A great light system is really important in a club. It’s one of the key ingredients for creating an atmosphere where people will feel like dancing and chilling out - even the most fantastic music won’t get them in the mood if the dancefloor is as brightly lit as a supermarket. When you go clubbing, the light and music overload your senses in a very powerful way – sending the higher levels of your consciousness on a bit of a holiday, and allowing you to ‘let go’. The experts know all about how to do this – and here’s your chance to experiment too. So plug in your speakers, turn up the volume and get into some serious light entertainment. Every moment you’re awake, your brain’s working flat out processing information about the outside world - the sights, sounds, smells, textures coming to you through your sense organs. The information from the senses is processed by different parts of the brain, but there’s far too much of this incoming data to deal with at a high level. So the brain filters out whatever information it reckons you don’t need, and pays attention to the rest. Your brain is hardwired to be particularly focused on things that are changing or are out of the ordinary. (This is because in the wild, such things could be a danger to your survival.) Unusual sensory signals like these attract the brain’s attention in a big way… Clubs’ lighting designers take advantage of this for their own purposes. Light/dark/colour patterns are made to change incessantly – so that your brain is constantly engaged trying to process these signals. As it struggles to keep up, communications between the different areas of the brain break down. Sensations from the immediate moment take over your mind, and it becomes less easy to think of anything else. The past and future recede, along perhaps with any cares and worries you may have. As your thinking diminishes, so your emotions swell – giving you a huge feeling of enjoyment… Play some loud rhythmic music, and nearly everyone will find their toes begin to tap, or perhaps their body starts to sway in time. People from all cultures and all regions around the world are compelled to move their bodies in time to music like this. But why? No-one knows for certain, but one clue may lie in an organ buried within the inner ear called the sacculus. The sacculus is mainly concerned with helping you balance, but researchers have discovered it also responds to loud music. As the music stimulates the sacculus, you feel similar pleasurable sensations, similar to those felt during ‘thrilling’ experiences like a roller-coaster ride, or a bungee jump. As music and movement are linked, your body may start to move in rhythm with the sounds you hear.