Music for the soul
(extra: Celery Soup recipe)
Here are some snippets from a December 19, 2024 article in Scientific American is titled: “The Unbelievable Slowness of Thinking,” by Rachel Nuwer.
"The brain is sometimes called the most complex machine in the known universe. But the thoughts that it outputs putter along at a trifling 10 bits per second, the pace of a conversation."
“Nature, it seems, has built a speed limit into our conscious thoughts, and no amount of neural engineering may be able to bypass it,” Zador says. “Why? We really don’t know, but it’s likely the result of our evolutionary history.”
Nicole Rust, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who also was not involved in the research, says the new study could reshape how neuroscientists approach some of their work.
“Why can our peripheral nervous system process thousands of items in parallel, but we can only do one thing at a time?” she says. “Any theory of the brain that seeks to account for all the fascinating things we can do, like planning and problem solving, will have to account for this paradox.”
This SciAm article is adapted from: http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00808-0
I don’t see any paradox, just a misunderstanding. You have to separate the things that the brain on its own can accomplish from its methods to communicate with others in language mode. Putting our thoughts into language form requires filtering and aligning them into the speech-processing channel, which is the 10 bits per second data stream. Is that the only method of communication? Certainly not!
Check out these music videos - I’m seeing massively higher data flow rates here than 10 bits per second!
Chloe Chua, Mozart Violin Concerto #5
Yuja Wang, Rachmaninov Piano Concerto #3 in D minor.
Most of these performances are from memory. I would love to pull up a tiny chair in one of those brains to watch the data flow!
Christmas Organ Concert 2024, Johnathan Scott at Rochdale Town Hall. Now pay attention to the final ~15 minutes. Johnathan, is playing the organ with both hands and both feet, yet does another trick - he is playing a different tune with each hand, and the audience must guess the names of the two tunes, twelve pairs of them. Does this look like 10 bits per second?
These performances are a witness to the differences in processing abilities of people with musical training compared to those who only learned to read and write (or not even those accomplishments).
On one of her posts, Laura from www.normalisland.co.uk mentions the “lost souls.” So what can you do with people in such dire straits? The usual approach is to put them into rehabilitation programs to break their cycle of addiction, then assume they just walk away and get back to a normal life. Wrong approach, they might be in a mental state of pre-school children and need a group approach including simple musical training, perhaps learning recorders, or whatever else is available. It is the small “l” liberal system of “individualism” which imposes isolation in this society and you rescue people from that with group activity. Music and soul are intertwined; lost souls have no sound-track to their lives, so if you wish to bring back life, bring in music.
Best-ever Cream of Celery Soup
This should be a new canned soup, it's that good!
Preparation time, 20 minutes; Cooking time, 60 minutes. Serves 2
You don't have to measure these ingredients, make it as you wish! First I sliced up some cheese smokeys thinly and cut the slices in half. Then in a 4-qt soup kettle, I fried these in butter with half a minced onion, with some salt, pepper and some dried Italian herb mix. Then I added a full litre of chicken stock and two diced carrots and two thinly-sliced (strong-tasting) celery stalks having first pulled the veins out (I know, ouch, brutal), and a thinly-sliced hot pepper. Allow this to simmer around 45 minutes. Then I added some thawed and cut-small frozen green beans to cook another 15 minutes. I finished with more water added along with some corn starch, 10% cream, a tiny bit of sherry and about 170 g of fresh egg fettuccini noodles.
Enjoy!