"If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals...) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body... it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world..."
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University of Cambridge facultyMathematicians from EnglandScience authorsCosmologistsPhysicists from England
Original Language: English
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Ch. 5, p. 236
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Barrow
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John D. Barrow
John David Barrow, FRS (November 29, 1952 – September 27, 2020) was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, mathematician, writer of popular science, and an amateur playwright.
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