Road Safety Hazard?

Our property backs onto a narrow lane. It’s an interesting lane, because it was part of an old rope factory – down the centre of the lane is a gutter in which the separate strands that would make up the rope were laid to be wet while being twisted into the final rope.

That was almost completely immaterial to my point. Young people with large sound systems in their vehicles frequently stop in the lane, the bodywork of the modified Japanese used  imports pulsating with the internal sound pressure. I have no idea how a person can drive when their sense of hearing is in a state of distressed overload. You may have heard the phrase, “I can’t hear myself think.” I’m not sure that total auditory isolation from the outside world is a great idea for a driver either.

That too was mostly a digression.

What has struck me is the prevalence of entrainment-grade delta stimulus in the most powerful of the low-frequency beats in the music that seems to appeal to people who drive modified Japanese used imports. Every piece of AVS/entrainment hardware, software or content comes with cautions and disclaimers about use while driving or operating machinery. Sleep/deep meditation seem sub-optimal states for driving. An already slow teenager (prior to 21 myelination of the neurons is not complete, and most neural electrical transmission is as slow as one-third the speed it will be in a mature, properly myelinated brain), who may well also be suffering from ADHD or depression (typically aggravated by theta/delta stimulus) is going to be further incapacitated by elevated delta activity.

Irrespective of the energy of the rest of a composition, in a complex session, the most insistent slow beat will eventually dominate the experience. Certain types of conventional music clearly fall within the scope of my idea of a “complex session” – a deliberate engineering of physiological and psychological stimuli.

Cheers,
Craig

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