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.

• I learned about myself that…

  • … I need time to think, no heavy outside stimuli. And that television is the worst possible stimuli ever (but, because I have no television in New York, the trip to Colombia was the only opportunity to find that). This also explains why I became much more aware of that mind soundtrack during the Ph.D., the reason is the subway rides, I never use headphones and usually don’t read much while in the subway, just look at people, advertisement, and all around; a perfect moment for my brain to have quiet thinking time.
  • … for some stuff I change easily from Spanish to English and vice versa, but not for all. It was particularly hard to change a couple of comments on the songs from Spanish to English –for the posts– when the first comment I had was in Spanish.
  • … language isn’t, however, a particular predictable commonality between the environment and the song playing inside. Sometimes I spent the entire day just talking with family and friends in Spanish and a song in English popped up, or spent most of the day reading and thinking in English and the inner jukebox played something in Spanish. Or, other times, language was the same… did not take numbers, but there is a fair chance of neglectable correlation between dummy variables for language in both thoughts/environment and song.
  • … not all the played songs count towards the list of my favorites, but happily during those days nothing I really dislike came to mind. It happens from time to time, I know that, but my mind played the role of a good pal helping me to not post horrible things.
  • … it is really hard to collect data on myself without corrupting the data just by collecting it. Clear example: one of he first songs I posted was “Turning Japanese”, and after that it was very usual to have that one on and on, something that didn’t happen before. Just by thinking about the songs, identifying them, and looking for the video to post, those songs became more relevant in my mind and took a lot of my mental processing about music afterwards.
  • … I knew some of the videos before doing this thing, but very few of those are something that I can remember other than by a couple of shots. Just like the songs, some of them were only a phrase with some rhythm rolling over and over again.

• I learned also that…

  • … there are few Spanish-speaking artists with official channels for their videos. t was really hard to find some videos that I think were hits at their time, much harder than for English-speaking artists. And I always looked for official channels and legally distributed videos to avoid copyright issues and to ensure that videos were good quality and without add-ons.
  • … Google is just amazing. A couple times I had only three words from the song and a vague idea of the artist, and the search was extremely easy anyway. There is only one song I missed, and the reason is that only one word and a long instrumental piece come to my mind. Hopefully I’ll hear it again and identify it, although I don’t give a high probability to it given that I know it is not a 21st century song (April 2020 update: that song is ‘True’, performed by Spandau Ballet).
  • … people like making their own videos over the official videos. And the lyrics videos are mostly hideous. Please, seriously, the rest of the world has no need to see your (lack of) ability to edit videos.

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.