Vocal Medicine: Why Your Body Reads Singing as a Promise of Peace

When I sing I always feel better. It is one of the only times I feel goosebumps. Singing is known to enhance mood and is one of the few activities known to increase endorphins appreciably. I think the body takes it as an evolutionarily honest signal. It tells your body that your companions and group mates are ok with you expressing yourself. They are letting you rather than discouraging you from doing something dominant and fun. They must not be trying to dissuade you from vocalizing loudly and fluidly. I think when you sing with gusto your body knows you are not vocalizing out of distress or fear. In fact, I believe our bodies know to take this as a positive signal that portends a type of evolutionary optimism that reprograms the body for peace, relaxation, and camaraderie instead of anger, hate, and violence. I think this would be a good reason for people to try and sing a little everyday even if there is no one around. I do it in the car where no one can hear me. In prehistoric times, we probably wouldn't sing alone because we would be giving our location away to both prey and predators. So even if you choose to sing alone, your body may not know it is alone and may believe you are showing off and doing it without embarrassment. I think singing is an evolutionarily honest signal that the body receives as an environmental cue telling it that positive biological and neurological growth (optimistic phenotypic plasticity) is in order. Here is an essay I brainstormed and wrote with GPT o3 about this belief of mine:

"Singing is an ancient gesture, older than language and as instinctive as laughter. When you let a melody roll off your tongue—whether in a crowded choir loft or alone in the shower—you set off a quiet biochemical celebration. Within minutes the brain’s opioid system brightens, pain thresholds drift upward, and a warm tide of pleasure washes through the body. Endocrinologists have watched cortisol, the stress hormone, subside while oxytocin, the chemistry of closeness, quietly rises. Even the quicksilver shiver of frisson —the musical “chill” that races across your skin—reveals a surge of dopamine and noradrenaline in reward circuits deep inside the mid-brain. All of this unfolds from nothing more complicated than air, pitch, and breath.

Why should so simple an act feel so profoundly good? Evolution offers a compelling answer. In the tense quiet of the savanna our ancestors rarely raised their voices without reason. Loud, ornamented song advertised that the singers were healthy, well-fed, and unafraid of predators nearby. It was a costly display, metabolically expensive and strategically unwise unless the landscape was secure and the social fabric strong. Over thousands of generations our nervous systems appear to have internalized this logic. Whenever we sing with confidence—whether or not anyone is listening—the body receives the performance as evidence that all is well and shifts into a state of physiological optimism.

This is self-signalling in action. We usually think of honest signals as messages aimed at others, but the brain is both sender and audience. When you launch into an exuberant chorus you demonstrate, to yourself, that resources are plentiful and threat is low. The autonomic nervous system responds by loosening defensive vigilance: heart-rate variability climbs, digestion restarts, immune function rises. In effect the body whispers, “If we can afford to sing, we can afford to heal.”

That internal verdict carries emotional weight. Mood lifts not only because endorphins bathe the limbic system but because the act of singing rewrites the story we tell about our circumstances. It feels less lonely to inhabit a soundscape of your own making; the room itself seems to answer back, filling with resonance that mimics the presence of sympathetic peers. What begins as private recreation ends as a rehearsal for fellowship, priming neural pathways that anticipate camaraderie and trust.

The acoustics of the act deepen the effect. Diaphragmatic breathing massages the vagus nerve, amplifying the parasympathetic lull that follows each phrase. Melodic variation and dynamic swells mirror the playful exchanges of social grooming, engaging sensorimotor circuits evolved for face-to-face rapport. Even the bodily posture of sustained vocalization—open chest, lifted chin—stands opposite to the hunched geometry of fear. Form reinforces feeling, and feeling shapes form, until the singer inhabits a feedback loop of embodied confidence.

Modern life, of course, rarely rewards such costly display; neighbours complain, time runs short, and digital soundtracks feel safer than our own voices. Yet the biology remains ready, waiting for that unmistakable cue. A single song—three minutes of unapologetic sound—can nudge gene expression toward growth and repair, tilt neurotransmitters toward curiosity instead of vigilance, and remind memory networks that there is more to the world than deadlines and alarms. In an age of curated playlists and noise-cancelled solitude, singing returns agency to the listener, turning consumption into creation.

