6 ms·

Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)

127 points by miobrien 9y ago

vixen99 9y ago
An intriguing study of an evidently cross-cultural experience! The authors identify physical brain differences between those who report chills (intense emotions) when listening to music and those who do not. These effects are not attributable to gender, ethnicity, IQ, languages differences, years of musical training or personality!
1_player 9y ago
It's fascinating that music elicits strong effects on some people, and none whatsoever to others. When I hear someone say "I don't much care about music" it's so hard to understand, as personally I feel it's a direct plug to emotions like none other. I regularly experience frissons when listening to an interesting piece - I've always thought everybody did! - and it can change my mood dramatically and instantly. I always feel I should listen to MORE music, but it's such an all-encompassing activity I can't do much while music's around. Some people fall asleep to music, and my brain instead just goes into (positive) overdrive. EDIT: an anecdote about frissons: ages ago under the influence of strong psychedelics my frissons turned into multiple intense full body orgasms-like waves of pleasure, and it was clearly related to the music I was listening to, the relationship between instruments and the harmony and movement of dissonant sounds to final resolution. Such an amazing, transcendent experience I'll remember all my life. I've never been able to listen to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain album again after that day. And all this has no clear value for survival? How did it evolve? Is there anything else we do, apart from appreciating "aesthetics", that has no survival reason?
- Darthy 9y ago
  Well, all art is basically things with no clear value for survival. You could even say that's the definition of it :-)
  - osense 9y ago
    I disagree that art is limited to things which have no clear value for survival. People have decorated every-day objects in their surroundings for millennia. Survival-themed video games have an innate attractiveness to many of us. Some even seek out to make their homes as plain & functional as possible and call it an art movement — minimalism.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      Imagine an art-free world. Everything would be as functional and utilitarian as possible, with zero design and decoration. Our world looks and sounds nothing like that. We put an incredible amount of effort into aesthetics. Virtually nothing is 100% utilitarian. Shape, colour, texture, and sound are all considered essential. None of that has direct survival value, but it clearly has such deep emotional benefits that most people would find it very hard to be happy or functional in a purely utilitarian world.
      - slfnflctd 9y ago
        This is hugely visible in architecture. There is a gray, rectangular building made of cinder blocks not far from here. The lighting is sufficient for all tasks needed, and its heating, cooling and drainage functionality is optimal. A more recently built structure used for a similar purpose sits a few blocks away. Several pointless curves, colors and contrasting materials were used in its design. Light is allowed in from overly large windows near the roof line, leading to wildly varying amounts of illumination in much of the interior. It does not heat and cool evenly. The landscaping is excessive and requires additional maintenance. Strangely, construction projects seem to be trending away from the former type of structure and toward the latter. Which building would you rather work in?
      - pishpash 9y ago
        In fact we reject purely utilitarian landscapes as, variously, alien, cold, robotic, or dystopic. More specific to music, it clearly has a unique value even within art. Multiple directors have said something to the effect that a movie doesn't work until the music is put in.
- hudon 9y ago
  > has no survival reason? This is going to sound crazy but maybe it does have a survival reason. In societies where music is enjoyed (all major societies today), music has the capacity to not only gather people but also have them experience a shared emotion or thought. Not only that, but music has the capacity to carry a story through time, from generation to generation, and thus the capacity to carry the morals of that story through time too. Maybe music is a way to disseminate important cultural information across a population and across time, and the societies that did not have music were weaker (eg. due to less shared morals across the society and across time) and therefore lost when they were confronted in battle by a society with music. If music is used in war to inspire courage in soldiers, perhaps it has a function beyond aesthetics and is actually used for survival, in a literal darwinian sense.
  - 1_player 9y ago
    Definitely makes sense. I imagine a prehistoric tribe dancing in trance around the fire, playing with improvised instruments. The human experience is so "lonely" - we all are separate entities in desperate need to belong - and sharing a common experience and emotion definitely bonds people. It would help glue a tribe together, which is decidedly a survival advantage. And the poor fella who didn't join in because he didn't care much for music would have been marked as an outcast :-)
    - aswanson 9y ago
      This concept reminds me of the "uni-mind",a concept from Jack Kirbys comic series "The Eternals", which I read as a kid.
    - stinos 9y ago
      I imagine a prehistoric tribe dancing in trance around the fire This is basically how I, and others, tend to feel when attending goa/acidcore/dnb (that one to a lesser extent though) parties. All together in front of the speakers, just us and the music, then the sun coming up. Pure bless. And that's even without drugs, or at least not a lot, go imagine what it's like with certain substances :P. I tried hard, but this doesn't work for me at all with more popular/known genres, presumably both because of music and audience, too much people just chatting instead of dancing etc, and also never got that connection with metal etc. Would love to see research on that.
- jehlakj 9y ago
  Could this be similar to attractiveness? Although there may be studies linking it to better “survival” genes, it doesn’t necessarily help with the situation at hand.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  > And all this has no clear value for survival? Music very much creates a culture which is important for group cohesion which has evolutionary advantages.
- pouta 9y ago
  I will have to listen to that album today, thanks for sharing. Here's an album that has been very good to me lately: Masayoshi Takanaka - An Insatiable High LP Hope you enjoy it
- montalbano 9y ago
  Reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks at the moment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia ), it sometimes misses the mark but does provide a little bit of insight into your questions.
- lukas099 9y ago
  "no clear value for survival" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
  - lukas099 9y ago
    Also, chanting, dancing, etc. could be a strong signal of social cohesion, making predators and other threats think twice about attacking. Look at the "haka" of the Māori and tell me you wouldn't be scared facing that.
  - JoshMnem 9y ago
