It can be argued that one of the reasons why humans love music with the same bpm as the human heart beat, is because it reminds us of being in the womb and can induce a relaxed state.
I have recently been reading up on self-sustaining criticality, the process by which the brain maintains a fine balance between boring and slow order, and exciting out of control thought propagation, to achieve a balance of speedy but stable thought / processing. A common example of self sustaining criticality in nature is the sand pile, where you can predict the average frequency and size of collapses, but where each one is still random and unpredictable.
There are similar events in nature that seem to be able to hold us humans in a trance, a burning fire, waves breaking, falling snow and of course avalanches in a sand pile. Do all of these events have an element of self-sustaining criticality to them?..and if they do, does our brain "enjoy" them because it fits in with its own processing system - similarly to how our body "enjoys" repetitive beats on the same frequency as our heartbeat?