So the invitation is simple. Claim a corner of the day, breathe deep, and let a tune escape. No audience is required; predators are unlikely, and the prey you risk startling is only your own anxiety. Your voice may not be polished, but it is unmistakably alive, and biology will reward the courage of its release. In that small act you resurrect an ancestral signal of safety, summon a chemistry of hope, and rehearse, for a moment, the art of belonging."

Don’t Feel Disempowered After Waking Up to the Freeze Response

Most people have had the experience where they have woken up in fear and not been able to move. You’re afraid that a stranger is in your room or in your home, but you’re pinned to the bed. You can’t rise, you can’t run away, you can’t even talk. It can be very frustrating and humbling. I remember having this experience several times as a child and I felt ashamed that my fear could immobilize me in this way. It’s also scary, because your body‘s freezing response seems to be putting you in danger. My mother called me last night and related an experience that she had with this recently telling me that she took it as a sign to be more courageous. I have taken it as a sign to be less fearful. If I have felt this way, and she has felt this way, many others likely have too.

If you’ve had this experience before, and were similarly subdued by and disappointed in yourself, this short entry is for you. I’m gonna give you three reasons why you shouldn’t worry about it, and should not feel disempowered. 

 

Number one, freezing is an adaptive response and it’s all about survival. All mammals do it and we do it today because it saved our ancestors and abetted their survival countless times. Called the freeze response, it is a survival mechanism triggered by unconscious brain modules in response to a perceived threat. We also share this response with reptiles. It involves physical mobility, rapid heartbeat, shallow, breathing, muscle tension, and a sense of being trapped or dissociated. It helps prey animals avoid detection, remaining still to reduce the chance of being noticed by a predator. Some people, when faced with perceived inescapable threat enter the state of tonic and immobility. It’s a vestigial defense mechanism that, in other animals, is called playing dead. The most extreme form of this parasympathetic response involves shutdown, collapse, or folding where animals go limp and numb. It’s important to recognize that freezing is not a choice, it’s a hardwired biological reflex. Recognize your bodies innate intelligence, and that if you are freezing, it may help you remain undetected or stop you from provoking something much stronger than you.

 

Number two, it may not feel like it, but your body will know when to snap out of the stillness. Trust your body’s wisdom that the freezing will end abruptly, you will totally regain your strength, and your flight or flight will kick in full force. Your unconscious mind is looking and waiting for an opening. As soon as the moment presents itself, you will be able to run or defend yourself with vigor.

 

Number three, it’s very likely that you were not frozen in fear, but in sleep paralysis. Even though you may have begun to wake up, the paralysis was part and parcel of the dream state. All mammals enter sleep atonia (a form of paralysis) during REM sleep. It inhibits all voluntary skeletal muscles, except for the eyes and diaphragm. It stops us from acting out our dreams. This ensures that we do not thrash about in ways that could hurt us or our sleeping companions. So you may not have been freezing in fear at all. The paralysis may have been from the rapid eye movement sleep. 

 

To recap, when you're waking from a nightmare, especially during REM sleep, there can be a brief overlap between REM atonia, a freeze response, and conscious awareness. This can result in a transitional hybrid state where you're conscious or semi-conscious, experiencing intense fear, and your body is frozen and unresponsive. This can be made more uncomfortable because the threat content from the nightmare is still present in your mind, you cannot move or call for help, you may be hallucinating (intrusions of dream imagery), and it feels like being "attacked" from both inside (the dream) and outside (the paralysis).

 

Just last week, I had this familiar experience of waking up and being frozen in fear. The dream involved a home invasion, and I wasn’t able to rise or prepare myself in anyway. But something interesting happened. I heard an outside noise from a neighbor and that noise completely woke me up out of the dream. I was instantly able to move completely normally. I rose out of bed, preparing to defend myself before I realized that there was no real threat at all. So, this showed me that even though I have often had these disempowering dream experiences, I likely have never been frozen in a completely awake state and never been frozen in response to a real threat. 

