Rhythm

Whitehead believed there was a close identification of rhythm with 'the causal counterpart of life; namely, that wherever there is some rhythm there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. The rhythm is then the life'.

McGilchrist via Whitehead advances rhythm as an ontological co-terminus with life itself, such that the presence of rhythm anywhere signals some form of vitality and the end of one rhythmic cycle seamlessly initiates the next.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Whitehead believed there was a close identification of rhythm with 'the causal counterpart of life; namely, that wherever there is some rhythm there is some life, only perceptible to us when the analogies are sufficiently close. The rhythm is then the life'.

Duplicate witness to the same thesis: McGilchrist marshals Whitehead's identification of rhythm with the causal principle of life, grounding an ontology of dynamic patterning over static form.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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I see them as resulting from a fragmentation of essential life rhythms. The chemistry of the body, just like a person's creative energy, emerges from a primary rhythmic pulse. From the tempo of breath to the movements of water and planets, rhythm is the palpable basis of nature's reality.

McNiff reframes psychosis and mental disturbance as acute losses of synchrony with natural rhythmic flow, proposing rhythm as the primary ontological and therapeutic ground for mental health rather than chemical imbalance.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

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In my experience, rhythm is a primal source of creativity and healing. 'Surrender to the Rhythm' (1980/2003) is an updated version of a paper… the discomfort caused by a loss of rhythm can be likened to the shamanic definition of illness as lost soul.

McNiff declares rhythm the primal source of creativity and healing, linking rhythmic loss to the shamanic concept of soul-loss and positioning surrender to rhythm as the foundational therapeutic act.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

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Let the rhythm take you; surrender control to it. Feel deeply into the rhythm of your movements; listen to what they have to say to you… Welcome your chaos, your fears, and your resistance—they are signs that you are getting close; let the rhythm emerge from all of them.

McNiff issues a therapeutic imperative of surrender to rhythm, recasting chaos and resistance not as obstacles but as signs of proximity to the emergent rhythmic ground of creative healing.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

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The striking consistency of the healing practices found throughout diverse regions and historical epochs reflects the universal ability of rhythm to express and work with the life energy of individuals and groups.

McNiff establishes rhythm as a cross-cultural universal in healing traditions, citing Dionysian rites, Heraclitean flux, and Eastern energy medicine as converging testimony to rhythmic well-being.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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psychological writing needs to attend to the rhythm of language if it is to write down the soul. Psychological writing at its best is perhaps closest to music.

Romanyshyn extends rhythm from phenomenal nature into the epistemology of psychological writing itself, arguing that meaning is carried by—not merely expressed in—rhythmic language, and that the best psychological prose approaches the condition of music.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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Discriminating rhythm patterns activates broadly distributed networks in temporal, inferior parietal and prefrontal cortex almost exclusively in the right hemisphere… more complex rhythms, and those with more deviations from the standard pattern, such as syncopations and cross rhythms, are preferentially treated by the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist maps rhythm neurologically onto hemisphere lateralisation, associating complex and syncopated rhythm with right-hemisphere processing and basic metrical rhythm with left-hemisphere Broca's area.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting

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A human being takes approximately eighteen breaths a minute… 25,920 breaths a day. A cosmic year is 25,900 years… These intriguing calculations point to the way in which the rhythm of the body is related to the rhythm of the cosmos.

Sardello, drawing on Steiner, demonstrates an arithmetic correspondence between bodily breath-rhythm and the cosmic precession, arguing that human life-rhythm and cosmic rhythm share the same underlying periodicity.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting

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Creative imagination is a very real energy of the body and spirit, passing from one place to another via inspiration; it can sweep through a group like a pulsating musical rhythm.

McNiff figures creative imagination as a contagious energetic rhythm capable of transmitting itself through a group, aligning the social dynamics of creative process with musical rhythmic entrainment.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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Euripide parle du rhythmos d'un vêtement, de sa 'forme distinctive'; de la 'modalité' d'un meurtre; de la 'marque distinctive' du deuil… Ce sens de rhythmos persiste dans la prose attique du Ve siècle.

Benveniste's philological analysis reveals that rhythmos in classical Greek signified distinctive form or proportion inherent to objects and acts, not mere temporal periodicity, underscoring the term's original plastic rather than metrical sense.

Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting

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le rythme résulte du rapide et du lent, d'abord opposés, puis accordés… un certain ordre (taxis), privilège exclusivement humain, apparaît dans leurs mouvements.

