"Worms are the simplest organisms to have a central nervous system, which includes a distinct brain that is connected to groups of neurons organized as nerve cords running along the length of its body. This more complicated nervous system allows worms to exhibit more complex forms of behavior. An anterior brain connected to a nerve cord is the basic design for all organisms with central nervous systems, from the earthworm on the hook to the human on the other end of the fishing rod. But although we can discern a separate brain in worms, it is not the case that the brain is the sole "commander" of the animal that the rest of the nervous system and body obeys. Indeed, even with its brain removed, worms are able to perform many types of behaviors, including locomotion, mating, burrowing, feeding, and even maze learning.(Bullock 1977) " http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/wm/05.html

If a worm is maze learning (and brainless at that) it has to be negotiating its enviroment emotively, so that it has an idea about which direction feels 'good' and which one feels 'bad', and it's also going to need a reliable, and accessible way of storing this feeling as a memory.It appears that even the most basic creatures with their brains removed still have an idea about what's right or wrong!

Sloppy Philosophy

It's sloppy philosophisng I know, but I've been copying and pasting stuff together that I've unearthed online:

Astronomers have assembled the first definitive detection of a background infrared glow across the sky produced by dust warmed by all the stars that have existed since the beginning of time.For scientists, the discovery of this "fossil radiation" is akin to turning out all the lights in a bedroom only to find the walls, floor and ceiling aglow with an eerie luminescence.
http://www.spacetoday.org/DeepSpace/Universe/InfraredGlow.html


Background microwave radiation, a relic of the primordial big bang, invokes concepts of ''supersymmetry'' that attempt to explain ''the never-ending hum of the universal sounding board that permeates the universe,'' as the authors of ''Longing for the Harmonies'' express it.

And on the level of the infinitely small, physicists and astronomers training supersensitive detectors on a water-filled cavern 1,000 feet underground in a Michigan salt mine seek evidence for the decay of protons -a phenomenon that could help confirm the seminal theory of grand unification, which seeks to link all the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic forces of nature. This world of theory and experiment in physics is what Frank Wilczek, a distinguished physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his wife, the freelance writer Betsy Devine, describe in ''Longing for the Harmonies.''
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFD6123CF937A25751C0A96E948260


The present theory of the creation of the universe, the Big Bang Theory states that the universe is expanding. It is expanding in such a way that everything is moving away from everything else.
If you imagine a deflated balloon and you draw lots of dots on this balloon. When you blow the balloon up, the dots get further away from each other. If you imagine that each of these dots is a galaxy, this is what is happening to the universe.

There is another important effect which is matched with this balloon analogy. If you measure the size of the dots when the balloon is blown up the dots are much bigger suggesting that the galaxies are larger, which is true.

This process can be taken to even smaller scales. Imagine looking at a photon of light, which is a wave packet. If you drew this on to an inflated balloon and then blew it up, what happens? The length of the wave increases which means that the wavelength increases, which means that it shifts further to the infra-red side of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This results in all the photons that were released at the time of the last scattering being stretched to the infra-red side of the spectrum.

Back in time to just before the last scattering the gravitational instabilities were fluctuating as they had been for thousands of years before that. Each gravitational instability creates a force around it which means that to get out of the 'potential well' you have to expend energy.

The particles that are in this potential well oscillate as if they were stuck to either end of a spring. The greater the potential well (the more photon-baryon particles there are around them creating a greater gravitational force) the more tightly forced together the 'spring' between them is. This is effectively a sound wave. However, to oscillate in and out the particles need energy and expel energy in the form of photons.
http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/submm/CMB1.html


Pranava means "Cosmic Sound"- Om - the sound that everything in the entire of existence makes if one hears it all at once in totality...

Mystics, when they have cleared their minds of all thought that preoccupies the mind, therefore preventing it from hearing this background hum of the universe, have traditionally indicated that it is beyond recounting, it is an indescribable experience.

They say that the verbalization "Om" comes the closest of all sounds to what this hum of the universe is.

Action is vibration - movement in time/ space/ thought - whatever dimensions or parameters of existence you perceive. Vibration is energy (hence the "prana" in "Pranava" we suspect), Vibration is light, vibration is heat, but for humans our sense perception can most easily see the vibratory nature of energy when it is in the form of sound because our hearing faculities can perceive sound to a frequency slow enough in vibration that we can begin to see (as the rate of vibration slows) it's transition into repeating oscillations of air (for all the dolphins reading this "air" does not apply- please substitute "water", thank you) in the range of vibratory rate of about 20 vibrations per second - where humans perceive the vibrating air transitioning from auditory experience to ( as the vibration is gradually slowed down) to tactile experience.

