Geometric and Musical Patterns: Brain Mechanisms and Educational Relevance
Abstract
The sense of geometry for static shapes is accompanied, in the human species, by an ability to perceive regularities and in particular symmetries within spatial and musical sequences. An initial series of laboratory experiments focused on the perception of geometric and musical sequences : what mental representations do humans use to mentally picture shapes as simple as a zigzag, as observed on a shell found in Java and dated 540 000 years ago, or a rectangle as in Lascaux ? Our research suggests that a single language of thought, based on the recursive detection of symmetries (repetitions with variations), can capture human intuitions of geometric and musical sequences, at least as far as the most elementary sequences are concerned. Whether in the auditory or visual modality, the memory of sequences depends on their compression ratio in the language of thought, in other words on their minimum description length. Thanks to brain imaging, the cerebral mechanisms involved in the perception of geometric and musical patterns are beginning to be discovered, and their enrichment through experience and education is beginning to be modeled.