Via Platonic citations Benveniste shows that rhythm arises from the reconciliation of opposing speeds—fast and slow—and that the ordering of movement into rhythm is identified as an exclusively human capacity.

Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting

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a song or ode has three parts—the words, the melody, and the rhythm… the melody and rhythm will depend upon the words.

Plato subordinates melody and rhythm to verbal content in the Republic, establishing the ethical primacy of logos over musical form and making rhythm an instrument of moral formation rather than aesthetic pleasure.

Plato, Republic, -380supporting

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is in what is called sinus rhythm (that is to say, beating normally) is considerably variable, though regular: the interval between beats in any one sequence may vary from, say, around 0.85 to 1.35 beats per second. Loss of such variability is again a sign of stress and is not desirable.

McGilchrist uses cardiac sinus rhythm to illustrate that healthy rhythm is variable-yet-regular, distinguishing life-sustaining rhythmic flexibility from pathological mechanical regularity or chaotic arrhythmia.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Loss of such variability is again a sign of stress and is not desirable. Note, this is quite distinct from an arrhythmia, which is normally undesirable, and in which the underlying regularity of beat structure is either temporarily or permanently lost.

McGilchrist distinguishes between pathological rigidity and pathological chaos in cardiac rhythm, implying that psychological health similarly requires flexible, variable-yet-ordered rhythmic organisation.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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trauma is about being frozen or stuck, pendulation is about the innate organismic rhythm of contraction and expansion. It is, in other words, about getting unstuck by knowing (sensing from the inside), perhaps for the first time, that no matter how horrible one is feeling, those feelings can and will change.

Levine identifies pendulation—the innate bodily rhythm of contraction and expansion—as the organismic counter to traumatic freezing, making restoration of rhythmic oscillation the basis of somatic trauma therapy.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting

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Vagal fibers originating in the NAex and terminating in both the bronchi and the sinoatrial node have a respiratory rhythm, thus suggesting that RSA may reflect a common respiratory rhythm originating in or at least incorporating the NA.

Porges grounds rhythm neurophysiologically in the nucleus ambiguus and its respiratory sinus arrhythmia, linking the social-engagement system to a shared cardiopulmonary oscillator as the biological infrastructure of relational regulation.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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the hippocampus exhibits highly synchronous rhythmic theta activity during REM. During waking, this type of hippocampal synchronization… usually indicates that the circuits are systematically encoding information.

Panksepp identifies theta-rhythm synchronisation in the hippocampus during REM sleep as a rhythmic neural correlate of memory consolidation, linking dreaming to the brain's rhythmic information-processing architecture.

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting

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There are certain aspects of the so-called 'inner life' – physical or mental – which have formal properties similar to those of music – patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfilment, excitation, sudden change.

McGilchrist, via Suzanne Langer, aligns the formal properties of psychic life with musical rhythm's dynamic structuring of tension, release, motion, and rest, favouring becoming over static being.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfilment, excitation, sudden change… she emphasises dynamic elements, what is always becoming, where analytic philosophy accentuates always the static, what has become.

The Langer passage, as deployed by McGilchrist, frames the inner life as rhythmically structured becoming, contrasting the dynamic philosophy of rhythm with analytic philosophy's preference for static completed states.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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The situation most comparable to the Greek would in our modern culture be found in the effect upon the popular memory of verses which are wedded to popular melodies and recorded and played on machines. Particularly close is the analogy provided by Jazz and other dance rhythms so far as these are often married to words which are then remembered.

Havelock situates oral-poetic rhythm as a mnemonic technology, arguing that dance rhythms wedded to words function in modern culture as the Homeric performance did in antiquity—inducing embodied memorisation through rhythmic entrainment.

Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, 1963aside

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This transformation occurs through the action of digestion, a rhythmic activity.

Sardello briefly identifies digestion as a rhythmic alchemical activity in which foreign substance is transformed into soul-body, situating bodily rhythm within a broader Steinerian psychology of somatic soul-formation.

Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992aside

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a more nuanced view of the timbral, rhythmic, and cultural contexts that may relate to musical frisson.

Harrison notes rhythm as one of the timbral-rhythmic-cultural variables that may condition the induction of musical frisson, situating it within a psychophysiological framework of transcendent musical experience without elaborating its specific role.

Harrison, Luke, Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music, 2014aside

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