Too much music...in my head

As a little addendum to my Too much music entry, here’s what happened on the tram yesterday morning. I was wired for sound as usual when, a few stops into the journey, a distant acquaintance got on and made eye contact. I immediately unplugged my ears, and we exchanged greetings and brief small-talk about how late we were both running. The conversation rapidly petered out, and he started playing with his phone; I didn’t want to force it, especially in what was a foreign language for him, but I felt it rude to definitively turn my back and re-plug. So I left him with the option of talking further if he so desired – in my experience, some people like to practice their English when the opportunity arises – and contented myself with mental musings in the meantime.

As it happened, nothing more was said until our leave-taking as we descended from the tram. It was only then that I realized that the music I had been listening to previously was still playing – in my head. A part of the chorus, at least, was spinning round around in my mental audio machine, rather like the way snippets of songs do on restless nights when my brain is too active to sleep.

So I tried an experiment; I deliberately made the mental switch to one of my habitual tram-stop-to-office tunes (as detailed in Too much music). With very little conscious effort on my part, the song proceeded to play to the virtual ears of my brain, relatively complete in structure and texture. It was quite remarkable.

This set me thinking; perhaps this current cultural glut of wiring and memory space, as discussed in Technology in my pocket, is just a temporary stage in human evolution, a stepping stone to help train us to access and utilize the 90% or whatever of our brain capacity that is currently redundant (or is that an urban myth?). Then we will be using our own multi-GB memory space, and be able to render visual and aural mental images so vivid and accurate that external play-back equipment will be redundant.

Or, rather more likely, exercise of my over-exposed musical memory is pushing other, more functional stuff out of my head, like pin numbers and to-do lists. Oh well – at least I know I shan't be too bothered when the iPod battery is flat.