No one knows why humans like music; why dopamine floods our brains when we hear certain patterns of sound and tempo. Scientists are conducting research on the subject.
On April 1, 2014, scientists in Jefferson City, Missouri discovered that mice could play the tiny saxophones they manufactured in their labs.
One surprise, for me at least, was to learn that some animals enjoy music. The music should resonate with their heartbeats and play at natural, species-specific pitches and timbres.
It takes effort to create the music animals like. And they won’t pay for it. Even pets—most of them, anyway—don’t self-identify as music lovers.
The Prairie Dog Three are currently on tour in Utah and New Mexico.
As far as I know, only one species take the time to create tools to play music: homo sapiens. But many animals such as gibbons, birds, whales, insects—even the dog next door—make noises that sound suspiciously like music to most people. Research continues.
Music is not something that exists in the universe apart from conscious life. Music seems to require a conscious mind to produce and another more or less semi-conscious mind to hear and appreciate it.
The sensation of pleasure initiated by vibrations of air entering the ear canal is the result of auditory hallucinations created in the mind. Air molecules bounce off structures in the ear to stimulate the brain to manufacture mysterious sensations called sound, which unleash an avalanche of chemical (emotional) reactions inside the body of the listener.
Many parts of the brain are involved in music appreciation. It is known, for example, that the visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory areas of the brain are stimulated by music. Research is ongoing—with special emphasis on definitions of words like olfactory and gustatory.
3D image of a musical sound. The sound doesn’t look at all like what the sound sounds like. …mmm…ahhh…
There seems to be no similarity between the simple vibrations entering the ear and the complex and textured mental experience the brain makes when it processes these vibrations to conjure music. It might be sad for some to learn: when life in the universe comes to its end, it will take music with it.
Thomas Edison placed the phonograph he patented on his head. Thus was invented the world’s first hearing-aid.
Most people did not hear much music before the invention of the phonograph in 1877. What music they heard was played by itinerant flute musicians and the occasional wood-nymph on tambourine.
It took decades for the phonograph to become enough widespread to impact the listening habits of average people. As the technology of music became more sophisticated and pervasive, its mystery and wonder inspired scientists to try to figure out just what the hell is going on!?!.
Simon Cowell stops cotton-candy from dribbling out his ears. Simon’s television career revealed that he is unable to evaluate musical talent.
Current research suggests that as many as 4% of humans do not enjoy music. Whatever the process that is not going on in their heads, it seems to be inherited. Some people simply lack the genetic coding required to process the pleasures of music. If all life mimicked these unfortunates, the concept of music might cease to exist.
Some have said that folks wouldn’t miss it. Music is not necessary for our survival, they say. Humans have lived on Earth for tens-of-thousands of years without any but the most primitive forms.
Grandma when she was young. Note bulky headphones, popular 50 years ago.
That might be. But its irrepressible popularity during the past 50 years in all parts of the world is proof enough. People prefer music. It’s going nowhere.
Here’s some music to help persuade skeptics that music is special:
https://youtu.be/EQ9ftKMWTW4
Billy Lee
Update: 5 July 2016: When Billy Lee wrote this essay two years ago, he was naive; he didn’t know about the dark side of music. Recently he learned that music has been used by intelligence agencies since the 1980s to torture detainees.
Imagine being forced to listen to old sound tracks from the Lawrence Welk Show over and over. It’s a sordid, terrifying prospect. Billy Lee didn’t want to soil his essay by discussing it.
Alex Ross’s article in the 4 July 2016 issue of the New Yorker Magazine ripped open the underbelly of this stinking carcass of evil. Ross titled his essay, The Sounds of Hate.
Since then, links to the essay have been retitled to When Music is Violence. No one at The Pontificator knows why the print version and the Internet version are titled differently.
Billy Lee asked that we provide a link for readers who might want to know more.
I imagine men wrote many books over hundreds, even thousands, of years. The best of these books were collected by other men interested in truth, ethics, and the nature of God.
These men were, I suppose, prominent in law, medicine, politics, philosophy, and religion. They selected books that presented a consistent view of their ideas about Jesus and what he had done. They prayed that God would guide them as they organized their chosen books into a collection, now called the Bible.
We know they believed God answered their prayers, because they included in the Bible this passage: all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness….
