From the Mental State of Noise to the New Frontiers of Cognition

Abstract

outside his window, Schopenhauer famously lamented, would lacerate his brain and quash every thought in its infancy. In “The Concept of Noise,” which we are happy to be able to republish here, Steven Sands and John Ratey can be credited with first spelling out the cognitive dimension of the predicament that Schopenhauer so lamented, offering the following definition of the “mental state of noise”: “By ‘noise,’ we mean an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience” (Sands and Ratey 290). However, noise, in this enlarged and cybernetically inflected sense, now alludes to a relation between contingency and control, which includes but is no longer limited to the experience of unwanted sound. In the past few decades this novel, cybernetic conception of noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks. As the economist Fischer Black put it so adroitly in his seminal paper from 1986, simply entitled “Noise”: