Remembering the Future

Anatomy Of A Dance Hit

Last month neuroscientists at Aarhus University in Denmark a study showing that danceable grooves have just the right amount of gaps or breaks in the beats. Your brain wants to fill in those gaps with body movement, says the study's lead author, .

"Gaps in the rhythmic structure, gaps in the sort of underlying beat of the music — that sort of provides us with an opportunity to physically inhabit those gaps and fill in those gaps with our own bodies," she says.

This strangely reminds me of one of the major themes of Terrance Deacon's resent work.
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

Deacon makes the case for absence as the critical factor in the transition from inorganic matter to life and from life to mind. To best illustrate this notion, ideas have no physical attribute yet they have casual power.

See

The development of life and consciousness took the world literally from brute ‘matter to mattering. In this process nothing, according to Deacon, was added to (or subtracted from) ‘the matter, energy, or fundamental physical laws of nature’.

What was novel were the new forms of relational organization of the material and energetic dimensions of the universe in constrained dynamical processes, and constraints are absences conserved as information within bioforms; and these new forms of organization and relation produced a new irreducible kind of cosmic causality with the emergence of ententionality.

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