By AD 400 Jerome produced a definitive Latin edition of the Bible called the Vulgate, which effectively set the Canon of the New Testament. The Canon of the Old Testament wasn’t fully agreed on until after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.
One notable change: the Book of Sirach (which Jesus quoted) was dropped to make the Protestant Old Testament match the then current Judaic Canon.
In the 13th century, Stephen Langton divided the Bible into chapters. In the 16th century, French printer, Robert Estienne, divided it into verses.
Today, the shepherds of Christianity spend years studying the books of the Bible, their histories and pedigrees. Some believe God has called them to shepherd the faithful by keeping church doctrine consistent with the “inerrant” Scripture of the Bible.
In the two thousand years since the crucifixion of Jesus, the pursuit of inerrancy has led — by some accounts — to the establishment of over forty-thousand Christian denominations.
It seems reasonable to ask: if Scripture is inerrant and plainly written, why so many denominations? Are the large numbers the result of a godly pursuit of “inerrancy” or from other causes? The extraordinary number of denominations — many formed after the Protestant Reformation of 1517 — leads me to think that the natural tendencies of young pastors, chafing under the authority of those with whom they disagree, may play a role.
These leaders seem to share the conviction that God chose them to fight the good fight against false doctrine. They defend their understanding of God’s inerrant word against all comers. Sometimes, it seems to me, they end up increasing their influence but leave weakened churches and damaged denominations in their wake.
I think I know why these men don’t fight and win their battles within the denominations they were called to serve. I imagine it doesn’t occur to them, because they see themselves as protectors of congregants who could be eternally harmed by contact with heretics.
And, in truth, it’s stressful to submit to church authorities with whom they disagree, especially in matters of faith. Some can’t deal with it. The pressure is too great. They find themselves in an uncomfortable cognitive-dissonance between the truth of Scripture as God has revealed it to them and another compelling biblical principle: submission to the authorities established by God Himself.
It’s a psychological double-bind of excruciating pain for those who take seriously their vows to serve Christ. It takes a lot of prayer and the support of the saints to determine God’s will and muster the strength to endure it. These leaders sometimes choose to break away to form new churches — new denominations — where they can better manage their message. And in the end, if the history of the Church is a guide, God is faithful to justify the conscientious men who belong to Him and heal their divides.
Where does this idea about “inerrancy” of Scripture come from, since the Bible was written by men, and gently hides mankind’s many prejudices and ignorant ideas about history and science? If Scripture is inerrant — and I believe it is — its truth must come from God alone. God makes Scripture true, even when human logic, common sense and evidence seem to speak otherwise.
Sometimes God condescends to endow truth to Scripture as a concession to our hard hearts and inabilities to love each other the way we should. Jesus said as much when he replied to the famous question Pharisees asked about an apparent contradiction in the Bible concerning divorce, recorded in Mathew 19. Moses permitted divorce, contrary to God’s original plan, Jesus said, because people’s hearts were hard.
The Bible plainly says we live in a time when the law of God is written on our hearts. The law is no longer written on stone, unless it is our hearts that are made of stone. We know in our hearts — where the law lives — we should love more.
Loving more means, it seems to me, judging less for one thing. We should pray we can love more our spouses, our sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, and especially our neighbors, both gay and straight.
Yes, making safe spaces for gay folks to worship Jesus and to grow in holiness within our churches is a controversial subject these days. But it seems to me that those of us who are straight share with our gay brothers and sisters a life-long desire for sexual sin. That we can better hide our sinful desires gives us no advantages before Christ, our redeemer, because he sees into our hearts and knows we are, by nature, sinful and in rebellion against God — pretty much all the time.
This much we know. Love pleases God more than hate. We should know that tolerance and inclusion please God more than intolerance and exclusion, because the Bible says, God is love.
But those of us who belong to Christ Jesus know more. If we honestly face our past and examine our hearts, we know that God loved us first, before we even knew who He was, while we still numbered ourselves — many of us — among the most ungodly on the earth.
Shouldn’t we love those who are like what we used to be?
Of course, we should. Yes, it’s difficult, because most of us want to forget our pasts and move on. Will we really move on without first rescuing our fallen friends? Some can be found within our churches. Will we abandon them on a battlefield ofdoctrinal purity?
