creepingwaves

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Gotta say, I had a pretty good day on Friday the 13th; I'm starting to think those calendar witches are full of shit.

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People Have Always Been People

The complexity of human experience has probably always been roughly similar to our own. And I mean always. Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, and way before that, wandering as tribes on the savanna, interacting with tribes of other hominids like neanderthals. Those people were very much more like us than a lot of people are willing to recognize.

We weren't some proto-human primates when we came out of Africa; when we say that anatomically modern humans have existed for 100,000+ years, that really does mean homo sapiens just like us. Civilized history is just a tiny fraction of it, but every one of those humans over all that time experienced the full suite of fear and pain and joy and sorrow and lust and rage and envy and all of it.

And I mean all of it. Normal goofy ass humans doing goofy human stuff. Adolescents being awkward and horny, dancing a silly dance because it makes them happy and singing a little song to see their friends smile. Sneaking out to do something risky, and making up a web of lies to cover their trail. Spreading gossip they know isn't true. Taking drugs and freaking out. Farting in public (and laughing about people farting). People have been doing all this stuff forever, for as long as we've been human, and we've been human for a long damn time.

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Is dancing synesthesia?

You're aware of the neurological phenomenon called synesthesia, right? It's a blending of different senses, hearing colors or tasting textures, etc. You might be turning a piece of clay on a wheel and hear specific frequencies when you create certain shapes or textures. You might hear specific notes on a piano as specific colors. And different individuals will very likely hear different colors for the same note: one person's bright yellow B-flat might be dark blue for someone else. It seems to vary quite a bit from person to person, even for individuals with similar types of synesthetic overlap.

We're not entirely sure what causes it, but psychedelic drugs and certain brain injuries can sometimes induce these experiences. It also just happens naturally in about 2-4% of humans (which is roughly in line with the percentage for a lot of other neurodivergences btw). If there's a specific genetic marker for synesthetic experience, we haven't found it yet. As far as I can tell from a cursory internet browse, we don't really know the root cause of synesthetic experience, but it offers an interesting avenue of research because it can help us map out a lot of the edge cases of human consciousness: What exactly is happening in our brains when our senses are pushing against their usual boundaries?

What I'm proposing here is that (maybe) a rather large subset of the human population experiences a form of synesthesia when they hear music and then feel the impulse to dance. This kind of synesthesia takes rhythmic auditory inputs and processes them through proprioception (the sensation of the position of your body and limbs, the amount of force you're using when you open a jar, the weirdly intuitive feeling of squeezing through a tight space just barely wide enough to accommodate your body, etc.)

It happens on such a widespread scale that we typically just call this synesthetic experience "having rhythm". Some people can feel the music and naturally move along to the beat, but a big chunk of humanity just doesn't seem to be able to do it. Like, if you can dance or play the drums, then you probably have the mutation that causes the rhythm synesthesia experience. Or maybe the actual mutation is the people who can't feel rhythm?

I'm assuming that it's pretty difficult to get fMRI scans of somebody's brain while they're dancing, but there's probably a ton of research using fMRI scans while people listen to music. Hopefully there are some brilliant neuroscientists out there who can explain to me why my synesthesia theory is completely wrong or point me to some cool research about human perception of rhythm or somesuch. Anyway, thanks for reading, and please be peaceful.