say, the right thigh with the right hand) and then the other; do this repeatedly with an even rhythm at a comfortable tempo. Now, group your strokes into groups of three by slapping your knee on the first of each group of three. You will probably have to count to do this. You could use number names and say “one two three” but any three syllables will do. Just repeat the sequence over and over and slap your knee on the first syllable in the series. Not only is the physical gesture a little different from before, so is the sound. Notice that the initial stroke in your groups—set in bold type—will alternate between your right and left knees:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

A full cycle is thus six strokes long, divided into two groups marked by initial knee slaps. Emphasize the knee slaps so that they are just a little louder, thus strengthening the triple grouping. Practice this at a comfortable pace until you can do it with little or no thought. then you may want to pick up the pace and see how fast you can go.

Next we are going to superimpose THREE (two-stroke groupings) on the TWO groupings that consist of three strokes each. We will do this merely by thinking. Continue the same pattern but now concentrate on only one hand at a time, perhaps your right. I find it helps simply to look at the appropriate thigh. In the following representation the right strokes have been set in bold type while the initial strokes of the two groups of three have been set in italics:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

One could also choose to concentrate on the left-hand strokes:

(1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh (1) R Knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh

Either way, get six beats in two different ways. When you use knee slaps as your marker, the six beats are divided into two groups or three beats each. When you use left or right side as your marker, they are divided into three groups of two beats each. Further, you can switch your concentration back and forth from the right-hand strokes to the left-hand ones.

If you are not already practiced in this sort of thing, you should be slow and deliberate. As you become comfortable, pick up the pace. You will reach a point where you no longer explicitly think in six, with overlays about how each stroke must be executed, and think instead in three/two.

The pattern of physical gestures you establish by practicing this exercise can then be applied to playing the ng’oma drum, the lead or master drum of Tumbuka music. The thigh stroke and knee stroke of the exercise become two different ways of striking the drum. But the basic pattern the Mupa left his people forms the core pattern of Tumbuka drumming; all other patterns derive from it.

* * * * *

See also: Three Against Two: Splitting the Mind in Two.

Rhythmic brain activity

𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲-𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀
What is rhythmic activity for??
Revisiting gamma and beta.https://t.co/XZHCHMZLlt pic.twitter.com/U3tAnzBTF3

— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) September 26, 2023

Breathing in waves: Understanding respiratory-brain coupling as a gradient of predictive oscillations

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴:https://t.co/WREIn4Im41 pic.twitter.com/IZCL1NTES6

— Luiz Pessoa (@PessoaBrain) July 14, 2023

Note that breathing involves both top-down voluntary control and bottom-up involuntary control. 

From the linked article:

Highlights

• Respiration fundamentally influences neural oscillations in animals and humans.
• Neuropsychiatric disorders are characterised by specific oscillatory profiles.
• Here, respiratory and neural aberrations are integrated to explain psychopathology.
• We propose a gradient model of respiratory-modulated prediction errors.

Abstract

Breathing plays a crucial role in shaping perceptual and cognitive processes by regulating the strength and synchronisation of neural oscillations. Numerous studies have demonstrated that respiratory rhythms govern a wide range of behavioural effects across cognitive, affective, and perceptual domains. Additionally, respiratory-modulated brain oscillations have been observed in various mammalian models and across diverse frequency spectra. However, a comprehensive framework to elucidate these disparate phenomena remains elusive. In this review, we synthesise existing findings to propose a neural gradient of respiratory-modulated brain oscillations and examine recent computational models of neural oscillations to map this gradient onto a hierarchical cascade of precision-weighted prediction errors. By deciphering the computational mechanisms underlying respiratory control of these processes, we can potentially uncover new pathways for understanding the link between respiratory-brain coupling and psychiatric disorders.

Time out of time: The eternal return of the rhythm people [Bang on a drum!]

Jochen Szangolies has an interesting post at 3 Quarks Today, Dinner For Nietzsche: Rhythms, Rituals, And Eternal Return, Jan. 9. 2023. It speaks to some of my central concerns, time, rhythm, music, and ritual. He opens:

Time presents itself, depending on the context, under two different modalities: cyclical and linear. Linear time moves always forward, carrying us from past to present, ever towards an uncertain future; while circular time, the time of clock hands, sunrise and sunset, and recurring seasons, sees us back again at our origin.