Stand with loose clothing a few inches from a subwoofer (don't have it too loud at your ears or you may not be able to hear anything externally afterwards) and have an oscillator ( on an analogue sythesizer or ...?) progressively go lower in frequency. When it gets down below 40 HZ it will become less audible but at below 20 HZ you will start to feel you loose clothing (remember that part- good for doing yoga afterwards too!)- move back and forth with the vibrations of the air from the subwoofer This will work only if all the sound system is capable of reproducing sounds this low (be carefully - it takes a lot of amplifier power and speaker capacity even at moderate volumes- much equipment is designed to not reproduce lower than 20 HZ.

So what's the point about sound being vibration?-
Well, if all action is vibration, and vibration in a certain spectrum of vibratory rate is discernable to the human as sound - then everything that exists, everything you do, everything you think - is part of OM. It is the fabric of the play of existence. Understand it (by direct thoughtless perception) and you understand the essence of your being.
http://www.pranava.com/pranava_whatis.html


In the 1970’s, scientists discovered the background radiation left from the big bang, and calculated it’s frequency. The universe, it seems, still reverberates with a note that, when put into our standard system, is between a B and a B flat. In 2003, scientists working with the Chandra x-ray observatory detected the deepest note ever found in the cosmos. It is a B-flat that is 57 or so octaves below piano tuning. I read online that the gyuto monks chant on this note, and a quick trip to youtube confirmed this for me.
http://people.tribe.net/wil/blog/cf6b8efd-9d1d-40a3-bfc1-241ec3187ebb


Each one of billions of nerve cells creates the precise amount of electricity that it uses to transfer its particular code. The nerve cells create the electrical signals that they use by sending sodium and potassium ions in and out of the cell wall at rates varying up to 1000 changes per second.In 1/1000 of a second, the cell changes from a negative charge to a positive charge and then back again. In this way, nerve cells "hum" with electricity.
http://www.creationdesign.org/english/codes.html


There is never any real silence; I think it was John Cage who, when visiting a sound-proofed, anechoic chamber, heard two distinct sounds: the technician later told him that what he had heard were the sound of his blood going round and the electric hum of his own brain.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2001/jan/12/artsfeatures

I visited this article http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/electric.html at Nova Online,Rodolfo Llinas of the New York University School of Medicine talks about the rhythm of electrical oscillations of the brain.

"Llinás: Neurons like one another very much. They respond to one another's messages, so they basically chat all day, like people do in society. "Where can I park?" "How much is it going to cost?" "Am I going to get a ticket?" One set of neurons talks to another set of neurons, and they talk back, so we have a dialogue between different components in the brain. And the dialogue is not between one cell and another cell, but rather between many cells and many other cells. It's like having a huge number of people holding hands, dancing together, making ever-changing circles and organized together in such a way that every cell belongs, at some time, to some circle. It's like a huge square dance. Each dancer belongs to a particular movement at a particular time. "

I love this imagery he has given me of the brain. The interview continues:

"NOVA: And there's music that keeps them all dancing together?

Llinás: Right. It's generated by the neurons themselves. Neurons have an intrinsic rhythm, a bit like a hum. They generate this electrical dance at a given frequency because they have similar rhythms—they hum in unison. But as in the case of choirs and dancing, you can have two groups doing different things at the same time. Now imagine that each group doing something represents an aspect of an external event, like a color. "

And it's this part which really grabbed me :

"Llinás: Imagine I have a little bird on my hand. I can see the bird. I can see its color. I can see its shape. I can hear it sing. I can feel its weight on my hand. It might peck me. All of these things occur simultaneously, so we say that the bird has those properties. But all those properties are put together in different parts of the brain. So one wonders how the brain makes a collage of all these sensory inputs to generate one single precept—the bird—out of all the different sensory systems activated. This is called the binding property. Since we don't know for sure how it works, we call it the binding problem."

I look at the photo of that little golden chick. The 'bird' emerges from my emotive memory. The photo has opened the door to an emotive memory where a collage of all these sensory inputs have turned a key.

A coqui frog is native to Puerto Rico. Just like humans and other animals, a coqui creates sound by blowing air out of its lungs. This thrust of air moves the frog's vocal chords (two pairs of folded tissue in the throat), causing air molecules to vibrate back and forth. Result? A sound wave. The soundwave with the highest amplitude (height) makes the loudest 'ko-kee'. A coqui's vocal chords are primitive. They can't change the sound wave's frequency (number of vibrations per second) since the pitch (how high or low a note sounds) of a noise depends on the frequency of the sound wave. You can listen to a coqui here :http://www.bogartsdaddy.com/coqui.htm
The meaning of each croak is hidden in its rhythm (pattern of beats). The only difference between a distress call and a mating call is the rhythm pattern, or which beats are accented as they call. This tiny little frog has a basic grasp of rhythm which it is using to communicate to the outside world. Understanding how rhythm is percieved by the brain is anything but basic.