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If might makes right, America is the most righteous nation to ever exist.
Most Americans — if asked before 911 — would say that nothing is wrong with America. America is where everyone wants to be. People risk everything to come here. End of story. And by the way, if you don’t like it, leave.
The attitude of most Americans before September 11, 2001 was to willfully and blissfully ignore the many blunders for which the United States is renowned in the rest of the watching world.
These screw-ups include but are not limited to:
Codifying slavery in our Constitution (Article IV, Sec. 2)Southern States fighting the Civil War to preserve slavery.Conducting genocidal wars against native Americans.Depriving Negroes of their freedom after fighting a bloody civil war to give them their freedom.Permitting our country to slide into a Great Depression while doing almost nothing to fix it. (Free coffee and donuts?)Dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities.Killing 20% of the population during a senseless war in Korea.Allowing gangsters to run our cities.Unleashing a bloodbath of assassinations against politicians and entertainers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.Executing foreign leaders (among them, Che Guevara, pictured above) while launching Bay-of-Pigs style military operations against small countries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile.Conducting a genocidal war in Vietnam — simply to test a new generation of weapons. Jane Fonda, pictured above, was among the first who said it wasn’t right.Exploiting migrant agricultural workers.Overturning sixty years of tax law in the 1980s to allow undemocratic concentrations of wealth.
In 2001 Americans believed these idiocies lay in our past; our distant past. They were symptomatic of nothing; not worth noticing, analyzing or fixing. They had nothing to do with now. Nothing was going on now that we needed to fret about or repair. Like Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, Americans could say, What, me worry?
World Trade Center Twin Towers.
In 2001 the Twin Towers came down. Buried in the rubble lay two-hundred billion dollars of 99.997% pure gold ingot (allegedly recovered).
The oil-rich Bush family‘s first reaction was to take the world to war. The ramp-up was egged on by profiteers, as war always is. And Wall Street insiders, under the cover of the War on Terror, began to deploy contrived financial instruments like bundled sub-primemortgage derivatives (which obfuscated risk) to better suck dry the deep pools of the world’s wealth unaware.
Blunders came fast and furious. By 2008 the leaders of the United States had made so many mistakes they created a financial meltdown. Millions of people lost their homes and jobs. The middle class lost fifty-five percent of its accumulated wealth — much of it in retirement accounts. The situation became dire, causing some people to believe God was punishing the USA for its sins.
Before he made his Nobel Prize winning run for the presidency, Barack Obama’s pastor was Jeremiah Wright. During the early years of Obama’s term, hundreds of retired Chicago police officers set up a perimeter defense around Jeremiah’s church each week to protect congregants from death threats. Obama eventually resigned his membership to protect from harm his friends-in-Christ. It worked. Over the years the threats decreased; the church survived.
People decided to turn around and do the unthinkable: elect the nation’s first black president. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, screamed, the chickens have come home to roost, on all the news shows. Some people thought, maybe Barack Obama can calm down our angry God.
But as of 2014 — six years after the near-fatal financial meltdown — the USA continues to hover on the precipice of a Soviet Union style collapse.
It’s time to ask the question: Is something wrong with America? And maybe one more: Is somethingwrong with Americans?
Before we ask or answer questions like these, perhaps we should ask an even larger question. Is America a place where people have any chance at all to do well over time?
It might be that geography and geology on this side of the globe are not suitable for civilization or sustained human activity. Whoever lives on this side — whatever their values or culture — may, in the long run, not matter.
Historically, large populations of humans have been unable to establish themselves for long periods on our hemisphere.Hurricane Irene, 1999
The Americas have been inhospitable to humankind. Looking back over the eons, a case can be made — due to earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor hits, frequent ice ages, predatory animals, mosquito and insect bred diseases, droughts, floods, wild fires and hurricanes — that large populations of humans have simply not been able to establish themselves on our hemisphere for long periods; nor will they, ever.
This disturbing graphic is one artist’s depiction of volcanic eruptions 100 miles southeast of Yosemite National Park — now a hundred years overdue.
The United States endures, on average, a thousand tornadoes each year. This number is greater than all the tornadoes that occur in the rest of the world added together.
It wasn’t until 1920 that the population in North America reached a hundred million people. It is conceivable — under reasonably imagined scenarios — that the population of North America will soon collapse.