These would seem to be somewhat in tension. But I find that time, perhaps like all the great mysteries, is only enriched by its seeming contradictions. Take ‘stopping time’, as it is sometimes portrayed in movies—that is, holding everything frozen. How long does such a state last? What is the difference between it lasting an hour, a day, or an eternity? In the absence of change, time is robbed of duration. But in an instant of time, there can be no change. Hence, any instant, it seems, might as well be an infinity, held in the palm of your hand.

Toward the middle he has a wonderful story:

Time’s cycles are often marked by ritual, and none more so than the turning of the great celestial clock. One of the most cherished rituals in Germany is to usher in the new year by watching the 1963 comedy sketch Dinner for One, recorded in black and white by the NDR (you can watch it here, if you’re not familiar).

The plot is simple enough: Miss Sophie intends to celebrate her 90th birthday, and has invited her four closest friends. Unfortunately, they have all since passed; nevertheless, she is unwilling to forgo the ritual, and thus, her butler James stands in for each. As this includes a toast with an alcoholic beverage at each course of the evening’s meal, contributing to a progressive inebriation, hijinks, as they are wont to, ensue.

I can’t quite say how the tradition came about, but it’s taken seriously—up to half of all households catch at least one of the various showings on New Year’s Eve, and it is the most often repeated programme on German television. In 2018, Deutsche Post even issued a commemorative stamp. My father’s laughter, always renewed at the always same cues, is a fond childhood memory.

The sketch is, in my unqualified opinion at least, a hilarious masterclass in comedic timing, but I doubt that alone is reason for its popularity. And it must strike one as quite strange: comedy, resting to some degree on surprise, seems to be the genre least well-suited to repeated viewing. But I think there is a lesson here, about what one might call the willing suspension of inurement: to let the new return, as new, again and again. To suspend the modern, cynical seen-it-all attitude in favor of a renewed, wilfull naiveté that renounces all pretense of aloof sophistication in favor of laughing, again, again, and then again at James’ struggle with the tiger’s head.

Still later there is this observation:

Strangely enough, there is some support for such a notion in physics: the phenomenon of Poincaré recurrence means that a dynamical system, typically after a very long time, will return to a state arbitrarily close to its initial state (provided the system is bounded in a certain sense, and nothing ‘flies off to infinity’). Taking things a step further, physicist Julian Barbour has indeed argued that there is no such thing as time, there are only moments—little slivers of eternity—which differ from each other in small details, and are ordered only in retrospect, by ‘later’ ones carrying traces—memories or records—of their predecessors, like a picture of a picture.

And that, as I observed in a comment, is at the center of my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. And that gives me a chance to link to the literature on synchronized clapping, a phenomenon I discuss at the end of my third chapter, "Fireflies, Dynamics, and Brain States," pp. 67-68 (you can read a final draft here). Here is a nice video of the phenomenon. It's from Budapest.

The synchronization doesn't fully emerge until about 49 seconds in, and then it is very clear. But you can hear it trying to get out. It then ebbs and flows until the end of the two-minute video.

You might also want to take a look at my working paper from 2015, The Magic of the Bell: How Networks of Social Actors Create Cultural Beings. Here's the abstract:

It is well known that music can engender altered states of consciousness that are difficult to interpret scientifically except as odd malfunctions in the nervous system. In this paper I report a phenomenon known among some musicians as “the magic of the bell”: the emergence of high-pitched twittering sounds when a group is playing interlocking rhythms on different bells. These sounds cannot be attributed to any of the musicians and they emerge only when the group is a group is playing bells with passion and precision. I argue that those sounds arise through interpersonal coupling among the musicians and that the ‘naïve’ temptation to attribute them to a ‘spirit’ or ‘spirits’ can be reconciled with a close description that does not presuppose non-physical entities. Those spirits should be conceived as the embodiment of non-mysterious and physically coherent group process. This argument has ramifications for how we think of time and how we think of longer cycles of group life.

A critical period for acquiring rhythmic feel?

Steven Pinker recently posted a short video about a critical period for learning language. He reports a recent study he participated in that found that, yes, there apparently is a critical period for syntax and semantics, which ends at about 17 (c. 7:43). He went on to note, however, that their online survey could not test for pronunciation and accent. where “we have some reason to believe that the critical window might end earlier” (c. 9:12).

That got me to thinking and I put those thoughts into a note I sent to Pinker.