If you have had this experience, it is normal. Let’s not feel ashamed because it is not indicative of weakness or vulnerability. Instead, now more informed, let’s feel empowered by the wisdom of our body’s powerful survival instincts and deep evolutionary preparedness. I hope that this explanation helps people realize that even though they may have been terrified by what seemed like a freezing response, they were really just transitioning out of a nightmare. Have some faith that if there really was an external threat, such as an outside noise, your awareness of it would rouse you and pull you into action.

The Specious Present in Machine Consciousness: Why Temporal Continuity is the Missing Key to AI Awareness

The ability to perceive the present as an extended yet unified experience, rather than as a series of discrete, isolated moments, is central to human cognition. This phenomenon, known as the specious present, is a critical aspect of temporal awareness that enables fluid perception, coherent thought, and a stable sense of self. Unlike machines, which process information in strict sequences with no intrinsic sense of continuity, human consciousness unfolds across time in a way that allows for seamless transitions between thoughts, decisions, and actions. If artificial intelligence is ever to approach anything like human-like awareness or achieve machine consciousness, it may need to develop a computational equivalent of the specious present.

- LLMs operate like someone reading one frame of a film at a time and commenting on it.

- Consciousness arises not from seeing a frame, but from living inside the stream of frames.

Figure 1: This figure shows a timeline consisting of 20 seconds where four new environmental stimuli were encountered and four new concepts were considered. Three of these stimuli and two of the concepts were carried forward into the present moment at time 0. At the bottom of the figure are the current contents of attention and this represents the specious present.

What is the Specious Present?

The specious present is the idea that our perception of "now" is not a single static instant but a brief duration in which we experience events as a unified whole. Imagine you're watching a movie. The pictures on the screen change quickly, but you don’t see them as separate pictures—you see one smooth story happening. This is the specious present. In fact, it holds every event and episode in our lives together. Our short-term memory ensures that in any present instant there are many simultaneously coactive traces carried over from the last few seconds of experience. This allows our brains to construct a rolling window of awareness. The specious present is what allows us to perceive a melody as a coherent whole rather than a sequence of isolated notes. It helps us link together speech sounds so that we can comprehend whole conversations. And this ability to build an evolving conception of reality as it unfolds helps us understand cause and effect.

The specious present is considered "specious" because it is an illusion—our perception of the "now" is not an objective, indivisible instant in time but a constructed temporal experience. The term specious in this context means "deceptive" or "misleading," rather than outright false. It suggests that while we feel as though we are experiencing a single, unified present moment, this is actually a fabrication.

The idea was popularized by E. R. Clay and later developed by William James. James called it the “short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.” In cognitive science, this concept aligns closely with Jared Reser’s theory of iterative updating which can be found at aithought.com. The Iterative Updating model explains that successive mental states retain partial continuity with prior states rather than being replaced wholesale. This form of updating ensures that past and present states are not sharply divided but instead blend into one another, creating an ongoing stream of consciousness. If AI were to incorporate a similar mechanism, it might come closer to replicating a form of intelligence that is temporally situated rather than ephemeral and fleeting.

So before we talk about how to implement this in a computer, let’s take a look at what it has to offer AI.

 

What Capabilities Could a Specious Present Create for an AI System?

The specious present plays a role in shaping our sense of self. Human identity is not constructed from isolated mental events but from a persistent, temporally extended awareness that binds together past, present, and anticipated future states. This self emerges from the very continuity that AI currently lacks. If AI were to develop a specious present, it might become capable of acquiring something resembling personal identity. Can you imagine a way that consciousness, identity, or thought could exist without an experience of time? How could they given they are inherently structured by the passage of time?

Some philosophers argue that the specious present is not merely an aspect of cognition but a necessary condition for consciousness itself. If subjective awareness requires an ongoing experience of time, then any AI that operates purely through discrete, non-iterative processes may always remain fundamentally unconscious, no matter how sophisticated its outputs become.