Some geologists believe the mammoth super volcano buried beneath Yellowstone National Park will erupt someday — perhaps soon. If they are right, surviving humans will have to start over.
Coastal shelf off Los Angeles, California
Other geologists believe seismic activity in the west may one day cause the loss of sizable portions of our continental shelf, perhaps precipitating a cataclysmic flood. Earthquakes in the Cascadia subduction zone have wiped-out huge swaths of our Pacific Northwest forty-one times during the past ten-thousand years. The next earthquake/tsunami is a hundred-and seven years overdue.
It is often said California is the eighth largest economy in the world. Should California or the Pacific Northwest slide into the Pacific Ocean, it would be hard for the rest of North America to keep going.
In addition to the deaths of forty million people, intensive seismic activity and floods could destroy California’s four civilian nuclear reactors (one active, but all storing dangerous quantities of radioactive waste) and the military’s nuclear sites, nuclear powered ships, and submarines. High-level radioactive waste would then pollute the Pacific Ocean and our coastal areas for many thousands of years (much like the disaster now unfolding in Fukushima, Japan).
The question of whether our continent is suitable to support an advanced civilization for more than a few hundred years remains to be answered. It’s not clear to me that it can.
But let’s return to the original question: Is something wrong with America?
Why does a country with our values do bad things? Why so much inequality, crime and perversion? Why so much addiction, pervasive drug use, bullying, child abuse, domestic violence and murder?
Why generational wars, gated communities, blighted inner cities, militias, and political extremism? Why concentration of wealth for the few and debt and despair for the many? Why the increase in home schools and private academies in a nation whose founding virtue was public education for every citizen?
Why so much hatred directed against a people whose only crime was hating slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the current hardships of discrimination in hiring, housing, health care, and policing?
Why can’t black people, for example, catch a break after everything they’ve put up with, from lynchings to (for one black man, at least) being ridiculed on national television for mispronouncing correct answers on Jeopardy?
When we ask questions like these, it seems clear (to me at least) that something sinister is wrecking havoc on our dreams and aspirations. Something fundamental about the way we think and problem-solve is not serving us well.
Europeans like to point out that Americans solve problems by selecting and working through all the wrong solutions first. It’s what makes us so sure we’re right, when we finally stumble on the correct solution.
But how about another view? We live in a country where powerful people once owned slaves. Industrial tycoons operated private militias to control restless employees.
We live in a country where an entitled, strong-willed aristocracy has ruled for centuries a population who believes itself to be free; a democracy.
Old habits of thought and action have been handed down from each generation to the next on both sides.
The powerful and wealthy have learned they can hire spokesmen (like Rush Limbaugh and Tom Brokaw, for example) to play on the fears, aspirations, and assumptions of common people to better confuse and seduce them into serving their interests. This manipulation of one class of people by another has led to a schizophrenic dynamic, which is one of the reasons people in other countries and cultures think Americans are crazy.
Possible future if we don’t secure our democracy.
The lunacy will not end anytime soon. It seems our country is determined to follow its aristocracy wherever it leads. History is full of examples of elites who — deluded, depraved, and out of touch — led their civilizations into the abyss. It’s why our ancestors invented democracy — so cliques of wealthy, well-connected power-trippers couldn’t harm us.
Alas, democracy is not a form of government the elites of the world favor. And we may have lost our democracy a long time ago. Perhaps we never had one. We simply imagined we did, because our rulers told us so.
Billy Lee
Post Script — 19 October 2017 — from the EDITORS:Nineteen months after the publication of this essay, Americans elected a self-proclaimed billionaire and entertainer who was unvetted as to his physical and mental health; unvetted as to his financial status; unvetted in his foreign entanglements; and who lacked any experience whatever in the art of politics.
He lost the popular election by eleven million votes to Hillary Clinton (3M votes) and third-party candidates (8M votes).
Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Evan McMullen garnered the lion’s share of third-party voting.
The new president blamed his 11 million vote deficit on illegal voting by immigrants. He is now being investigated by the Justice Department and committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for conspiring with foreign powers to rig the outcome.
He didn’t serve in the military, yet threatens to take America to war against Korea and Iran. Something is wrong with this picture. He is dismantling health-care and unleashing immigration pit-bulls like ICE on a population of young people who have no memory of having ever lived outside the United States.
