Brain mode

I'm listening to this podcast, (Pickup Podcast Ep. #109 Inner Confidence Interview), and I'm understanding more about what people mean when they talk about mind and body... being in the body... and really what you mean when you say hearing the music.

The thing is, they (including you) have an odd way of saying it. You're "right" in a way, however the meaning doesn't always get through to me. Because it's not literally about being in the body... you're always in your body. It's not literally about hearing the music... I'm always hearing the music. But I'm just now putting together what you guys and girls and really meaning to convey.

This is probably the deal:

There are two different brain states. Somehow you can semi-consciously modulate whether your brain is in one state or the other. I say semi-consciously because this is sort of like learning to wink. It's a control that sometimes you don't even have until you investigate it.

State (1) Processing and acting more directly (from sensory information through wired pathways directly into action).

State (2) Acting with high level cognitive intervention, using more recently evolved structures in your brain, like the neocortex, which is powerful cognitively but also fragile and slow compared to the rest.


The trick is switching into (2). And, the reason that people drink alcohol at clubs, is because alcohol tends to shut down the "outermost" recently evolved brain regions first, like the neocortex, leaving others like the stuff that keeps your heart beating running.

Musicians consider state (2) a lot also. Especially, it comes up with jazz musicians, because you want to flip into that state in order to have the kind of response time necessary to play music. You're still being creative, but it's got to come out of the "wiring." No time for the neocortex (unlike a music writer). And when you do turn the neocortex on, the delays there are so long that you can hear them in the playing.

At a club, those delays translate into micro-second-long facial expressions and the like that people will then automatically process.

And this is why those few guys in my classes at highschool who knew how to program computers were the exact same ones on the wall with arms crossed at the dances. Because they have a boatload of neocortex going on but don't typically switch over into the other state. It's also why my romantic interest who was a profession dancer damn near hardly ever made logical sense, because she's going through her whole life in state (2).