PART I: night
I'm developing musical habits. I guess that could mean that I'm developing a style.
And, actually, come to think of it, I rather like it. I always tend to start with all the possibilities, but I keep choosing this particular set over and over. And there's still plenty of room for variety and improvisation.

The most recent video I made does not fit this style. It's more representative of me reaching beyond myself, pulling in more atonality, experimenting. And I like to listen to it, but it's not really *me*. I am not my preferences; I don't want to express my preferences. But likes and dislikes are a treasure map to what's buried on a desert island.

I don't want to give away all my good ideas before they're ready.

PART II: morning
I had the feeling last night that I had an important realization that I wanted to write about, but I could not remember what it was. Turns out, it's memory. I listened to a podcast on the way up here that described what researchers at Stanford are learning about how we learn, and the most salient detail that remains with me is how different parts of the brain remember different things. We like to forget (or ignore) that there are different types of learning, but there are several: factual memory (hippocampus), emotional memory (amygdala), habit memory (basal ganglia), perception (cerebral cortex), and motor memory (cerebellum).

So, as if I didn't know this about myself, our ability to remember emotions is different than our ability to remember facts; we can remember the emotion but forget the details surrounding those emotions. The story of my life. And probably everyone's. Because those two functions are in separate regions, an event can trigger an emotion even when the original event and the emotion are no longer associated together.

Even more amusing: our motor abilities are controlled by a different region than our higher brain functions. That's why we can ride a bike even when we're stupid drunk. Not that anyone would ever do that.


So, we're carrying around all these memories that we don't even consider part of our memory. I guess they would be our subconsciousness. But there are at least three different brain parts that seem to correspond to subconscious memories: amygdala, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. The emotional memories in the amygdala are probably the most exciting/powerful/frightening: lodes of data to mine.

All for now. I'm headed back to Chicago for NYE this afternoon. I have some resolutions to make before then.