I touched on this thesis a few posts back, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately and wanted to write more. We've all heard the studies which claim that music education in k-12 is paramount to learning in general. If you haven't, I'm too lazy to google a link right now but it's out there. The reason is that music has the very unique ability to stimulate both the right and left brain hemispheres since it is simultaneously very creative and mathematical. Children who spend twenty minutes learning piano at the top of the school day retain much more knowledge from every subject they study that day.
So engaging with music seems to heighten our awareness. Say you buy a really good album that you listen to intensely for a certain period of time. Because your brain is functioning at a higher level, everything else you experience during this period of time is recorded into your subconscious mind in acute detail. Inevitably you will tire of this album and it will go on the shelf. Years will pass and you will seldom even think of this album. Then, for some reason, you pull it out and play it again. Suddenly everything you were doing all those years ago is foremost in your thoughts. Things you had seemingly forgotten altogether are as if they happened yesterday. If you often ate lunch at the Thai place near your old job, now you can almost taste the Pad See Ew. You feel the potholes on the Sellwood Bridge that was once your daily commute. If you were going through a breakup at the time your heart might ache all over again, even though you've long since moved on.
This, I can only imagine, is similar to what people mean when they talk about acid flashbacks.
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