Tune In Turn On Think Out

I love my headphones. The ones I'm using now are the kind with the really big cushy earpieces that are designed to keep the rock in your ears and out of the rest of the world as well as keeping your rock world free. Having headphones that are so smart is a necessity when you are me. I do my best thinking after the sun has long been set and with my music playing really loudly. Of course, as my life is governed by Murphy, my family is filled with morning people who are light sleepers. They go to bed just as my brain is waking up and a mouse hiccup could wake them up. Headphones rule all in my world. Without headphones I would not be able to think. I discovered this over the course of the last week when I was too lazy to drag my CD player out to the living room and opted for the sounds of silence as I surfed. The result was a disastrous bout of writer's block and suffocating self doubt.

I have this theory that really good music can both shut out the world to give your brain room to think and at the same time feed your brain so that it is nourished enough to think. People who can't think unless they have total silence absolutely amaze me. How do they get past the noise in their own brain to sift the tasty from the tacky? Do these people even have noisy brains? Does my need for external background stimulation confuse them?