This has a bearing on free will. Human decision-making relies on holding multiple relevant pieces of information active at the same time, forming a coherent decision space. The specious present allows for deliberation, where alternatives are weighed within a coherent and evolving cognitive space. Can an AI truly "choose" if it lacks a unified present experience? If free will depends on the ability to hold multiple potential futures in mind at once, then a specious present should be essential for AI autonomy. The absence of this capacity raises important questions about intentionality and whether AI can ever genuinely "choose" rather than merely execute the most statistically probable response at a given moment.

 LLMs only predict the very next word (token) for the very next state, and they put all their processing power into that computation. The human brain makes predictions many states ahead, we aren’t even interested in what comes in the very next state.

Do Modern AI’s Experience a Present or a Sense of Continuity?

There is not much reason to believe that contemporary AI systems exhibit a form of temporal continuity. Even the most advanced AI models, such as state-of-the-art large language models like GPT, operate in a manner that is fundamentally different from human cognition. When prompted, the models generate responses that can demonstrate sophisticated forms of intelligence, knowledge, understanding, introspection, and even coherence across extended dialogues. Yet, once a response is produced, the internal cognitive process of the AI effectively vanishes, until it is reinitialized with a new prompt. There is no persistence of thought or self-directed continuity beyond the task at hand. Unlike a human, who maintains an ongoing awareness that stretches across each waking day, an AI does not carry an evolving, self-updating internal state. This limitation suggests that artificial systems are not merely lacking in conscious experience but are also constrained in their ability to engage in sustained, context-aware deliberation. Would creating an AI where conceptions persist consistently even when not in dialogue allow it to be conscious? Probably not because its lack of continuity extends down into the way it actually processes tokens.

Most modern AI systems, particularly those based on the transformer architecture, process input through self-attention mechanisms that dynamically weight the importance of words or symbols within a predefined context window. While this approach allows AI to generate coherent text, it probably does not grant it a specious present. In human cognition, attention is not recomputed from scratch with each passing moment. Rather, some neuronal activity remains sustained over multiple cognitive cycles, allowing for the gradual fading and persistence of relevant information. AI, by contrast, recalculates its attention weight matrix anew every time it shifts to the next input token (word). Thus, it loses a good deal of continuity after generating each new token. Basically, AI systems, especially deep learning models, process information in discrete steps, much like frames in a video. For AI to better mimic human cognition, it would need a mechanism that integrates events over short time spans, rather than treating each moment as isolated.

Large language models using the transformer architecture do retain some contextual information within a fixed context window. And that window, like its attentional store is updated iteratively. But anything outside that range is irretrievably lost unless explicitly retrieved. There is no natural mechanism for dynamically recalling and reintegrating forgotten details in a way that mimics biological cognition (such as synaptic potentiation).

This discrepancy between human and artificial cognition is further reinforced by how their respective memory systems operate. Human working memory does not function like a rigid queue in which new items simply push out older ones in a fixed sequence. Instead, the brain varies the rate of updating depending on cognitive demand, retaining some information for extended periods while discarding other details more quickly. An AI model context window, however, operate on a strict first-in, first-out (FIFO) replacement system, where information is lost at a predetermined rate dictated by the architecture rather than by meaningful contextual relevance. In human cognition, a particularly significant event or idea may be retained far longer than less relevant details, allowing for a dynamically weighted memory system that adapts to the needs of the moment as well as long-term plans. Without this capacity for flexible, self-directed retention and recall, AI remains constrained to static processing rather than true, evolving thought.

 

How Could We Build a Specious Present into AI?

If we think of the specious present as a "temporal buffer" for reality, then an AI trying to achieve human-like intelligence might need something similar. Unlike static windowed attention (e.g., in GPT-like models), an AI implementing the specious present would require sliding attention windows that retain and update relevant context iteratively. A rolling buffer of attention that refreshes dynamically, ensuring that a portion of past activations persists while incorporating new ones. This could be implemented by architectures designed for persistent, overlapping time representation.

