I don't know who first came up with the idea, but this is one of my research areas and I'm not surprised at all by the findings of that the scientists reported in the article. Music has been said to release more endorphins in the brain than sex, and probably more than at any other time in history, music plays an over arching predominate role in our lives.
The observations that it was "a simple song with lots of repetition and an unexpected shift is among the most likely to bedevil you", is interesting because of my research into how synchronous music and visuals affect people. In that case, the more in synch (ie. "simple")but also with unexpected intervals, the piece was, the higher the rate of "repeatability", meaning the more it was remembered and desired to be viewed again.
As for Jahn and Dunne's description for the process, I don't have a problem with that idea as a part of what consciousness does. Clearly though, the brain does seem to store data, to a significant degree, however.
age -----
From: rmiller
To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
Subject: Re: time sampling
Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 22:21:12 -0500
>
> Scientists are interested in why the auditory cortex can act like
> an iPOD. . .<> Seems when
> you hear the music, even in your mind--it takes you back to the
> first time you heard that song. Moooooon Riiiiiiver. . .
>
> Ahem.
> In their book *Margins of Reality* Princeton Researchers Jahn and
> Dunne suggested that consciousness may behave like a quantum wave
> function---the upshot being that memory is not a database or a
> neural lookup table (my words, not theirs) but rather is the result
> of consciousness sampling the past. When I asked Dunne in '95
> where and Jahn came up with such an idea, she replied, in typical
> Dunne fashion, "Seemed like a good idea at the time."
>
> Of course.
>
> When pressed, she thought that the idea actually came from an
> Italian physicist---possibly Flavia Ravelli.
>
> The idea of the brain as a RF receiver has been around a long
> while, but this was the first I'd heard of consciousness as a wave
> function sampling various areas of block space. Anyone happen to
> know the source of this concept?
>
> RMiller
--
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Received on Fri May 27 2005 - 14:22:30 PDT