Words vs. Music...Short step vs. Long leap

I made a naked claim in the last post that if you see casual audio as any sort of contribution to long-term intellectual development and practical ideas, you need a mix of words and music. The claim was that "words are the seed and music is the soil." Hey, this is a blog, so I can claim whatever I want, but DoxSpot is supposed to be at least a little rigorous in such things, if only so you can tell me what I'm all screwed up. So I tried to dissect the results of my own experimentation. Everyone that cares about such things assumes a link between words (NPR podcasts, non-fiction audiobooks, classic speeches, etc.) to intellectual growth. And most assume some practical value for your daily decisions. What a shock. Listen to 30 minutes on Katrina and learn about levies (or corruption or poverty or political ambivalence or whatever). Listen to 60 minutes on Einstein and gain a conversational knowledge of relativity. But does music play a role? Does the content--and more importantly, your ability to use the content--grow differently depending on how it is subsequently marinated? In my "experiments" it did. The difference was the size of the steps (or leaps). When all audio is "content," the steps are small. Learn about Katrina and then make decisions about donations, home flood control, a trip to New Orleans. Learn about relativity and then make decisions to, well, learn more about relativity (or not). In short, all thinking was a simple regurgitation of the actual content--a glorified book report. But learn (sufficiently) about Katrina and switch to music and then the thinking evolves to changing planning processes related to various disasters, finding ideas to respond to a headline-driven society incapable of maintaining the 3-5 year attention span to really fix the New Orleans ills with new ways to mobilize interested subsegments. Or learn (again, sufficiently) about relativity and build a mental model for exactly why time slows down so you can explain it to a 12 year old.

If you are a parent or other person-of-influence for a young person, this isn't navel gazing. It's completely practical. What do you model? What do you encourage? What do you buy? And for any given person and any given topic, what is the optimal mix? 90:10? 50:50? Where exactly on this mythical scale is hip-hop? (My personal view is that's it's on both ends.)

Try this sometime on yourself. You may be surprised by your results. And let me know.