It seems like an angry, racist pit-bull is loose in the china-shop. Maybe Billy Lee is right. If so, the United States is screwed. It really is. When this nightmare is over, a lot of broken glass is going to be lying around that everyone will somehow have to clean-up.
The good news? America has a way of surviving catastrophes of its own making. We’re good at managing unnatural disasters that we inflict on ourselves. Maybe to some the chances seem this time to be as low as one in a million.
Jim Carey said in the movie Dumb and Dumber, one in a million means we still have a chance. We might survive the mess of a failed presidency. It’s possible. Who knows? Many are ready to sit on the sidelines to “wait and see” what happens.
During WWII, millions boarded trains in Europe to travel to God knows where. What’s the worst that can happen? many thought to themselves as they watched German soldiers with dogs push families into rail cars.
Maybe waiting to see what happens is not the best strategy for survival..
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Note: On Tuesday September 24 2019 the House of Representatives opened an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.
How do I write a confession when I don’t know how to write?
I was tortured. I confessed to everything. As I write I am unsure I will have courage enough to publish. For one thing, the odds seem good I may have actually done some version of the shameful things I confessed.
Shame is a powerful motivator. It drives a person to hide, to cover-up, to deny, to forget. It can induce a form of stress psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The chasm between what I think I am and what my tormentors tell me I am becomes too wide. The personality begins to unravel.
N-no. M-my eye doesn’t itch.
Fear, on the other hand, drives a person to act, to survive, to do whatever it takes to reach safety.
Or it can induce a state of paralysis.
Either way, fear intensifies cognitive dissonance to a level where the accused becomes intolerant. Dissonance becomes painful. The sufferer must find release. One way is to confess — confess and become compliant.
This dynamic works well when a person believes they’ve done wrong, and not well when they don’t. Inducing fear to intensify shame is one thing torturers do. When managed skillfully, guilty people confess their crimes. The innocent don’t — most of the time, anyway.
It’s why torture works. Confessing reduces shame through the cathartic admission of guilt. And it offers the hope of freeing the confessor from further physical discomfort.
If torture is not overly arduous, an accused person has a chance to resist with enough vigor to establish their innocence.
”You stole my contacts,” Wild-Man said.
I’m not going to detail what the authorities did to get me to write a four-page signed confession. But the gist is, they threw a psychotic arrestee into my cell. The first thing he did was grab my shoes and hurl them against the wall. (The authorities had told me to tie them together to use as a pillow.)
Wild-Man accused me of stealing his contact lenses. I looked him in the eyes and told him as carefully and with as much love as I could muster, it was good he came to my area, because now we could look for his contact lenses together.
We spent the next twenty-five minutes on our hands and knees searching every square inch of my tiny cell.
When the authorities realized I had taken control of Wild-Man, they came into the cell and led him away. After a few minutes passed, a uniformed woman brought me a legal pad and asked me to write my confession.
Unsure of what was coming next I sat on the cold floor and started to write. Forty-five minutes later on page three I began spilling my guts; I confessed to everything I thought they thought I did.
Many unnerving things occurred after I “confessed.” As I struggled to sleep, someone slammed a steel door over and again to keep me awake. Someone pumped bone chilling cold into my cell. The air made me shake and induced an arthritic pain from which I suffer to this day.
After a night of no sleep someone served a breakfast of curdled milk and soggy hamburger.
Eventually the authorities released me. I learned then that the city newspaper had published parts of my confession on its editorial page.
I was doing OK, until they fed me bad hamburger.
I decided to fully cooperate with the various authorities who handled me during the following months or years, whatever it was going to be. After pleading guilty, a judge sentenced me to probation and community service.
I worked hard. Case workers reported I was remorseful and repentant. They added, I was cooperative and helpful. During community service the people I worked for reported that I was conscientious. I fixed things that were broken. I looked for novel ways to help the needy people who relied on people in trouble with the law to assist them for no fee.
The authorities expunged my crime from public records. The judge set aside my guilty plea. My torturers assured me that my anonymity would be protected as long as I remained the model citizen that I always was before my arrest.
Best of all, they will confirm that I have not committed even a single crime since. Their modification of my behavior has been a complete success.
