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Comment by namenumber | Hacker News Reader

I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my normal waking time).

It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake.

I guess i'll never know.

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I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer trust your sense: are you certain that you actually heard a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just your perception of it?

I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce it.

You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.)

Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself).

So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods.

So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can

Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.

I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.

I've always been jealous of people who could do stuff like talk to "other" people or listen to symphonies in their head. But I just realized: I do all that stuff too, but only when I'm dreaming. The incredible environments, landscapes, and people that come to me in my dreams seem to exist outside my head entirely, because there's simply no way for me to conjure them when I'm awake. It's as if my brain doles out my consciousness only as a tiny, fractional part of its full capabilities. In other words, I am maybe not as much its master as I thought. I wonder if there's a way to unlock that ability in my everyday life.

Sidenote: I can sometimes sort of do it when I'm awake, but only when I'm really, really tired.

Partial tangent, I used to lucid dream a bit when younger. While doing so I felt that the imagery was a lot more colourful and fleshed out than when I would consciously daydream.

Translated to IT terms, I always thought that I had more computing power available while my conscious brain was partially disabled...or perhaps that my conscious brain had a limited information scope (ie. bandwidth) which made it filter out too much extraneous information, making me feel as if I (as a conscious entity) could only experience and be aware of less information at a time than in semi-conscious states.

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