Hi Steve,

I just watched your little video on critical periods for language acquisition. The bit at the end, about the possibility that the critical period for acquiring accent may end earlier than that for syntax and semantics interests me.

I’ve got a bit of anecdotal evidence that musical rhythm may be subject to a similar critical period. I became interested in jazz at about the onset of puberty. Fortunately my trumpet teacher just happened to be a jazz musician and so he worked with me on jazz. In particular, he wrote out exercises in swing interpretation.

He told me that the hardest thing he ever had to do as a musician was when he was in the service working with musicians who were trained as ‘legit’ musicians – where ‘legit’ was an informal term of art and, for all I know, may still be in use. They simply could not get the hang of jazz rhythm. It wasn’t merely that jazz rhythms cannot be readily notated, but the musicians simply could not get the feel of the rhythm. In particular, swing eluded them.

That problem certainly wasn’t confined to the particular musicians he encountered in the service. It seemed to be a widely recognized problem. It showed up in high school concert band when we had pieces that were supposed to swing. It was difficult for the band to do.

I later found out, through practical experience, that proficiency in jazz did not automatically translate into proficiency in Latin rhythms. And a musician I played with in a rhythm and blues band maintained that RnB musicians could not play rock rhythms idiomatically. My sense is that jazz, rock, RnB, and Latin music are rhythmically closer to one another than any of them is to ‘legit’ music (that is, European concert and military music).

I have no idea whether or not this has been studied. If not, it would be worth looking into.

Best,

Bill B

* * * * *

On the general relationship between music and language, see this recent review, David Temperley, Music and Language, Annu. Rev. Linguist. 2022. 8:153–70, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031220-121126

Abstract: This review presents a highly selective survey of connections between music and language. I begin by considering some fundamental differences between music and language and some nonspecific similarities that may arise out of more general characteristics of human cognition and communication. I then discuss an important, specific interaction between music and language: the connection between linguistic stress and musical meter. Next, I consider several possible connections that have been widely studied but remain controversial: cross-cultural correlations between linguistic and musical rhythm, effects of musical training on linguistic abilities, and connections in cogni- tive processing between music and linguistic syntax. Finally, I discuss some parallels regarding the use of repetition in music and language, which until now has been a little-explored topic.

* * * * *

The first four minutes of the following video are about the difference between the time concepts of classica and jazz musicians:

King Clave | Planet Drum ft. Mickey Hart | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Cognition is Rhythm

This is an extremely interesting video about perception, awareness, and consciousness, though I'll have to do a more than a little bit of reading to make use of this information. One thing surprised me a bit. At the beginning Miller Talks about the clockwork metaphor for understanding the brain. The idea is that there are rigid connections between neurons, which have highly specific sensitivities. This is the kind of thinking that led to the idea of so-called grandmother neurons, neurons that responded only to one's grandmother, or to Bill Clinton, or your dog, a favorite tree, whatever. This idea is easy to understand and that gives it plausibility. The fact that researchers have discovered cortical neurons with very specific sensitivity (e.g. Bill Clinton) lends credence to this idea.

But there is another idea that's been around for a while, and this is where Miller is heading. This idea is that, on the one hand, perceptions of particular objects or actions are distributed over a population of neurons and, correlatively, that any given neuron participates in responding to many different stimuli. It's difficult to get your head around this, but, as I said, the idea's been around for awhile. I discovered it in 1969 in an article Karl Pribram published in December 1969. I soon adopted it.

That was 50 year ago. Now I understand that the idea of distributed representation was hard for people to grasp, and that the clockwork view persisted, but I hadn't realized that is persisted for so long that it is necessary, in 2022, to point out its limitations. So Miller does that early on.

And then he poses a questions: If any given neuron will respond to many different stimuli and many response populations can be active at once, how does the brain get a coherent view of the world? How does one population of neurons win out over the others. His answers: synchronization. He spends the rest of the video exploring that.

This screen shot is from the conclusion:

I'm thinking of top-down control as being setting reference levels in the sense that Bill Powers talks about (Behavior: The Control of Perception). Bottom-up is sensory input. Notice that we're looking a layers in the cortex.

Music and heart beat

Abnormal heart rhythms tend to form simple inter-beat-interval ratios that match music: Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk for ventricular early beats, Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango for atrial fibrillation. https://t.co/67eHu6pTyT

— Scientific American (@sciam) September 18, 2021