AI researchers have explored architectures that attempt to integrate elements of persistence into computational models. These include recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks which have nodes or neurons that remain active for extended periods as they do in the brain. Transformer-XL networks, extend the context window of conventional Transformers by allowing past activations to influence present ones, creating a form of recurrence that mimics some aspects of human memory. Similarly, Longformer and Memorizing Transformers introduce mechanisms that allow for the retention of information over longer sequences, enabling AI to reference past data beyond a fixed window.

Neural Turing Machines and Differentiable Neural Computers take a different approach, explicitly modeling memory structures that can be read from and written to dynamically, providing a form of information continuity. RWKV, a more recent development, blends elements of Transformer-based attention with recurrent architectures, attempting to capture both long-range dependencies and efficient processing of sequential information. While each of these models moves AI closer to the ability to process time as a continuous experience rather than as a sequence of disjointed computations, none yet fully replicate the flexible, iterative updating of human cognition.

 

Conclusion

The concept of the specious present is more than a theoretical curiosity—it is the structural foundation that allows thought to unfold over time rather than existing as a series of isolated computations. Without it, AI remains a collection of momentary states, never evolving into an entity that perceives time, remembers meaningfully, or sustains self-awareness.

The specious present is more than just a technical feature of cognition—it is the foundation of conscious experience, temporal reasoning, decision-making, and selfhood. If AI is ever to think, reflect, or even "feel" in a human-like way, it must:

1. Maintain a persistent but fluid cognitive state.
2. Experience time as a continuous flow rather than discrete moments.
3. Integrate past and present information in a structured, self-referential manner.
4. Develop a temporally extended sense of self-awareness.

If consciousness is, at its core, an ongoing stream of experience, then AI will never achieve it unless it develops the mechanisms necessary to sustain and integrate temporal awareness. An AI without a specious present can only approximate sentient intelligence, not embody it. The pursuit of artificial consciousness may therefore depend not just on increasing computational power or refining present neural networks conventions, but on giving machines a way to exist in time rather than merely process it.

Simple Strategies That Helped Me Sleep Better and Feel Calmer

Sleep Hygiene 

 

Here is a list of what I found to be the most helpful interventions for sleeplessness and insomnia. The first four here helped me transition from 5 hours of sleep per night to at least 7 within a week.

 

 

Get outside in the sun for least 10 minutes, first thing after waking. Early sunlight resets and supports a healthy, regular circadian sleep cycle. Sunlight directly after waking works best, but direct or indirect sunlight anytime during the day is beneficial. The bright light convinces your brain that now is the time to be alert and energetic which will help you feel tired by nighttime and sleepy by bedtime.

 

Stop eating four hours before bed. Don’t overeat for dinner. Eating late meals keeps you up and burdens the digestive system. Snacking right up to bedtime keeps the mind in a state of agitation and. If you tell yourself that you will not eat during the four hours before bedtime, you will find a part of you relax knowing that hunger and compulsive eating are off the table.

 

Set an alarm every morning, including weekends. Don’t hit the snooze button. 

 

Fatiguing your neck muscles before sleep can help you greatly to crash. When your neck is tired your body knows it needs rest. I lie in bed on my back and touch each ear to the surface of the bed 40 times, turning my neck from side to side. You want to hold your head an inch or two off of the bed and alternate between tapping your right and left ears to the bed surface.

 

Do not take naps and don’t sleep in, this only confuses your sleep cycle. Going to sleep earlier than usual when tired often backfires because it throws off your cycle.

 

Exercise during the day will help you to wind down at night and sleep much harder. If you can fatigue your muscles, heart, and breathing apparatus, then they all crave deep restful sleep. I shoot for an hour of some kind of exercise every day.

 

Don’t work out too hard in the second half of the day. Do push-ups and heavy weights by midday. Try to stop exercising two hours before bed. Yoga and stretching are fine though.

