Heard about two students discussing Thelonious Monk’s compositions. One said those tunes integrate dissonant melodic gestures and through their repetition, position the brain to accept sequences that aren’t necessarily sweet sounding. The second one said why presume the brain has a bias towards what’s sweet or dissonant, isn’t it learned behaviour? Do toddlers flee from speakers playing dissonance and crawl towards those playing something gentle? The first one said maybe you have a point. Maybe my assumption about what’s sweet or what’s less easy to listen to, just reflect my taste. The second one said but I think Monk did enjoy exactly doing that, exactly the way you put it. The first one said if you agree with my earlier stance then why did you challenge me and make the issue about the brain instead of my analysis of Monk? The second one said because even though I agree that Monk liked to place less used intervals prominently in his melodies and even though I agree he probably got off on doing that within his milieu of that time and place, I also think the background to how the world came to occupy the kind of space where people drew lines in the sand, partitioning ideas around what is harmonically pleasing vs. what is not harmonically pleasing, is a comment on how the brain uses the part we call mind, to perpetuate a state of endless complaining. The first one paused, then added did you hear about the two people discussing John Cage and how eventually one punched the other in the stomach as a way to shock them into a consideration that what’s actually real in life is merely the physical experience and that everything else is just made of nothing?