Musical Intelligence

Musical Intelligence - 22nd January 2006

• Rate at which music is absorbed / assimilated
  
• I tend to get sick of music quickly. I hear it on the radio, most likely in the background to start with. After a while of subconciously absorbing it (and creating or reinforcing neural pathways) I will like it. But I theorise that I have a threshold of the rate of hearing it (and stimulating those same neural pathways) and once that threshold has been breached, the further stimulation 'angers' the neural connections, and the love turns to hate;
  
• The pathways must slowly break down ('decay'), or loose some internal structure, since given a break from hearing that song, I will like it again when heard later. But of course it doesn't take much to start dis-liking the song again;
  
• I build neural pathways quickly - that's the intelligence. The faster they can are built, the more "musical intelligence" one has;
  
• Some people either don't ever start dis-liking a song, or the rate at which they build neural pathways is so slow that they never reach the threshold whilst the song is being played to fucking death on the radio;
  
• Some people don't like much music. The don't have Schemas or Concepts for music and so don't have the structures with which to build neural connections about music, so, not only do they like songs very slowly, but they don't tend to like much music (because it takes so long for the structures to build and they stop hearing the song after some period of time so the structures are never built. Then, due to the decay, when they start hearing the song again it either has no impact since there are no structures in place, or there is a sufficient structure that they do like it.;
  
• Stimulation of pathways is 'exciting', and this is why we like music.;
  
• One day I'll get back to Uni to study Neuropsychology - one of the streams I touched upon when doing 1st year Psych, and the one which i later found out, interested me most, and which I tend to be 'excited' by, and quickly. The question is, why do some neural connections (Concepts or Schemas) form quickly? Perhaps it was influence sometime in the earlier years, but I can't think what that would have been. Perhaps this is the Innate part of intelligence that we are born with - that is, we are born with pre-made Concepts. But not everyone has the same concepts. But perhaps that is what the norm is - the majority of people are born with the same basic structures (Concepts), and then exceptional people are born with different ones (not that I'm necessarily an exceptional person, though I definitely different to most other people).
  

This discussion should be better organised and be carried on at some other time (not 11 on a Sunday night).

23:00

ps. Its my birthday in one hour. 36 - yipee. First gray hairs have started appearing.