Lyrical Listener

What determines how we listen to music?

Early in 2022, I was confronted by discourse I did not recognize on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok. Across the web, users were separating themselves by whether they were shape rotators or wordcels.

With a term like “wordcel” involved, it is perhaps of little surprise that the discussion was turbocharged by venture capitalist and all-time dweeb Marc Andreessen. And while the terminology was emblematic of some of the worst trends in online culture at the time, the revelation that most people prefer to process abstract ideas in one of two ways — either by picturing images of the idea (shape rotators) or by picturing the words that define the idea (wordcels) — floored me.¹

Much of conversation is based on what you’re thinking, but comparatively little is ever dedicated to how you have those thoughts, so it makes sense that most of us go our whole lives without realizing a huge percentage of the population processes their thoughts in a completely different manner. Until ChatGPT’s …