Imagination Rewarded

Art is about expectation. Pattern established, pattern broken, pattern restored. A music history teacher used to take the needle off the record just before a piece would come back to the home key and say "sing the tonic!" A painter in a neighboring studio came and looked at a piece I was struggling with and said, "You need rhythm here. Think of Beethoven. Simple repetition, within the melody... let's you know where you are, where you're going."

So after listening to John Lehrer on the science of decision making today, I went reading, and came upon this, part of Lehrer's discussion of why science needs art:Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70, 1885,ANTONÍN DVOŘÁK

(from Daniel Levitin, Neuroscientist, McGill University, emphasis mine)

"A particular region in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, Brodmann Area 47, is engaged in trying to figure out what's going to happen next in a sequence of events manifested over time, in spoken language, signed language, music, etc. When expectations are met, these neural circuits are rewarded and reinforced. When expectations are violated, a different part of our brain, the anterior cingulated, becomes activated, focusing our attention on the unexpected sequence. The end of Dvořák's 7th Symphony is a wonderful artistic exploration of the delicate orchestration of neural responses that allows us to feel both surprised and rewarded by clever permutations of what we're accustomed to. We retrieve these perceptions from episodic memory traces the next time we hear a similar piece of music."

Think about that, while you work.