Words, music, memories and other mind-altering drugs – Lent 2025: Day 25

Smash, rip, incinerate, crush, suffocate, destroy, annihilate, mourn, despair. [Now read again.]

Has reading this list of verbs changed your mood? Feeling a little more... anxious? Now, how about these –

Flourish, embrace, inspire, open, cherish, rejuvenate, love, marvel, celebrate, hope. [Now re-read.]

– Have these words returned you to a better place?

The simple act of casting your eyes over shapes on a screen – characters or graphemes – that we recognise as letters, placed together to form words, can cause either the levels of cortisol or of dopamine to rise within your body. When released into a living organism, chemical substances that produce a biological effect are, pharmacologically speaking, drugs. Hormones. Signalling molecules that affect the body, produced endogenously. We have been conditioned to respond accordingly. It's what makes great poets great; wringing emotion out of language.

With music, the effect is more powerful. Music plays a significant role in our emotions and moods. Uppers and downers. Specific sequences of notes, tempo, key (major/minor), volume, trance-inducing beat; music has a powerful array of tools at its disposal to alter our mindset.

And so it is for memories. Memories can be of events or of qualia. Events – embarrassing, awkward, painful memories tend to stick around. Summoning them can prompt cortisol release. But qualia memories – memories not of what you did, but what you felt – tend to be more likely to set off a dopamine release. Tiny quantities, but noticeable. Quick to dissipate, but very real.

Below: words, music, memories – pictured by Google Gemini Imagen 3.0

English romantic poet William Wordsworth describes in Daffodils (1804) this experience of a qualia memory flashback, prompted by his memories from a walk along the shore of Lake Ullswater in the Lake District, when he saw a long line of daffodils, "Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." The last stanza runs thus:

"For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

That is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Qualia memory events can have powerful pharmacological effects, like words and music.

Tonight the clocks go forward. For the next week I'll be getting through the day with a sense of guilt that an extra hour of daylight has passed and I've done nothing with it.

Lent 2025: Day 25
Dealing with Evil

Lent 2023, Day 25
Intuition and Dreaming

Lent 2022: Day 25
Writing It All Down

Lent 2021: Day 25
Faith and Knowledge

Lent 2020: Day 25
Chances, complacency and gratitude