Do Radios Play on Your Emotions?
Friday December 28, 2007 8:35 AM
In traditional divinatory techniques, "stereomancy" is the practice of divining through the elements. In this age of technology, however, the word has come to develop another meaning entirely: divination through the songs that play on your radio, iPod or computer. It's hardly an official method of divination, but how many of us have experienced this phenomenon? You start your morning commute, and as you thread your way through the traffic, certain songs start playing on the radio that eeriely echo your thoughts or current mood. Or you have your iPod on shuffle, but the same song keeps coming up over and over again. Something in the lyrics seems to be a message geared specifically to you, and later in the day, that message seems to come true.
It's easy to read too much into the things that randomly occur around us, but messages out of apparent random actions is what most divinatory techniques are all about. Divination can be seen to function on one of two principles. Either, there is a greater force that governs events in the world, so that patterns emerge, even from apparent chaos. Fans of fractals and chaos theory can even skip the implication that this guiding force is divine — in modern chaos theory, the force that causes complex patterns to emerge from the chaotic input of numbers in a fractal is simply a mathematical value known as a "strange attractor."
The other possibility is perhaps even more earth-shattering in its implications. Can we, as humans, have an influence on the apparently random activity that occurs around us? One researcher, Masaru Emoto, seems to have proven that human emotions can affect the structure and appearance of water crytals. At the more obscure ends of modern scientific theories, there are notions that the very act of observation can influence the activity of the thing being observed. This is known simply as the observer effect, and it suggests a profound and mysterious relationship between observation and apparently random phenomenon.
A lot has been made of this by arm-chair quantum physicists, but one experiment, which is on-going, really stands out. It involves a black box known as a Random Event Generator. The box randomly generates two numbers, a one and a zero, rather like the heads or tails of a coin. According to the laws of chance, these two options should each come up 50 percent of the time in a random dispersion. But one scientist, a Professor Jahn, wanted to see if human thought could influence the random generation of the numbers. His experiments in the 1970s led to a number of these black boxes being installed in universities around the world where they tantalizingly seem to predict major world events. Does the REG prove the underlying principles of divination? Scientists are still working on that one, but maybe you should pay a little more attention to that song playing on the radio right now.
Comments (1)
My husband and I play a game we call "iPod 8-Ball" (as in the Magic 8-Ball that you turn upside down then right-side up again to get an answer to your pressing issues).
It's fun and sometimes eerily accurate - try it! Hold a thought or a question in your mind, then go to Shuffle. The song that pops up provides the answer.
Posted by Marlane | January 3, 2008 1:07 PM
Posted on January 3, 2008 13:07