Daniel Levitin is the author of the book 'This Is Your Brain On Music'. Levitin explains that memory is connected to the experience of music, that one could venture to say we wouldn't have music at all if we didn't have memory. Levitin's unique contribution to research on music lies in his drawing attention to the importance of the cerebellum in music listening - including tracking the beat and distinguishing familiar from unfamiliar music. These discoveries are consistent with anatomical studies from the 1970s that found direct neural connections between the cerebellum and the hearing organ within the cochlea, which converts sound vibrations into nerve impulses. With memory, our brains formulate schemas, the patterns, organisation and rules of how music goes together. It is anticipation and expectation from schemas that is key to the emotional drive of music. Is music's true motivation centred on playing with the rules and conventions that are inherent to the brain's method of storing and organising sound?

Research performed by Petr Janata using EEG recordings shows nearly identical patterns of activity when subjects hear/percieve music and when they imagine/remember the music. These results suggest that perception entails the activation of a set of inter-connected neurons, causing them to fire in a particular pattern. Brainwaves are measured as frequencies in the unit of Hertz, the number of wave cycles per second. There are four types of brainwaves (or rhythms) that are focused on in EEGs -Alpha (8-11Hz), Beta (12hz and above), Theta (4-7Hz) and Delta (less than 3Hz), and each type can be matched with a certain state of functioning. Several studies, one of which was by Charles Gray of UCDavis and another by David McCormick of Yale U. School of Medicine have shown that the brain has its own internal rhythm. Chatter cells co-ordinate rhythmic firings of millions of cells in bursts around 30-60Hz. Some imagine that these cells link anatomically distant neural structures and are unlikely to have anything to do with musical rhythm - but wouldn't it be fascinating if they did?

Listen To Me

Do you like listening to the sound of your own voice? I know I do. Are you listening now to the voice inside your own head? I'm listening to mine and I'm trying to make a comparison to what it sounds like when I am actually speaking. I can change the pitch at what I think I sound like from high to low quite effectively, and right now I am giving myself a ridiculous comedy voice that's straight out of a helium balloon. Now I'm back trying to find my 'normal' voice, and I have an awkward feeling that the sound of the voice in my head, and the sound I make when I speak are slightly different. I'm feeling around the sounds. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but I'm sure my mind's voice is not as deep as the one with which I speak, and it also seems to contain a lot more clarity. This clarity could be the result of my voice no longer being hampered by my lips, or my inhibitions, or more importantly, my vocal chords.


It's not just our voice we can play around with, but an elaborate array of every sound that we have ever heard. I'm playing a song in my head - 'Dream On' by Robyn, and it sounds nearly as good as it does on the radio. Now I'm introducing a slamming car door during the song, but the song stops every time I do so. Then I'm distracted by the outside world, my mind goes quiet and all I hear is the hum of the computer drive. I'm now back playing the song but this time I'm singing instead of Robyn, which does not quite work because I'm only switching between her voice and the music,and my voice (which sounds a bit like I'm on the telephone) on its own. So then I try other sounds... an old book sliding across a desk... a teaspoon rattling on a saucer...my father's voice....the noise a toothbrush makes as it scrubs my teeth....the slap of a wet fish on concrete... a brass band... well, you get the idea. Is it not also true that for every time we draw on a memory of a sound it is almost always accompanied by an image associated with that sound, and also an emotion? If you play around a bit you will find that we can only ever produce one sound from memory at any one given time, in the same way we can only produce one conscious thought.


When I am absorbed with the voice inside my mind, the hum of the computer disappears... ooop, now it's back, and now I'm switching between the two, back and forth. It's very subtle, but it appears that it is impossible for me to listen to my own voice, and listen to something in my enviroment at the exact same time. Back and forth, back and forth.... flicking the switch between the two, and when I become caught up with a trail of thought which is dragging me along, it's evident that I am being sucked in at an emotive level. For we don't simply produce a memory which in-turn produces an emotion, but rather the memory is emotion. When I think of a sound, some take me to a different time and place, and some don't, but this is a variation on the emotive charge of a memory and not because no emotions are present. I look away from this computer screen to survey the Universe around me. Every item which occupies it is created by me. Some things I have a strong attachment to, like for example my mother, and then some things I have apparently none, such as this pen on the table, but my mind is creating both emotively. My mind is creating everything in my Universe.

