Why Is Music Like a Traffic Accident?

Why Is Music Like a Traffic Accident?

It is the kind of question that begs a punchline: "Because sometimes there is a lot of horn and not much direction." And while that might get a laugh from the rhythm section, the comparison can go deeper: Both can stretch your sense of time. And when that happens, you are left with remarkably vivid memories.

With traffic accidents, we understand the science. The amygdala takes over: a rush of adrenaline, a spike in heart rate, tunnel vision, heightened focus. Your consciousness narrows focus to a razor's edge: vision, movement, memory. You're in survival mode, and your brain starts recording in bio-HD—like extra frames in a film reel. I experienced this only once—as a teenager, as a passenger in an auto accident. But the weird thing is, I've experienced that same slow motion, hyper-vivid sensation during music. Not just once, but three times. And I wasn't the one playing. I was just listening.

So what's going on there?

Science acknowledges that music can warp our perception of time. But how—or why—that happens during certain musical moments, we still don't fully understand. We do know that some musicians, especially jazz improvisers, enter a kind of zone while performing. Researchers call it flow state: hyper focus. The prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that handles timekeeping, self-monitoring, second-guessing—goes quiet. What's left is instinct, attention, and intuition. Musicians in this state often say things like, "I wasn't thinking," or "My hands were ahead of my brain." That's not just poetic—it lines up with what neuroscientists have observed.

Some researchers think this might be part of a bigger picture. One speculative angle involves something called Critical Flicker Fusion rate—essentially, the brain's refresh rate. Most of us max out at around 60 frames per second, so to speak. But elite performers—fighter pilots, e-sports champions, maybe even great musicians—might have a higher rate, allowing them to take in and respond to more detail, more quickly, in the same amount of time.

Birds offer an insight here. Their CFF—critical flicker fusion—is much higher than ours, allowing them to fly through dense branches without crashing. It's not just reflexes; it's resolution. They're seeing more slices of the world per second. If there's an analogous auditory process, it might help explain how some musicians seem to anticipate and react with extraordinary speed and clarity. They could be processing audio signals at a higher rate, allowing their brains to perceive them more clearly and avoid the "audio bushes," so to speak.

And if that's true, it raises an interesting question: what about musicians who are blind?

In fact, there's strong evidence that blind musicians process sound differently—and in some ways, more powerfully—than the rest of us. Studies show that parts of their brain usually reserved for vision get rewired for sound. In blind musicians, the visual cortex lights up during pitch recognition tasks, as if they're seeing sound instead of light. Other studies show they recognize voices more quickly than sighted people, and may have sharper memory for auditory detail. It's a compelling case of neuroplasticity—the brain adapting and reallocating resources in response to need.

So what does that mean for music?

It might mean that blind musicians are not only hearing more detail, but feeling it more deeply. If your brain is less tied up with visual processing, maybe you have more capacity to enter flow. Not guaranteed—but more likely.

That brings us back to the idea of access. Can flow be trained?

Turns out, yes. Practices like breath control, mindfulness, and meditation—all slow, quiet, non-musical things—have been shown to increase your chances of slipping into that immersive zone. At first glance, that seems paradoxical. Jazz improvisation is fast, complex, and unpredictable. Meditation is... not. But when you look closer, the connection makes sense. Slow, diaphragmatic breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the one that calms you down and clears your head. Mindfulness strengthens attention and reduces mental chatter. Meditation increases gray matter in areas associated with emotion, memory, and awareness. All three practices can help quiet the self-monitoring parts of the brain, just like flow. And they help you stay in the zone—not just stumble into it.

Which brings us to another door people sometimes walk through to get there: cannabis.

It's not for everyone, and it's certainly not reliable. But for some artists, THC stretches time and enhances sensation. Music slows down. Texture and space open up. You may feel more inside the sound, more emotionally connected. The inner critic goes quiet, the ego steps aside. It can feel like flow. But it's also slipperier. With cannabis, you may gain depth but lose structure. You might feel expressive, but be less precise. Memory, judgment, and timing can all drift. The tricky part is knowing when it is helping—and when you're just along for the ride. What feels inspired in the moment may, on reflection, be unfocused or overly indulgent. The benefits, when they come, are usually fleeting. And over time, reliance can lead to tolerance, emotional dependency, or creative stagnation. The challenge is knowing when you're tapping into something deeper—and when you're simply drifting downstream, watching the current without steering the boat. There is also a real risk of anxiety or adverse psychological reactions. Unlike meditation or mindfulness, it's not a sustainable path to the flow state.

So where does all this leave us? Flow, in the end, may not be reserved for the gifted few. For most of us, it might be a skill—one that requires dedication and a quiet, disciplined grace. It suggests that flow is not just about natural talent or extreme circumstances. With the right conditions—attention, attitude, breath, practice, patience—we may all be able to access something like that timeless, heightened state. Consistency is the silent architect of greatness. Talent may be the spark, but only discipline keeps it burning.

Conclusion: The Music of Now

What, then, can we take away from all this speculation about time, memory, and music?

Maybe we are right up against something so obvious we almost overlook it: the present moment—the ever-present now—is actually all we ever have. The past isn't "out there" somewhere; it is a memory arising now, shaped by the mind. The future is a projection, conjured here in the present. Everything—feeling, thought, perception, music—only exists in the present, even if its content borrows from "before" or "after." Seen this way, the famous arrow of time is not an absolute, but more like a direction our minds insist on painting. We flash back or forward, but every recollection or anticipation is itself happening now, in this single field of awareness that just won't sit still.

Music is a near-perfect mirror for this mystery. Each note appears, disappears, and is gone. Yet we hear melody, shape, meaning—time made audible. Consciously or not, our minds stitch each vanishing note to the next, holding onto echoes, reaching ahead for what might come. In that flow, music is not just moving through time—it is revealing how the now stretches itself wide enough to hold memory, anticipation, and presence together. A song makes the passage of time feel both fleeting and eternal. And thanks to recording, we can relive that unfolding. But every "repeat" is not actually a trip to the past—it is another meeting in the present, another arrival at the edge of the now. The music is the same; you are not. Even familiarity is fresh, because it only happens here—never anywhere else.

Time can slow down until it nearly stands still, not because clocks change, but because the mind snaps to attention, flooding the moment with detail. In that frame-by-frame clarity, the ordinary scaffolding of time drops away, and there's just this: sensation, witness, awareness, the musicality of life happening in real time. That's the terrain where great art, love, insight, and even healing tend to happen—not in the conceptual past or future, but right here, in "now-space." Maybe this is why so many musicians (and listeners) chase those transcendent passages. In the end, being present is not just a spiritual platitude or a performance hack—it's the heart of what it means to feel alive.

Though often mistakenly credited to Plato, the words "Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety, and life to everything" are too fitting to ignore. And as Stokowski once told his audience, "A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence."

That silence—the awareness at the heart of experience—is never yesterday or tomorrow. It's the blank canvas of now, waiting for the next note.

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