The Science Of Cylons: Music Stops Overthinking, Activates Cylon Entity Inside You
In honor of last Friday's premiere of the new season of BSG, I dug up this creepy study I remembered seeing a few weeks ago: scientists who studied jazz musicians while they were improvising found that while playing music improvisationally, the parts of the musicians brains that monitor performance shut down, while areas responsible for "self-initiated thoughts and behaviors" lit up.
In other words, humming a fragment of a half-remembered tune counts as a perfectly sound way to activate yourself if you are, in fact, a human-form Cylon.
It gets cooler:
... the researchers found that much of the change between improvisation and memorization occurred in the prefrontal cortex, the region of the frontal lobe of the brain that helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. Interestingly, the large portion responsible for monitoring one's performance (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) increases in activity. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, and is very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story. The researchers explain that, just as over-thinking a jump shot can cause a basketball player to fall out of the zone and perform poorly, the suppression of inhibitory, self-monitoring brain mechanisms helps to promote the free flow of novel ideas and impulses. While this brain pattern is unusual, it resembles the pattern seen in people when they are dreaming.
Fun nutshell: while humming a fragment of Bear McCreary's version of All Along the Watchtower, the brain area responsible for your sense of you shuts down, while the part of your brain that narrates stories lights up. (You shut down while your Cylon self rewrites "you.") Since these unusual patterns resemble dreaming, the whole episode takes on a dreamlike, surreal quality, much like the meeting between Tigh, Tyrol, Tory and Anders at the end of Battlestar Galactica Season Three.
If you're not a BSG fan, I must sound like a raving idiot. If you're a BSG fella or lady, however, you understand. The twelve must be united! This is the path.
Study: Musical improvisation shuts down your brain's "overthinking" [Collision Detection]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, In the News on 7 April 2008
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: all along the watchtower, battlestar galactica, cylon, improvisation, music, overthinking
Even Hope wants an iPhone 3G!
OBJECTION!
Tiny, I love you, but you've missed a crucial aspect of the study, which I find frankly surprising, you're usually so spot on.
Improvisation is the key element here. Humming a fragment of a piece of music written by someone else, namely Bear McCreary, (sorry, I'm not familiar with it) activates the memorisation part of the brain. This would be analogous to relating a story that happened to someone else. Humming a song you make up as you go along (this would Tiny's Capriccio Burlesque) would activate the improvisation part of the brain, thus activating the cylon inside you.
So, forget other people, the song that wakens your inner cylon is unique to you, and only you can hum it.
Interestingly, as a performer, much of my preparation is learning how to actively not monitor my performance. Which would also activate the cylon in me…if I were one…which I'm not.
Hyppolytus:
Sustained, but only momentarily:
I thought of this! But since they're only humming a fragment, and only know a *part* of the song, I figure the ambient musical improvisation that surrounds trying to remember more music than one actually knows could be the triggering mechanism - that is, it's the unknown notes they hum around those notes that they *do* know that constitute the activation mechanism. They know a fragment, but it's the creativity inherent in reaching beyond the known that could play such a crucial role in activation.
In fact, it's that frustration we see in Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tory - the frustration of trying to fill in the music they do not know - that agitates them, raises the level of drama for their characters, and ultimately leads them to seek out one another. As they improvise their way, unsuccessfully, around the fragment of the song that they know in an attempt to remember more, they also begin to find each other. So in a sense, you could say they improvise their way to activation.
Of course, the *part* of the song you know may be unique to you, so your inner Cylon can still be unique to you!
That works for me. Sadly, I've never seen battlestar galactica, at least, outside of the really old episodes.