A sound wave plays the keyboard of the cochlea to produce noise inside the mind, so what then is taking place when I choose to play a sound from memory? How then does the neocortex gain access, and with such effciency, to what must be the largest store cupboard in the known Universe - the central nervous system?

As Above, So Below

Isn't the ear fascinating? It's an incredible bit of kit. Sound waves go into the ear canal and strike against the eardrum (tympanic membrane) and they start it thrilling or vibrating, just as a guitar string vibrates when you thrum it. These little vibrations are carred across the hollow behind the drum by a chain of bones, known as the ear-bones (called from their shapes , the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup) and passed onto the keyboard of the cochlea.

The cochlea is made up of a long row of tiny little hair cells, laid side by side like the keys of a piano, only there are about 3,000 of them. They are organised tonotopically (by sound frequency) in a coiled , spiral shape, and is how it derives its name cochlea (Greek for 'snail-shell'). It is also called, because it is the deepest or innermost part of the hearing apparatus, the inner-ear. The base of the cochlea responds to high frequency sounds, and the apex responds to low frequency sounds. These inner hair cells are innervated by a rich array of afferent nerve fibers (10-20 fibers per hair cell) that synapse with the auditory division of the vestibulocochlear nerve at the spiral ganglion. The vestibulocochlear nerve (also known as the auditory or acoustic nerve) is the eighth of twelve cranial nerves, and is responsible for transmitting sound and equilibrium (balance) information from the inner ear to the brain. Cranial nerves are nerves that emerge directly from the brain stem in contrast to spinal nerves which emerge from segments of the spinal cord. In short then, by banging on the keys of the cochlea we are blowing noises through the pipes of our minds.

People who have normal hearing actually hear far more than they percieve. Where hearing is a function of the ear, auditory processing (listening) is a function of the brain. Something inside the brain is censoring, and organising what sounds we are conscious of within our enviroment, based on a level of priority for whatever task we are completing. Startle responses are important to survival, and they illustrate how our emotions are directly connected to the auditory system. We might be busy watching the telly but someone leaping into the room screaming will demand our full attention. We can also be selective about what we are conscious of hearing. Whilst in a conversation with someone we might listen to them, or a car in the road, or the voice in our own head.... depending on which one we find the most interesting. We are not tuning in to different sounds taking place outside ourselves, but rather we are turning a dial inside our minds to what is preferential at that particular moment.

Sound is recieved in two ways, via bone conduction (when sound waves hit the body and are transmitted to the vestible) and air conduction (when sound waves pass through the ear canal and are analysed by the cochlea). The vestible can also be stimulated in two ways, either through motor movement or sound. Now I'm borrowing from a web-page on Attention Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder which can be found here....
http://www.listenandlearn.com.au/type/add.htm

I'll quote from it:"Because some children with AD/HD have weak auditory systems and cannot process sound effectively, they might compensate for the vestible's lack of sound stimulation by increased motor activity. Hyperactivity may be a symptom of an under-stimulated vestible."

"There are no tests that can conclusively determine whether a child has AD/HD, but an EEG (Electroencephalogram) can reveal abnormal brainwave patterns. While EEGs can be employed as a diagnostic tool, this technology is not generally used in a diagnosis of AD/HD as there are other guidelines that are simpler and more appropriate [3]. However it can be used in a form of treatment known as EEG Biofeedback/Neurofeedback. EEG Biofeedback is complemented by the Tomatis Method of sound stimulation which retrains the ear to become less dependent on motor activity for vestibular stimulation. It also strengthens the auditory system and enables selective listening so that the child is no longer overwhelmed by auditory information [7]. Other sound stimulation techniques may also be used, such as The Listening Program®, and Neuro Developmental Therapy may also be recommended. "

Then I found an article about lizards which speed up visual displays in noisy motion habitats...
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2124473

The article is referring to the visual display of the anole lizard which communicate using vertical movements of the head, known as head-bobs, and an expandable throat fan or dewlap. These displays are critical for males in the maintenance of territories that overlap those of sexual females. (Stamps 1983) In summary of this article then, they found high levels of background noise (windblown vegetation) produced high speed displays, while males experiencing calmer conditions produced more relaxed displays of lower speed.

Now I realise I am making an awkward shift from auditory systems and kids with AD/HD, to visual systems and anole lizards, but I am struck by an intriguing similarity: both parties increase motor activity to over-compensate background interference. Are the lizards also stimulating the vestible for whatever reason? Where am I going with this? Lord knows.