this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition. (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 6 days ago by Yondoza@sh.itjust.works to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Music is just layered simple patterns and our brains LOVE IT.

Sound is pressure waves, musical notes are a specific pattern of pressure waves. Melodies are repeated musical notes. Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.

Our brains love trying to decode and parse all these overlapping patterns.

Maybe not really a shower thought and more wild speculation.

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[โ€“] folkrav@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Music (and other art forms) happen to trigger our brains to shoot the same happy/sad/etc chemicals other less abstract physical experiences do, for reasons we don't completely understand. I'm utterly confused why being aware of them, or having the curiosity of wanting to learn more about it, is "what's going wrong with society". If anything, curiosity is one of the main things that kickstarted us as a species, and brushing it off to some abstract "deeper layers of human existence" like it was some sorcery we shouldn't dare try to understand would be way more concerning about our state as a society. As for the completeness of this particular theory... I mean, we are on /c/showerthoughts after all.

[โ€“] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It's absolutely worth an entire lifetime of exploration. But dismissing things you can't explain away immediately with chemical processes, as some sort of unknowable sorcery, is exactly why I call it reductive. As far as I'm concerned, maintaining a reverence for the fact that you will never be capable of conclusively explaining such things, because there is vastly more detail involved than even a thousand lifetimes could ever uncover, is necessary if you want to actually begin to learn about what's really happening.