I'm Just Rollin' Off To Sleep, Doin' Some Bloggin', Sippin' On Thin-ned Juice


As my title would suggest, I'm struggling to keep my eyelids open. I ran across Miguel's post and grudgingly realized that I couldn't go to sleep with that last post sitting there with it's tongue hanging out like a brain-damaged marmot.

I'm also drinking some orange juice that I watered down with, um, water. Wow, I am tired. It's a refreshing concoction that Sibbitt introduced to me the moonless night he, Donovan, and I decided that it would be a great idea to duct-tape flashlights to some mountain bikes and hit the trails along South Mountain.

It was good times.

That wasn't what I was going to talk about, though. Oh, yeah. I was listening to National Public Radio (NPR) on my way home. I casually listened to a segment about listening to yeast cells. The following is part of what I heard:

"UCLA scientist James Gimzewski positioned a sensitive instrument called an atomic force microscope over a cell to try to detect its motion. To his surprise, the microscope picked up regular vibrations. His team then looked for a program that would could convert the data into a sound file. Gimzewski thinks what they hear is the sound of tiny molecular motors inside the cell, moving things around. The researcher likened it to sitting outside a living factory, and listening to the wall. When they changed the temperature, the sound would speed up or slow down, as if the cells were running faster or slower" (NPR, August 2004, http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3859762).

Presumably, this technology could be helpful in detecting, say, pre-cancerous cells. Hey, I'm for that.

The scientist went on to hypothesize that the sounds could also be a method of communication for the cells. Communication...of cells.

A gear in my head slowly began to turn, shedding flakes of rust...

Music is hailed as a mysterious force; a force on par with such concepts as love and art, with the unnerving ability to influence our mood, thoughts, and behavior. I briefly touched on this a while ago, likening a dance club to boiling a pot of water.

I remember brushing up on Ayn Rand and discovering that there was one topic that caused her to balk: Music. She admitted that she could not satisfactorily explain why music seemed to have an intrinsic (and I think she actually used "intrinsic") ability to stir such intense feeling.

She isn't the only philosopher that has tackled the problem, but I can't think of one that has ever succeeded.

I had accepted that I didn't understand this quality of music either. My best theory was that emotional responses to music were conditioned, even though I knew it didn't explain listening to responses illicited by music of other cultures with radically different, um, music theories(?) (I don't know much about musical terms or theory, but I know that there is usually a dominant...groundwork on which the music of a culture is built upon.)

My conditioned theory didn't satisfactorily explain hearing entirely new sounds made by entirely new instruments (i.e., Radiohead). Eh, I'm saying "satisfactorily" because it may be that the new sounds are reminsiscent enough of the old sounds to which we've already attached an emotional response, but I'm not convinced.

I feel as if I'm trying to explain more than I can chew. Hmm...

I know of a story that describes the universe and the whole of existence as a vast musical composition. An eternal orchestra; a celestial symphony. Anyway, Satan existed as a part of this universe. He was a musical note, just like everything else. He wasn't bad and he wasn't good; he was a note. But what he was doing was sounding when he wasn't supposed to; essentially playing the right note at the wrong time to create chaos and dischord.

It's a story that makes a lot of sense to me. Time is a measure of relative movement. Our vision is sensing the movement of light.

We hear sound. Sound is a vibration; a series of movements that specialized structures in our ears pick up.

From my own experience, from what I've been told, what I've read, from what I've put together, and from observing the experiences of others, I've decided that sounds, music especially, can and do invoke profound emotional responses.

Slow, deep, foreboding drums, or the mournful wail of bagpipes, for example.

Back to the article: If cells are indeed communicating through these vibrations, these sounds, then that means (obviously) that sound is a form of cellular communication.

Cells, the building blocks of our entire bodies, are microscopic sound receivers.

The gears begin to turn a little more quickly...

Plants that grow better when they are played music. The hearbeat rhythm in Shakespeare, the stress-unstressed meter. A heartbeat rhythm that is also in the most popular classical music. The vibratto sung by opera singers that is hailed as "stimulating." Soothing lullabies that hush children. Rock music that sways hips.

We could very well be responding on a cellular level that we are unaware of. What if all this time, music hasn't only been hooked up to emotional memories like boxcars behind a locomotive?

What if these vibrations are literally an unseen hand reaching into our minds and flipping a cell-sized switch to turn on happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or hunger?

Well, probably not hunger.

Is music the universal language of all cellular organisms, a language that existed long before the Tower of Babel divided people forever. Is music the only language that still binds us, simply because it works so subtly that it escaped even the notice of God, so to speak? Subtle enough to elude Man until this very moment?

This idea is not new, I've just been told. Noam Chomsky had a similar theory.

I didn't think this idea was new. Hell, I think we've all had an inkling of it.

What I'm excited about is that now we have the technology to measure cellular response to sound. With this science, this system of testing and understanding to gather and share information, we may be able to unlock an entire universe of communication.

Imagine the possibilities. One day, a musician struggling to express to an audience the resulting emotion from losing everyone they love due to an addiction to heroin may be bent over a desk, pencil in hand, not writing notes but doing the math.

A suffering mother in a foreign land, her child killed by bombing, may be able to e-mail a sound file that, when heard, will cause a president to sink to the ground, bury their face in their hands and ask in a hoarse whisper "What have I done? What have I done?"

Then there's always the dark side to consider. Technology that can control your feelings? Emotion control? Well, I'd say we already have very similar mechanisms in place. Think about how many times in a given day that you are made to feel guilty, whether or not you deserve to be. Think about how many times you are made to feel afraid. Think about how many times you are made not to worry.

There is one solution.

We'll have to learn to distinguish between what we feel and what we're being made to feel. Sort of like what I recommend everyone do now: distinguish between what you think and what you're being made to think.

Yeah, I know. Hey, nobody said this was going to be easy.

Hmm...a society where the people are controlled, placated, rewarded, and even incited to violence using technology based on sounds that control cellular communication. The rag-tag group of rebels that gets wise, do something needlessly symbolic like burst out their own eardrums, and then start a silent revolution.

There could be a science fiction novel in this...

Until then, I say pump up the volume.

On NPR, of course.

[Note: It's incredibly late, I'm tired, due to the virus my spell-check doesn't work, I still haven't found the logic-check, and half-way through this post I ran out to the bar to meet my friend Amy whom I haven't seen in a couple of years.

The pointing out of my errors will be much appreciated.]