According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one’s rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, “For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all” (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the ‘real’ world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali’s method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. The Paranoiac-critical method is thus the reverse of the children’s ‘picture-puzzles’ in which people are hidden in drawings of trees etc, and resembles more the ‘double-images’ employed by psychologists. The two faces that become a vase, and other similar illusions such as faces seen in rocks, landscapes in marble and the anthropomorphic forms of plants such as the mandrake root.

I am not sure how much I like that explanation… I don’t think it’s so much “cultural preconditioning” as much as the brain constantly acting like a fuzzy pattern matching engine. The reason you think of other songs when listening to something new is the same reason you see a man on the moon or a VW Beetle in a cloud formation… The brain is constantly analyzing new input and trying to relate it to what is already known…

When you hear a new song, you can’t possibly relate it to something you haven’t heard, so you bend it to try and fit it to some model. You see this alot when people describe the music of bands like Secret Chiefs 3 as sounding “Middle Eastern”. While the band definitely adopts a vaguely middle-eastern aesthetic, and uses some non-traditional (in the west) scales and time signatures, their music doesn’t really sound like anything from the mid-east. But reviewers often relate their work to that culture because the only context they’ve heard some of these instruments and scales/signatures has been as background music in movies set in the middle east.