Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

I have a theory very similar to Schmidhuber's theory of creativity: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html

Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict. Music that's too random isn't pleasurable to listen to either. Otherwise you could just listen to white noise. Music seems to teeter in the balance between predictable and random. What could explain that?

The theory is that the brain seeks "novelty" and gets pleasure from it. If your brain tries to predict the next note and fails, synapses adjust slightly and it learns. It gets better at predicting its inputs. Learning these new patterns gives you reward, and encourages you to seek novelty like that in the future. Randomness doesn't cause new learning, neither does predictable patterns you already know.

> Music that is predictable is boring. Or music you've listened to a lot and have learned to predict.

You just haven't learned to pay proper attention. I can listen to the same piece of music over and over and over again and not get bored. I stop usually not because I'm bored of it, but because I've had my fill of that kind of experience at that time. I might return to listening to that piece later. The piece falls into a 'rut' in my head and becomes a platform on which I can have all kinds of related thoughts and experiences.

When I'm of a mind to do so, I might listen to a particular piece of music hundreds of times over the course of a week or two.

Here is an article that describes a similar kind of practice:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-fo...

Just because you can predict what's happening next doesn't make it boring. You just chose to make it boring.

This comment is outrageously pretentious and I respectfully disagree with your ridiculous conclusion.

Hard to accept that you're being respectful when you're calling me pretentious.

Would you mind explaining exactly what you're disagreeing with and why?

I too have this experience and have 2 albums I listen to daily that I find helps me concentrate.

You can make something that has previously been salient become yet more salient by noticing more in it; the two of you are not necessarily disagreeing.

So music is a superstimulus for learning?

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