Why the Jukebox 34 list?

After 34 days, I’ve heard a few questions about what did I do all the posting of songs through Twitter and Facebook, if the goal was to share the songs I like or what, why over my trip to Colombia, why music at all, why, why, and why.

Well, the answer is both easy and complicated at the same time, and believe it or not, it has a lot to do with the Ph.D. I’m in. Here in NYC I’m supposed to be studying Mathematics Education, and in the process, studying the meaning of education, learning, teaching, thinking, and so on. And one of the most amazing things I’ve found up to this point –and lots of people will disagree with me on this– is that basically we have no idea what is really happening in there.

There is a lot of criticism to something called Behaviorism and one of the arguments beneath is that behaviorism treats the brain as a black box: things go in, things go out, mostly like a computer and its memory, without paying much attention to the process between in and out. Behaviorism was among the first theories of learning, and it is mostly known as the theory behind the experiments set by Pavlov and Skinner –although for Skinner’s experiment and actually all his studies there is a second name, Operant Conditioning. Anyway, as you can read in the link related to Skinner, one of the most highlighted issues is the complete absence of interest on the mind.

Mostly in response to the argued dismissal of the mind on behaviorism, other learning theories have developed afterwards, being Constructivism one of the most widely accepted, even though there are a huge branches and interpretations of the meaning of constructivism and even discussions on which authors are adding to the theory and which are creating their own theories.

Anyway, the key part of this introduction is the word theory, because, being theories, no one knows for sure –up to this point– if their explanations are right. And the reason for that is that no one, not even with all the different ways to see the brain, knows what happens in the brain when you learn.

And most of that is also related to the very definition and purpose of learning, just in case you were wondering. Actually, as a small but worthy detour, here is a highly recommended reading on purposes of learning, called Four ‘Pillars of Learning’ for the Reorientation and Reorganization of Curriculum: Reflections and Discussions.

Back to business! So, taking into account that we have actually almost no clue on how the brain does what it does (and no, seeing electrical impulses or active regions in MRI images is not knowing what happens), I came up with the idea of talking about one of the things that I consider most weird about my brain: my thoughts have a soundtrack, and sometimes not even something related with whatever is happening or those thoughts, just random music coming to the surface every now and then.

So, the idea was simple… every time I became aware of a song playing in my head I took note to search for it later and to share it with you, and that made for a list that you’ll find here. But also I took note for myself of relevant commonalities of those moments, that is the key part of the experiment, to analyze what happens and what can I learn from those moments about myself and my brain. And I found things that were expected, and others that were not. And in addition I found another things about music and life that amaze me.

Those are the findings from my notes, and some of them are really relevant to my professional career, like the one about the corruption of self-reflection data. However, I have to say that I really enjoyed the opportunity to think about weird things like the relationship between learning theories and music playing in my head, and I will try to keep doing so, probably during those subway rides.

 
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