The Universal Sense (35 page)

If we could record all the sounds of all the neurons in any given brain, every brain would play a song composed of moments of event-driven and cognition-derived sounds. What better way to think of this ever-changing yet highly personalized waveform than as the mind of the listener? This would be an incredible technological challenge. Practically speaking, you can’t get 100 billion physical electrodes into someone’s brain without converting it from the most complex information-processing system on the planet into a conductive pincushion. But given the rate of progress in biomedical recording and imaging, and scientists’ and engineers’ abilities to play with existing technologies to get even more powerful toys, perhaps it’s not too far off. Conceptually? It’s probably not
the
answer to the question of the mind, but perhaps it’s a useful way to think of new ways of thinking about brain function and the mind.

If we could convert the song of the brain into something we could listen to, could we gain an intuitive sense of what is
working or not working in an individual’s mind? We do a simple version of this in the outside world already, letting us listen to the squealing cries of high-energy proton storms on Jupiter as a lonely spacecraft orbits, capturing the changes in its magnetic fields and replaying them for us to interpret as sounds. Would localized brain damage from a stroke sound like a song played with a section of the orchestra missing? Would we be able to hear early-onset Alzheimer’s creeping up like a slow detuning of the strings in an orchestra? Would some forms of mental illness sound like harmonic distortion? Would a flash of insight sound like the rising chorus from Beethoven’s
Eroica
or the prosodic tune of a voice yelling, “Eureka”?

I wish I knew. I hope I will one day as I keep studying sound.

But it’s something to think about while waiting for the next song to come up on your playlist.

Footnotes

¹
This is not to demean the fabulous array of organisms that create their own light to communicate. For a wonderful overview, I recommend
Aglow in the Dark
by Vincent Pieribone, David F. Gruber, and Sylvia Nasar. It covers the history of bioluminescence in plants, fungi, and invertebrate and vertebrate animals, both natural and genetically modified.

²
Actually, my aging memory was greatly helped by one of the more wondrous resources for someone seeking sound recordings: the Internet Archive, run by an old schoolmate of mine, Brewster Kahle. Brewster’s mission is to archive all the information in all the media in the world, and he has a pretty good start on it. If you want to hear this particular show, it can be found here:
www.archive.org/download/JeanShepherd1965Pt1/
1965_03_24_Pop_Art_Worlds_Fair.mp3.

³
The minus sign (−) before the numbers is based on a convention for describing amplitude based on 0 dB (top) being the loudest sound you hear, with progressively quieter sounds as the peaks get closer to the center line.

⁴
If they were the same distance from you, the cicada’s 90 dB call would probably blow the truck’s acoustic socks off. We’re just used to having 30–40 feet between us and a calling cicada up in a tree.

⁵
Giraffes are supposedly the only animals that do not yawn, according to Dr. Olivier Walusinski.

⁶
The only sounds that do make it through are caused by vibrations of the tub itself, unless you have suspended your radio directly over your bath with the speaker facing directly at the water surface. Then some sound gets through. But it would be easier to just take your head out of the bath.

⁷
Goldfish are among the more beloved subjects for fish hearing studies, due to their ease of care and limited likelihood of eating someone who falls in their bowl, as opposed to the subjects of shark hearing research.

⁸
For a great overview of how weird the intersection of science and sex is, read
Bonk
by Mary Roach. You may need mind bleach after reading it, though.

⁹
I always eventually won, but usually only after being showered with at least a pint of bullfrog pee. To which I am allergic. Score: bullfrog, 1; scientist without Benadryl, 0.

¹⁰
Which will no doubt provide you with a great thing to talk about at parties.

¹¹
I also had to make customized tadpole earmuffs to block the sound but not squeeze their squishy heads. Patent pending.

¹²
For a charming example, see Bruno Bozzetto’s animation
Baby Story
—particularly at about 7:56, when the mother goes dancing.

¹³
The outer ear is also called the pinna, concha, or auricle, depending on your background, age, and degree of pretentiousness.

¹⁴
Although some mammals tend to do this as well.

¹⁵
Not just the military is interested—NASA has funded some of my bat research in the hopes of developing an autonomous flying robot explorer that could make its way through the smoggy skies of Titan.

¹⁶
Bats don’t like Necco wafers, but since the candy gives off echoes about as strong as a dangling mealworm, bat scientists have been using them to try to confuse echolocating bats for about fifty years. I personally don’t know anyone who actually
eats
them.

¹⁷
Lazzaro Spallanzani first postulated in the 1770s that bats navigated by sound, though he used techniques that would not make it through a review committee these days.

¹⁸
Humans are not, as my previously described classroom experiment showed.

