Sentic Significance

Theories about children need not apply to adults because (I suspect) human minds do so much self-revising that things can get detached from their origins. We might end up liking both The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering, mainly because each work's subject illuminates the other, which gives each work a richer network of "significance." Dependent circularity need be no paradox here, for in thinking (unlike logic) two things can support each other in midair. To be sure, such autonomy is precarious; once detached from origins, might one not drift strangely awry? Indeed so, and many people seem quite mad to one another.

In his book Sentics [l978], the pianist-physiologist Manfred Clynes describes certain specific temporal sensory patterns and claims that each is associated with a certain common emotional state. For example, in his experiments, two particular patterns that gently rise and fall are said to suggest states of love and reverence; two others (more abrupt) signify anger and hate. He claims that these and other patterns–he calls them 'sentic'–arouse the same effects through different senses–that is, embodied as acoustical intensity, or pitch, or tactile pressure, or even visual motion–and that this is cross-cultural. The time lengths of these sentic shapes, on the order of 1 sec, could correspond to parts of musical phrases.

Clynes studied the "muscular" details of instrumental performances with this in view, and concluded that music can engage emotions through these sentic signals. Of course, more experiments are needed to verify that such signals really have the reported effects. Nevertheless, I would expect to find something of the sort for quite a different reason: namely, to serve in the early social development of children. Sentic signals (if they exist) would be quite useful in helping infants to learn about themselves and others.

All learning theories require brains to somehow impose "values" implicit or explicit in the choice of what to learn to do. Most such theories say that certain special signals, called reinforcers, are involved in this. For certain goals it should suffice to use some simple, "primary" physiological stimuli like eating, drinking, relief of physical discomfort.

Human infants must learn social signals, too. The early learning theorists in this century assumed that certain social sounds (for instance, of approval) could become reinforcers by association with innate reinforcers, but evidence for this was never found. If parents could exploit some innate sentic cues, that mystery might be explained.

This might also touch another, deeper problem: that of how an infant forms an image of its own mind. Self-images are important for at least two reasons. First, external reinforcement can only be a part of human learning; the growing infant must eventually learn to learn from within to free itself from its parents. With Freud, I think that children must replace and augment the outside teacher with a self-constructed, inner, parent image. Second, we need a self-model simply to make realistic plans for solving ordinary problems. For example, we must know enough about our own dispositions to be able to assess which plans are feasible. Pure self-commitment does not work; we simply cannot carry out a plan that we will find too boring to complete or too vulnerable to other, competing interests. We need models of our own behavior. How could a baby be smart enough to build such a model?

Innate sentic detectors could help by teaching children about their own affective states. For if distinct signals arouse specific states, the child can associate those signals with those states. Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle. If those signals are uniform enough, then from social discourse one can learn some rules about the behavior caused by those states. Thus a child might learn that conciliatory signals can change anger into affection. Given that sort of information, a simple learning machine should be able to construct a 'finite-state person model." This model would be crude at first, but to get started would be half of the job. Once the baby had a crude model of some other person, it could be copied and adapted in work on the baby's own self-model. This is more normative and constructional than it is descriptive, as Freud hinted, because the self-model dictates (rather than portrays) what it purports to portray. With regard to music, it seems possible that we conceal, in the innocent songs and setting of our children's musical cultures, some lessons about successions of our own affective states. Sentically encrypted, those ballads could encode instructions about conciliation and affection, or aggression and retreat—precisely the knowledge of signals and states that we need to get along with others. In later life, more complex music might illustrate more intricate kinds of compromise and conflict, ways to fit goals together to achieve more than one thing at a time. Finally, for grown-ups, our Burgesses and Kubricks fit Odes to Joy to Clockwork Oranges.

If you find all this farfetched, so do I. But before rejecting it entirely, recall the question, Why do we have music, and let it occupy our lives with no apparent reason? When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.