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don't you just love deja vu -- the sense that you've seen the world before, spinning back upon itself and unfolding like a place you've known, a memory you've had your whole life? i had this theory awhile back -- maybe i've already told you about it -- but it was when i was reading "einstein's dreams", thinking on relativity, time, the order of all things -- when it dawned on me that maybe the real reality is not that we're learning, getting to know one another more and more every day, but that we're remembering. plain and simple. so you and me, when we sit down across a table and divulge our deepest secrets and one of us has this moment where something clicks and we think "aha," that is not a path being created anew in the brain; it is an uncovering of an old path, an instant where we say, "oh right -- *there* you are."
saw girl talk the other night. it was a mystery to me -- how connected people were to the music, what it was doing to them -- all the 2-20 second clips of all the greatest feel-good hits from the past 30 or 40 years and all the girls and boys going totally wild for every new taste of an old hook. the mash-up magic wasn't exactly grabbing me. i was, however, totally taken by how taken everyone else was with it. people were sweating and just plain losing their minds. but what was it they loved? i wanted to know so badly.
the next morning i found this MIT article (through speculation that perhaps dj earworm and girl talk were really one person and we were all just pawns in their/his great hoax -- http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/21843/?a=f) about the technology of mash-ups, a sort of surface scrub of the science of how-to-make-a-mash-up. i read it and wanted to know more about the psychology, the physiology of what's happening in the brain when you're listening to a mash-up, and to girl talk's frenetically-paced, everything-in-the-pot-at-once mash-ups in particular. i haven't read anything (then again i haven't looked too hard), but here's my own personal theory:
every time a new song (melody, guitar riff, lyric, beat) jumps out of the girl talk mash-up soup, your brain lights up a little bit. the recognition of journey's "don't stop believing" lights up the place in your brain where you've stored that song. then, in the next instant, more spots on your brain light up -- all the places where you've stored the memories of where you first heard that song, who you were with, every emotional memory is tangentially tied up there, too: more lights. and before you have a chance to wallow in that moment or move on to something else, the next song (melody, guitar riff, lyric, beat) jumps out and a new spot on your brain lights up -- and all the spots connected to that first memory fire, too. and because all of this is happening at once, your brain is arcing connections between places that have never been connected before: journey spools out of the car speakers on that college road trip through virginia while beyonce shakes her stuff on saturday night live in your living room last fall while your discover your mom's elton john 45s in the 80's and simultaneously watch that scene from "almost famous" and dance to run-d.m.c. in a dark, sweaty-palmed gymnasium of a middle school dance. add more and more clips of songs -- you can do the math. it's an exponentially sparking lightning fire and pretty soon your whole brain is lit up like fireworks.
if you unlock a slew of memories and don't give your brain time to process them and turn them into new ones (memories, that is), my guess is that your brain is tricked into an excited state of all-time-at-once: the past is the present is the future is now. and the end result is a sort of music-induced ecstasy. it's a well-crafted upper -- a drug that enters your blood through your ears.
that's my theory about girl talk anyway. i'm off to read musicophilia. oliver sacks should take a stab at this. he's probably more qualified than me to talk about brains and beats and past and present tenses and how they all fit together. i'd sure love to run into him at a girl talk show anyway.
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9:13 PM
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