¹⁹
Bats do not catch bugs in their mouths. That would be like trying to trap something with your eyelids—it’s going to block your field of view. The insect is usually snagged by a wing or their uropatagium (the tail and membrane around it) and thrown it into their mouth, with the bat often performing an aerial somersault in the process.

²⁰
In my next career, I’m going to figure this one out and live to 240 even if it means a steady diet of mealworms and moths.

²¹
Like James Gorman in his excellent essay “The Man with No Endorphins,” I don’t really like running so much as I like having run. It’s sort of like beating your head against a wall—it just feels so good when you stop.

²²
As a matter of fact, some of the most complete visual connection mappings ever done, courtesy of Professor David Van Essen, look like the New York City subway map on steroids as drawn by Jackson Pollock.

²³
You can be scared by something moving in your peripheral vision, which is more responsive to motion than to form, but as it causes you to redirect your vision onto what startled you, it is much slower than an actual startle response.

²⁴
At least for a while. There are entire psychological disciplines and thousands of books and papers on the strategies to get maximum conditioning to a conditioned response.

²⁵
A friend of mine actually did a thriving pirate car service in killing the voice synthesizer chips in these cars, apparently the most common and most irritating being those in Chrysler LeBarons.

²⁶
But therein lies the potential problem of relying on “universal” emotional associations. There was one student who absolutely shuddered when she heard the cat purr. After class I asked her why she seemed so uncomfortable. She replied that she loathed cats and anything associated with them. Her personal history had changed her response patterns to a sound most others found very agreeable.

²⁷
Unless, of course, they had been previously mugged by a bunch of tough bluebirds.

²⁸
It should be noted, though, that a lot of these databases have their own baggage, since their data, as with most research done on humans, were drawn from American college students who really needed the extra $20 or the extra credit.

²⁹
In fact, for those of you who have never had to take music lessons, musical notation is a series of dots or blocks placed on a vertical scale that represents the sounds in a spatiotemporal pattern, rather like a seismic spectrogram.

³⁰
Schubart’s
Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst
(1806) can be found at several sites on the Web, including
www.gradfree.com/kevin/some_theory_on_musical_keys.htm
. It is in vague agreement with Nigel Tufnel’s claim that “D minor is the saddest key,” although calling it “melancholy womanliness, the spleen and humors brood” is pushing it a bit.

³¹
Especially when playing Nigel Tufnel’s “Lick My Love Pump.”

³²
Just read two psychology papers on the same subject with different authors and you can get a feeling for how hard it is even to get
that
group to agree on anything.

³³
At the neural level, habituation is one of the simplest forms of non-associative learning and can even be observed in organisms without brains.

³⁴
You would be shocked to see how many published studies fail to even check if the subjects have normal hearing. I used to be.

³⁵
I couldn’t find any reports of an increase in prison escapes in Texas following this, which sort of suggests the Mozart effect is not significant in planning the spatial aspects of jailbreaks.

³⁶
Check out the Edison motion pictures collection from 1891 to 1898 at the Internet Archive:
www.archive.org/details/EdisonMotionPicturesCollectionPartOne1891-1898
.

³⁷
There have been ten different scores played with this film, each providing a different emotional basis and take on the story, and often quite specific to the time in which each was created.

³⁸
My tuba-playing friend insisted that tubas don’t play major and minor scales, they play Richter scales.

³⁹
In the lab it was called the “Barry White effect.”

⁴⁰
Pink noise is a form of noise where the amount of energy is equal in each octave, yielding less noise as you go up in frequency. It has a more natural biological sound than white noise, which has a flat power spectrum across all frequencies.

⁴¹
I deliberately omit John Waters’s “Smell-O-Vision.” I suggest you do too.

⁴²
My tendency to stop a video after a particularly cool sound effect, record the effect into a sound capture program, and subject it to spectral, temporal, and phase analyses is one of the reasons my friends don’t like watching videos with me. Except those who do the same thing.

⁴³
There have been several studies carried out on current films that have shown that the loudness in most major theaters is well above suggested levels for being able to hear the next movie you see.

⁴⁴
I was born eleven months before Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight, and I hate the term “baby boomer.”

⁴⁵
Please don’t e-mail me about how the Commodore 64 SID chip rocked. I don’t need to be reminded how old I am.

⁴⁶
Although, like many other gamers, I tend to turn off the music track—there seems to be less attention paid to using composition to carry game flow than there is to making the simulated environment realistic.

⁴⁷
Don’t even get me started about the turrets in
Portal
.

⁴⁸
In current parlance it’s an audio logo. Jingles are now defined as having words.

⁴⁹
The fact that I can still remember all the cigarette ads from the 1960s indicates that the millions of dollars poured into their radio advertising budget was money well spent, at least from a brand recognition standpoint.