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Lovely sentence this: "[Music can] Create collective effervescence."

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Is there a better feeling than singing with people or listening to music with people or dancing with people? Maybe, but not a lot.

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Okay, so this post touches on several things I’m deeply interested in.

1.) If you want to extricate a song from your head, listening to the last 15 seconds or so can help. It’s thought that the loop is your brain wanting to end the song g but can’t precisely remember how, so hearing it will end it for you.

2.) He is right, it is the best Madonna song. Also, it was co-written by Hoosier phenom, Babyface!

3.) Your stand mixer is leaking oil because the model you have is not rated for bagel dough. I have this knowledge from experience. Repeated strain may have cracked a seal. Mine smells like it’s about to catch fire if I use it for that purpose.

4.) Math and Music are wonderfully similar, and both can be passed genetically. Check out Bach’s formulas. He used a lot of different methods to do it, but his music is FULL of his own name, converted to numbers, then converted to notes. It’s fascinating!

5.) There’s a whole bunch of science suggesting that certain forms of math (geometry in particular) which are genetically intuitive to humans, possibly to help identify food, predators, safe shelter, etc. Brain scans show that being shown a number on a screen (no equations, just a numeral) lights up non-linguistic processing centers. And some people on the more interesting parts of the mental spectrums do this very very intensely. They’re still processing the equations, it’s just happening at a deeper level and *much* faster. It’s like being asked a question and the answer comes to you before the sentence is finished.

Thanks for all the thoughts this morning!

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Wow, you have a lot of thoughts about this. Good to know about the stand mixer. It certainly does not sound happy while it's mixing bagel dough.

Very cool about Bach sneaking his name into music.

What does is it mean to say that math and music can be "passed genetically" or that certain forms of math are "genetically intuitive"? I'm not even sure those two words go together--"genetic" and "intuitive." But also as a sociologist, I get very skeptical every time I read the word "genetic."

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There was a study published about a year ago that suggested mathematical ability can be inherited from your parents. It was done in China and n= ~1200. They weren’t saying that if you were great at calculus your kids would be too, but more like your children would tend towards being able to do simple math easier and faster than kids whose parents weren’t as proficient.

I can send you the study, if you’d like!

The intuitive part is almost certainly less about math and more about pattern and shape recognition that would have been very beneficial to our hairier ancestors, scared of big clouds and such. But then we developed severe anxiety which lead to math, and then we were predisposed to being good at certain things because were really meant to look for cool rocks and eat sweet berries.

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What a delight this is. And I loved the kittens essay. If there is a hell (probably not) and I go there ( probably not) I will divide my time between grading and writing syllabi for all eternity.

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Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Elizabeth! Glad you liked the kittens essay, too. Yes, my hell would involve a combo of grading and committee meetings. Probably a faculty meeting thrown in for good measure, too.

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