The Pleasure of Pattern | Hacker News Reader

The Pleasure of Pattern

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45 pointszdw11 comments

The neurological basis is quite simple: the brain is a prediction machine, and it's rewarded when it predicts correctly.

This is why music is pleasant - it's highly structured nature is easy to predict, thus rewarding.

This can be further optimized: the "drop" in club music for example, which is anticipated and teased over even longer distance (tens of seconds, even minutes).

The tension between, and variation of, predictable and surprising elements in music are clearly important to it's enjoyability.

But to reduce the pleasure of listening to or playing music to "music is easy to predict therefore it feels good" seems overly simplistic.

Maybe you didn't intend to make that reduction, but your comment comes off that way, to me at least.

> The tension between, and variation of, predictable and surprising elements in music are clearly important to it's enjoyability.

I heard this idea a few times as well and I interpreted it more as being about a piece of music in relation to other pieces in the same genre or simular musically (e.g. harmonically, melodically or rhythmically).

When we talk about popular music I think for the majority people it will be nearly perfectly predictable after hearing a composition a few times. Clearly people enjoy re-listening the tunes they like so I think the point of predictability being enjoyable still stands.

Though I guess the idea about the tension between novelty and predictability applies to many contexts. Another example I clearly understand is that the melody needs to be a bit surprising with respect to the harmony to be interesting and enjoyable. Also the structure of the music seems to revolve around this idea as well - even the popular songs more often than note incorporate intros, solos, bridges, breaks and/or key changes to blend the chorus-verse base pattern.

Can you elaborate in what sense you find it simplistic ?

What I would personally add to that model is that if the music is "too easy" to predict for the brain, there's no challenge hence no reward. But that complements rather than contradict the initial theory.

Awesome post. I’m slowly coming around to a “consciousness is a persistent pattern” view on Philosophy of Mind, and this is a great addendum to that.

More materially;

  I’d also like to see an fMRI to understand the neural activation patterns at such times and see if programming, music, and poker all really have similar physical neurostructures.

This is one of the most exciting parts about the LLM revolution IMO; we’ll finally get some answers on these questions via EEG.

"What is the evolutionary advantage of being able to match abstract patterns?"

This reminds me of something I read about the mind preferring patterns because patterns require less (mental) effort (to perform tasks).

A lifetime or less fit into a single name or phrase, at will unpacked: lighter than air, computed imaginary, applied tangibly.

>What is the evolutionary advantage of being able to match abstract patterns? Assuming it increases evolutionary fitness, what is the cost of it that kept it from becoming universal?

Likely there is a tension between over- and under-fitting, with behavioral and evolutionary tuning always in flux as conditions change.

Relevant Scott Alexander's article : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-canal-papers

> I’ve heard explanations like “music is mathematical and programming is mathematical”, but I was never satisfied with them because they didn’t match my experience

Yes, it probably did match the author's experience. Mathematics is the study of pattern. But he probably did not realize that.

He probably had bad math teachers.

I think it's just the barrier is quite high for math. You need to be reasonably good technically before you even get a chance to see the forest for the trees.

And then you need to look from the right angle. That might come from within or from having talented teachers.

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