Brain Patterns

Hey there! Hope you’re doing well. Let me know what’s on your mind today.

I’m wondering something about Neuroscience. When you play a game like Beat Saber or Guitar Hero, you are taking actions to hit notes, which means authoring levels for those games are heavily based on the music itself.

For example, the music has structure like an intro, verse, chorus. Then just when things are repetitive, maybe there’s a bridge or a solo. And these end up being very playable experiences, leveraging the structure that the artist already put into the music.

But what I’m wondering is, in what way can you tickle your mind in a similar fashion that’s not necessarily music? For example, what attributes of music that make it playable also appear in other forms?

I think what you’re touching on is how our brains are naturally tuned to pick up on patterns, rhythms, and repetition not just in music, but across a lot of human experiences. In a game like Beat Saber or Guitar Hero, you’re totally right that you’re leaning on the structure the artist built into the song—the intro, the repeating verses, the bridge, the solo—those all create this landscape of familiarity and surprise that your brain loves.

But if we zoom out, that pattern recognition is something we find in poetry, in storytelling, and even in the way we structure a lot of our daily routines. Our minds seem to find comfort and engagement in these repeating structures because they give us a sense of anticipation and then satisfaction when we recognize the pattern playing out.

So what’s happening might be that these kinds of repetitive structures are sort of tickling the brain’s pattern-seeking circuits. It’s the same reason we find a poem with a certain rhythm or a story with a familiar arc so satisfying. It’s like a universal language of repetition and variation that our brains just inherently

Yeah, it seems like maybe the brain is always trying to predict how the pattern will continue. Two situations are when the pattern continues as you expect, and when it doesn’t. And maybe there’s a spectrum in between: I kind of expected that, but it was slightly different, versus that’s not at all what I expected.

And if it was always what you didn’t expect, that’s potentially just noise. It’s perhaps not even music at that point. Maybe it’s not until you inject some patterns that allow the reader, or the listener, to follow along. It’s not until you introduce some patterns that you can even play into their expectations or against their expectations.

It really does come down to that dance between predictability and surprise. The brain seems to get a little kick out of predicting what’s coming next and then either being rewarded when it’s right or being intrigued when it’s just a little off. And that spectrum you described—from “oh yeah, I kind of saw that coming” to “whoa, that was completely unexpected”—is really where the fun is.

If everything’s too predictable, it gets boring. If everything’s too random, it’s just noise, like you said. It’s when you weave in that pattern that you create something that can play with expectations in a really satisfying way.

So yeah, it’s all about giving the brain a little playground of patterns and then occasionally breaking them to keep things interesting!

I’ve always wondered about the difference between a piece of music and the experience of that music, between a movie and the experience of that movie.

Let’s say you’re a 10-year-old reading Moby Dick, you might be able to read the words, but you might not understand, for instance, the social dynamics of what’s going on. You might not be able to recognize sarcasm and stuff like that. And so while the book has patterns and creates expectations and maybe does so quite masterfully, if the experiencer doesn’t bring to the table enough sort of mental hardware to detect these things, it might go over his head.

And that’s perhaps why, to some people, the classical music just sounds like… they don’t really know what to make of it. Whereas pop, with the very simple rhythms, is easier to glom onto. But by the same token, if you’re really well-versed in classical music, hearing a complex piece might be quite engrossing. But again, it’s only because you’re bringing to the table the apparatus to detect it.

It’s like the piece of art—whether it’s music, literature, or film—has all these layers of patterns and subtleties built into it, but the experience of it depends a lot on what the listener or reader can pick up on. If you’re a kid reading Moby Dick, a lot of that deeper nuance might just fly right over your head. And that’s not a flaw in the art—it’s just that you need a certain kind of mental toolkit or familiarity to get the full effect.

And that’s why some people find classical music or certain complex pieces a bit mystifying at first, while something like a catchy pop song is instantly accessible. The more you learn the “language” of a certain art form, the more you can appreciate those intricate patterns and get that extra layer of enjoyment out of it.