 

Turn down the screen brightness on your devices three hours before bed. This light is confusing your sleep cycle, making your body think that it is the middle of the day. Set your phone, tablets, laptop, monitors, and televisions to a lower brightness setting. You can also program your cellphone to reduce the amount of blue light it emits two hours before bedtime. An hour before bedtime dim or turn off some ceiling lights.

 

No caffeine, THC, or alcohol. They have been shown to dysregulate sleep in a dose dependent manner.

 

No action movies, horror movies, or videogames two hours before bed. Watching violent or suspenseful content will keep you from getting to sleep, reduce sleep quality, and make it more difficult to stay asleep.

 

It’s OK to get bored a few hours before bed, it gets your adrenaline and your dopamine down. So, do something relaxing.

 

Read before bed. No electronics an hour before bed. Practice stimulus control and relaxation techniques.

 

Play piano music or soothing songs an hour before bed. 

 

It is difficult to sleep well in a hot room. Keep your bedroom cool, around 70 degrees, and undress, use lighter blankets, or use fans as needed.

 

Drink two to three glasses of water four hours before bed and then stop drinking so that you don’t have to wake up to pee as often.

 

A warm shower or bath two hours before bed will help you sleep. A cold shower early in the day might help you sleep but a cold shower late at night will keep you up.

 

Don’t talk about things that are upsetting or seek out conflict before bedtime.

 

Sleep in your bed, don’t rest in it. You want your body to associate lying in your bed with one thing, deep sleep.

 

Don’t allow people to keep you up late at night. Tell them firmly that you prioritize sleep.

 

Stay calm while sleep deprived. Whenever you sleep poorly, make sure you stay calm and take it easy the next day. Trauma can be multiplied by sleeplessness.

 

 

 

Dopamine Detox

 

Here are my rules for controlling dysregulating stimuli in life. This can help with anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and other issues.  

 

Overstimulating things cause unhealthy dopamine swings which can drive compulsive and self-destructive behavior.  Very potent stimuli of any kind do this. These include, extremely palatable food, suspenseful and thrilling television, and unattainably good-looking people. They all set an unrealistic threshold for dopamine release. The higher the artificial dopamine peak, the more you drop below baseline once you no longer have these stimulants. This leads to tolerance and withdrawal. This is because, after large releases of dopamine, dopamine becomes depleted, and the default, baseline level of dopamine drops, leaving you feeling lousy, anxious, and restless. This causes you engage in the same overstimulating activity that made dopamine surge before, and this reduces the baseline even more. To avoid this cycle, try to follow these rules:

 

 

No Instagram 

No TikTok 

No video games 

No violent shows

No fight videos

No injury videos

No sweets 

No MSG 

No overeating

No drugs

No alcohol

No stressful music

No overstimulating sexual content

No unnecessary spending

Only relaxing music

 

 

Here are some other strategies to find calm and reduce your reliance on overstimulation:

 

Listen to soft piano music while you work on the computer.

 

Embrace feeling bored. Just accept that you are in a healing state and don’t fight it. 

 

Just like eating sweet or salty foods, spending money makes you wanna spend more money. But when you stop for a few days, you gain peace.

 

Not scrolling social media or overstimulating myself makes me bored and eventually makes me want to read which is the best thing I can be doing. 

 

You should spend a day weekly without any cellphone, app, or streaming use.

 

You should spend 24 hours fasting every week.

 

Do hard things like meditation, weight lifting, hard work, fasting, and cold plunges that deplete, but then replenish dopamine to healthy levels.

 

Remember: “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” Albert Einstein

 

Years of social conditioning causes us to have a dependency on other people. We seek external validation, and many people feel they only get dopamine from interactions with others. You should be comfortable and content by yourself with nothing to do.

 

The energy you put into seeking, maintaining, and recovering from relationships and social interactions can be put into creative efforts. 

 

Loneliness increases inflammation and stress but peaceful self-sufficient solitude does not. We should crave time alone. Imagine not needing anyone. What would that feel like? Be able to be powerfully alone. 

 

Non-searching, nondependent, mindful, satisfied solitude is what we should be able to achieve.

 

Embrace being bored and you will become calmer.