Some years ago, I used to drive between San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area every couple of weeks. It's about an eight hour drive, or at least it was in the Volkswagon bus I had at the time.

Well, one day I got in the bus, turned the key, and a solid blanket of thick black smoke rose on my left, like a window shade being pulled up between me and the driver's side door. I turned the key off, the smoke production ceased, and I stumbled out of the car coughing, gasping, and laughing all at the same time.

On inspection I discovered the power cable to my stereo had shorted somewhere, and had turned into a plastic-coated heating element. Uh oh -- no more stereo until I get around to fixing that.

Being an avid procrastinator, I didn't really worry about it until it was time to drive all the way back to San Diego, and then I didn't have the time to worry about it. So I embarked upon a silent eight hour viewing of grey asphalt with four hundred miles of ETETET written on it in Morse code.

And the time went much more quickly than it had in the past, which was certainly not what I expected.

I've paid much more attention to the role of music ever since, once I realized that the activity I chose instead of music was thinking, which, for me at least, is vastly more entertaining.

Now with this Sudbury thing, I also take special notice of the role of boredom. Because boredom is the emotion that kicks us in the butt and makes us put out effort to make something happen rather than "just getting by".

And with the two together, I watch in quiet horror again and again as people caress the dials of their musical paraphernalia to save themselves the effort of thinking, to give them that feeling of thought which alleviates the boredom created by the empty space their own laziness has created around them.

For me now, music is more often an annoyance than a pleasure, because I've reallocated that part of my brain to other, more interesting things, and when there is music playing I really do feel that part of my brain that I am accustomed to using is missing. And I like my brain. I miss it when it's not all there. That's why I'm not a morning person, after all.

Think about it.

Look for it.

Some more recent dialog on the topic (12/17/2001):

This may have something to do with focus - without music, my mind often wanders. Mind wandering can be a good thing, but not when you are trying to accomplish a set task.

I concur with this distinction. Does depend both on the type of music and the type of problem being worked on. I might propose that, in general, once you get into a generative mode, i.e., where you already have an abstract understanding and are actually cranking out something with a pen, paint brush, or keyboard, then music can both keep the wheels turning and satiate the part of your mind that might get bored and wander off otherwise. My context was in a car, sans paint brush [don't paint and drive], where freeing up the wandering mind proved more beneficial. And my comment more generally is that music seems a hindrance to, and worse yet a substitute for, serious abstract thinking (i.e., not picturing colored swirls in your head, but whole-brain, effortful problem solving).

I wonder how much the rhythm of music emulates physical activity, allowing us that brand of focus when actually doing non-physical tasks? I.e., in the (evolutionary) past, there was abstract thinking and planning, and then physical doing--most any solution requiring considerable physical focus to implement. But more recently, we can "implement" with almost no physical focus...

-Brandyn