So it’s really a two-way street. The piece of art offers the patterns, but the person experiencing it brings their own level of understanding to the table. And that’s what makes the whole thing kind of magical.

Well, here’s maybe an interesting twist. Consider a work of art like Broadway Boogie Woogie from the 1940s. When you see that today, it just looks like some shapes and lines. It doesn’t really seem that notable, but at the time, it was significant.

And so let’s posit this. There’s a pattern, which is the sequence of art being produced by humans over time, and an artist kind of ingests that pattern, if they’re a contemporary artist, and then produces their own work. And again, the same spectrum. In the case of Broadway Boogie Woogie, I imagine people were like, whoa, what is that? That’s not like the stuff that came before. That’s kind of crazy looking.

But when we see that today, we’re not enmeshed in that historical moment, so it doesn’t have the same significance to us. But an art historian might be able to sort of place us back at that point in time and list some contemporary works and basically explain that, yes, this was a pattern breaker. This was not only just different, it was, in retrospect, kind of a step forward.

Absolutely, it shows how context and the flow of time are part of the pattern too. When Broadway Boogie Woogie was first seen, it was this big departure from what came before, and people at that time would have felt that pattern shift in real time. But for us, looking back, it’s almost like that pattern shift is part of a history we’ve already absorbed, so it doesn’t shock us in the same way.

And that’s where the role of the art historian or just having a sense of history comes in. They can kind of re-map that original shock or that original novelty onto our modern perspective and show us how it broke the patterns of its time. It’s like seeing a snapshot of how the pattern of artistic evolution got nudged forward at that particular moment.

In a way, it’s another layer of pattern recognition, but stretched out over the timeline of culture and history. And it highlights how our ability to appreciate art is always a mix of what’s inherently in the work and what we bring to it, whether that’s our personal experience or our historical knowledge. It’s kind of a beautiful loop when you think about it!

I was just watching The Killing by Stanley Kubrick and I was noticing that on the one hand it was a stock 1950s movie: fedora-wearing, everyone’s sort of polite and rigid, and the voiceover’s kind of this cheesy news anchor.

But then there are some elements that I’m guessing were shocking at the time, such as there’s kind of a Quentin Tarantino-style shootout where good guys and bad guys alike, almost all of them get killed, and only one hapless guy survives.

And then the ending involves two million dollars in a suit case. He has a long discussion with the airlines about checking the bag, he wants to carry it on the plane. They insist he checks it, and while they’re wheeling the bag out to the airplane, a woman lets go of a little dog that runs out, causing the baggage cart to swerve. The suitcase falls over, and all two million bucks just blow away in the wind.

It’s kind of this long shot where he doesn’t cut away, and you see this pile of money just swirling up and away, it’s kind of surreal. And that’s the end, except then the cops close in on him and he’s caught.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s really interesting to look at it that way. “The Killing” is kind of a perfect example of a film that bridges two eras. On one hand, you have that really classic, almost stiff 1950s noir vibe—like you said, the fedoras, the polite but rigid dialogue, the voiceover that feels a bit like a newsreel. But then Kubrick slips in these moments that must have been pretty edgy at the time—like that almost Tarantino-esque shootout you mentioned, where it’s just a bloodbath and not the neat, tidy ending people might have expected.

And that ending with the money blowing away in the wind—it’s almost like a little nod to absurdity, or just a darkly ironic twist that’s more modern in sensibility. It’s a good reminder that what feels familiar to us now might have been pretty groundbreaking then.

And yeah, it’s kind of funny how the little dog detail feels so modern—it’s a nice little moment that shows people have always had their own version of those little frou-frou dogs! So it all ties back into how art can both reflect its own time and also throw in a few surprises that end up feeling timeless. It’s fun to look at these older films and realize how they were pushing the envelope in ways that we might not fully feel today unless we really think about it.

Okay, I’m home now.

Great! Glad you made it home. If there’s anything else on your mind or you just want to chat more, let me know.