It is important not to confuse language with thought. Language is indeed closely related to human thought, but it is not equivalent. The conscious mind is hooked up to the subconscious mind, which is hardwired to the network of brain cells. The brain cells interact chemically whereas the conscious mind utilises language, and in between the two, the brain performs all of the necessary translation: Descartes held that the part of the brain responsible for this function is the pineal gland. The system is something like a computer where the hardware deals with binary words consisting of purely numerical data; the software provides the user with a friendly man/machine interface; and the operating system sits in between doing the interpretation95.

In 1981, the scientists Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein won a Nobel prize for their work on the neo-cortex of the brain; they showed that the left hemisphere of the brain was where logical, reasoning and analytical thought originated, and the right hemisphere was responsible for intuition, creativity and imagination. Edward De Bono has proposed that, in these hemispheres, the thought processes are themselves different. ‘Left brain thinking’ he says, consists of those processes which are ‘essentially language and symbolic’; whereas, in ‘right brain thinking, there is a whole pattern or general impression that cannot be broken down into parts. For that reason it can be reacted to but not described or communicated - except perhaps by art96’.

Much of modern philosophy is currently concerned with linguistic analysis: ‘the interesting thing’ says Francis A Schaffer in his book, He is There and He is Not Silent, ‘is that modern man has come to conclude that the secret of the whole thing lies somehow in language97’. But non-verbal communication via ‘right brain’ processes is able to bypass our normal verbal ‘left brain’ input processes which are conditioned, or filtered, through language. This may be why our innermost being is penetrated and stimulated, for example, by music, poetry and painting. We are touched spiritually by great art, beauty and wisdom because it communicates with us at a deeper level than that of spoken language and conscious thought.

In communist Russia, the popular music of the west was considered to be a subversive influence. According to Paul Du Noyer, in his book The Story of Rock n Roll, it was the ‘gloriously corrupting influence’ of this music which at least contributed to the fall of the Berlin wall. He says that western pop music proved to be ‘as deadly to that system as anything else’; pointing out that these ‘escapees from the communist bloc with their blue jeans and Pink Floyd T-shirts and punk hairstyles, were the children of rock n roll, of Elvis and the Beatles’. He goes on to say that ‘rock n roll is about a thrilling, liberating noise, full of excitement and sex and escapism. It can often be the vehicle of great emotional expression98’

Who can tell what are the true consequences of feeding a program (computer spelling) of repetitive and rather limited music into the subconscious mind? It is interesting to note that this is exactly the musical diet which is fed to workers who are required to function like automatons; performing repetitive tasks on factory production lines. There is no way we can legitimately extend this thinking beyond conjecture; since we cannot take our factory worker and turn back the clock, replacing middle-of-the-road pop with classical symphonies in order to observe the outcome.