Dancing To Music

On the secret sauce

hoto by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

The most important tool in a magician’s toolbox is a premium Spotify subscription.

Not kidding.

If you want to learn to do magic tricks with your brain (or with brains belonging to others), it is absolutely imperative that you develop an appreciation for an extremely wide range of musical genres and artists. There is no better way to get into all the different brain-states you need to do a wide variety of cognitive and body tricks than to listen to different styles of music.

In fact, I’m not sure there’s another way to do it, period. The most efficient way to switch the rate and pattern at which your brainwaves oscillate in real time is being able to jump genres of music to entrain those different states. When I talk about “The Dance,” and “different dances,” that’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s all about brainwave entrainment.

If you’ll look back at my post from the other day entitled Four White Horses, you’ll see I describe an experience of a type that sounds like it must be limited to the fictional character Jason Bourne. It really isn’t. It has to do with a particular state of mind I learned to get into when I was in my twenties.

In the early part of the aughts, I learned martial arts from a physical savant. I would never have presumed to ask The Wolf whether he was on the autism spectrum, but his young son certainly was. ASD runs in families, and it’s comorbid with spatial sequence synesthesia, which The Wolf absolutely had, and which I also have.

To say The Wolf was the perfect teacher for someone like me is to understate the case—having someone with similar neurological architecture teach you a physical task is like a gift from above. The Wolf was, among other things, an obsessive martial artist. Along with a bunch of his equally mad martial arts friends (including, for what it’s worth, a bunch of guys with Ranger tabs and at least one Legionaire), he had conscientiously recreated, from old self-defense manuals, a martial art called Defendu. Defendu was invented by Col. Rex Applegate, who taught it to American and British Special Forces at the OSS’s School of Spies and Assassins, where he was the chief close-combat instructor. During this martial rediscovery, The Wolf also independently determined the same principles that at one point were taught to Navy SEALS as part of their close-combat system, which was called S.C.A.R.S. The Wolf termed the application of those principles “impulsion.”

(Briefly—impulsion is like physical chess. Someone who is good at chess doesn’t predict what his opponent is going to do so much as he ensures only his opponent only has one set of options available to him.)

“Cool story, Rollins,” you may be saying. “But what does all this have to do with music?”

Hold your horses, dickhead. I’m getting there.

A journal article called “The impact of music on the bioelectrical oscillations of the brain” got my attention this morning. I’ve called myself a “gyromancer” in the past, which is a word I got from a remix of a Paul Oakenfold EDM track. It’s only sort of a joke. If necromancy is magic to do with raising the dead, and geomancy is magic to do with the earth, then gyromancy is magic to do with motion. Specifically, to do with dance.

Music absolutely gets people into different brain states. War drums to get soldiers marching in sync, EDM to get everyone at a festival into an ecstatic state where they dance for hours, and Bach and Beethoven for cerebral activity like studying are all well-known applications for specific genres of music.

Professionally speaking, I’m a literary editor. The way I think about language is that it’s modular. You can move words and phrases around, you can move the rhythm of sentences around; you can move any and all components of language around to alter meaning. You can change sense and reference to say the same thing in different social languages, or by clarifying that the actual social language you’re using is not the apparent one using devices like irony, change meaning without significantly changing the words.

I think about everything that way. Language is an equation we use to describe the world. As long as it balances, you can put the components in any order you like.

Language—any language—is a way of expressing concepts, but verbal and written language are also a reliable way to affect emotions. Romance novels exist, for example, because women enjoy a certain kind of emotional manipulation, which is achieved using a certain linguistic palette. If language is modular, why wouldn’t the emotions it evokes be modular in exactly the same way? If you can change the feeling evoked by a phrase by changing the tempo of the sentence, it’s the tempo that’s at issue, not the meaning.

In that case, what do you need language for? If it’s just tempo changes that evoke those emotions, why not cut out the middleman, go upstream and intentionally change your emotional state to one more conducive for performing different tasks, directly, by changing the tempo at which your brain operates? (You can even use the same conceptual toolbox to change other people’s emotional states.)

It occurred to me a long time ago, long before I’d read the scientific literature on the subject, that if I wanted to learn to do a lot of things in a short span of time, I needed to be able to get into the optimal state for learning each thing. I was listening to a lot of Nine Inch Nails, Rollins Band, and Ministry when I was hanging out with The Wolf, and heavy, relentless Industrial music turns out to be the ideal sound and tempo to get your brain into the state where you think in terms of cutting through a knot of hostile actors like a scythe. After all, all the artists I just named were on the soundtrack for The Crow, an action movie that starred Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, the greatest martial artist who ever lived.

Over the years, I took that concept and ran with it. Want to get really good at social? Figure out what the demographic you want to appeal to listens to and really get into that genre. It’ll entrain your brain to oscillate in the same patterns as theirs. You’ll fit in with them naturally, because of course you will—you’ll literally be on the same wavelength.

The problem arose for me when I started coming off benzodiazepines. Benzo withdrawal is brutal in part because one of the effects of benzos is to screw with the way your brain processes gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. Without going into a whole lot of technical detail, GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. It determines when everything from your neurons to your muscles tense and relax. Muck around with it enough and you’ll get seizures. Muck around with it just a little less, though, like, for example, doing drugs that suppress it for three years or so and then tapering off them, and your brain has to relearn how to regulate GABA essentially from scratch. You get to redo your entire psychosocial emotional development from the ground up.

What happens then—especially if you’ve got PTSD, which can cause flashbacks (and which isn’t unlikely, given that benzos are most often prescribed as anti-anxiety drugs)—is that sometimes old oscillation patterns get stuck. In a flashback, even though know you’re not back in a survival situation, you still feel like you are.

When I was in that Mexican restaurant the other day, I was, metaphorically speaking, listening to music that wasn’t playing on the radio. My brain was stuck oscillating in a pattern no one else’s was. It still happens occasionally, though much less often than it did even a few months ago; post-acute withdrawal is a bitch that way.

But I knew how to solve the problem: I got in the car and put on The 1975. After ten minutes of driving fifteen miles over the speed limit with “A Change of Heart” blasting at top volume, I started to feel better. I used the same musical entrainment technique to deliberately force my brainwaves into a state that was different than my flashback—NIN and The 1975 are both EDM-adjacent, but the tempo of each is subtly different and the tone of “A Change of Heart” is rueful, but not upsetting. From there, I changed up the playlist, altering the speed and the tone with every other song until, when I got back to my place, I was listening to the Dave Matthews Band, and I felt fine.

That is the basis for gyromancy. That’s the application of music to do magic.

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