this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1

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Music is just layered simple patterns and our brains LOVE IT.

Sound is pressure waves, musical notes are a specific pattern of pressure waves. Melodies are repeated musical notes. Songs are repeated melodies following standard structure.

Our brains love trying to decode and parse all these overlapping patterns.

Maybe not really a shower thought and more wild speculation.

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[–] LovableSidekick 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

As a speculation it's really pretty good. Many years ago there was a Scientific American article about why people like music. It was long and complicated but the tl;dr would go something like:

Well-liked music of any genre tends to contain fractal patterns. Doesn't matter if it's jazz, classical, rock or whatever. If you probe our peripheral nervous system you get a lot of white noise, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous system is filtering out the noise and letting the fractal part of our perceptions get through to our brains. This makes it very likely that our thoughts and memories are fractal patterns, which means that on a purely mathematical level there could be similarities between patterns that encode ideas that aren't related by context - for example, when a piece of music makes you think of the ocean, or flying birds, or the big city, it's probably because the music's pattern and the idea's pattern in your head are mathematically similar.