    > "Humans uniquely appreciate aesthetics, experiencing pleasurable responses to complex stimuli that confer no clear intrinsic value for survival." It seems to me like music has a clear value for survival. Music is a type of cultural transmission (memory technique), and humans do sexually select for musical ability (ask a musician).[1] Groups that sexually selected for the ability to transmit oral knowledge through generations (via memorization, including things like meter, rhythms, melody, and rhyming) probably had a greater chance of survival. Before writing, people stored their cultures' encyclopedias in their minds, which often involved music in some way.[2] Cultures also organize around music, people follow the ideas of musicians, etc. Napoleon made some interesting comments about the active use of music in leadership and group behavior.[3] A prehistoric human with an ability to organize groups through music probably had a higher survival/reproduction rate in general, or at least benefited the group through organizational techniques. [1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735613482025 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735613482025 [2] https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/popular-science/The-Memory-Code-Lynne-Kelly-9781760291327 https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/pop... [3] "Of all the fine arts, music is the one which has the most influence on the emotions, and it is this influence which the legislator must encourage most warmly. A piece of "moral" music, one by the hand of a master, cannot fail to touch the heart and has much more influence than a good, "moral" piece of writing, which moves the mind but has no effect on our behaviour."
    - nimrod0 9y ago
- jug 9y ago
  Same; I have called music a shortcut to emotions.
extralego 9y ago
If visual aesthetics enter through the front door, music flows through the side window you always leave unlocked. What music lacks in observability, compared to visual arts, is made up for in low level access. I find it uncanny to even consider the meaning of achieving objective measurements along these lines. Very exciting for sure.
laythea 9y ago
I have a theory that music feeds other "essential for survival" sub-systems in the brain, in manners we don't understand. Don't just take a shallow look.
- mantas 9y ago
  E.g. certain sounds give alert of coming danger. People are good to remember previous events by traits they see. E.g. hear ice cracking - realise you may fall through soon. Music rides on the same thing. Since music is frequently enjoyed in specific settings (e.g. festivities), it brings back those memories. Even if subconsciously.
ItsMe000001 9y ago
Anecdote time. Just for background story before I come to the music: I had chronic heavy metal poisoning diagnosed almost a decade ago (fortunately I had all relevant values - hair, blood, urine significantly elevated, usually chronic exposure is much harder to prove). Using chelators for years I got amazing recoveries, for example, for a few months each time after getting a chelator IV (DMPS, DMSA) the area around the side of my thyroid was "working". It was the side that was double-sied with a cold nodule, tested and seen decades ago and again just before the chelation treatments started (going to the endocrinologist again was part of my desperate search for answers that ended when I finally had the crazy idea it might be heavy metals, something only "crazy people" think, but which the lab results fortunately supported). The nodule had disappeared and the thyroid was normal size when I had the endocrinologist do another UV check because I had that crazy idea that what happened through chelation was just that miracle. Anyway, to the music (slowly). My brain for long periods of time was not very usable. Lots of "brain fog", stuff that I had firmly in my hands falling out, periods where I crashed into every obstacle in my flat for no apparent reason, hands shaking when I was holding my kindle (had to hold it with two hands), lots of word finding issues, extreme focus on details combined with an ability to let go - very disturbing, for example, when (without wanting to) you concentrate on a tiny insignificant detail and cannot think of anything else, this one thing races through your head for hours, and believe me, I'm not talking about anything reasonable or sane here, it is quite extreme. After a few years my brain was doing very very strange things, but with experience of years I knew it now was on the path to recovery. I needed LOTS of time, lying down, and the brain would do very strange things that I cannot describe but which are definitely not part of normal life. During that time the one thing that helped me was music. My brain needed music! The beat ("time"), the melody. Especially the timing aspect. Music was medicine. And I'm not talking about some "nice to have" psychological needs, I'm talking about a hard requirement. The right music held my brain together and helped it get or remain organized. Of course, I making that statement "by feel", I wasn't hooked up to an EEG, I have no proof, just my own experience. I did take several neuroscience courses (the best one the big one from Duke on Coursera by an excellent teacher[0]) and lots of anatomy, physiology, statistics), during the last few years, but obviously no scientific rigor was applied to the stories of my own experience. I didn't have music running all the time. in fact I loathe "background music". I needed it during certain times, especially during the first half of the day, and I would go for a walk and with good inner-ear headsets concentrate on the music. Having it play in the background when I'm doing something else would not have helped at all, quite the opposite, my ability to endure distractions was very limited during those years. I did (involuntarily, broken equipment) perform tests of how I would fare with and without the music. I felt much worse without. I'm not talking about the usual "helps you in a bad mood" kind of benefit. It's impossible to convey unfortunately, I never did and by now I don't have any more the need for that kind of help from music, so I suspect the vast majority of people won't ever experience something similar in their lives. These days I can easily not listen to music for days, but during the height of my "strange brain activities" I could not, as I said, music was medicine (for my brain). So the article does not surprise me because I had already concluded such a relationship, including why different people will react very differently. PS: By the way, I think we can all agree that the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is the best piece of music ever written, right? :-) [1] [0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience [1] https://youtu.be/5wOBNjgCg6M https://youtu.be/5wOBNjgCg6M (not actually my favorite peformance, but I could not find the one that I like most so easily)

127 points by miobrien 9y ago

An intriguing study of an evidently cross-cultural experience! The authors identify physical brain differences between those who report chills (intense emotions) when listening to music and those who do not. These effects are not attributable to gender, ethnicity, IQ, languages differences, years of musical training or personality!

1_player 9y ago

It's fascinating that music elicits strong effects on some people, and none whatsoever to others. When I hear someone say "I don't much care about music" it's so hard to understand, as personally I feel it's a direct plug to emotions like none other. I regularly experience frissons when listening to an interesting piece - I've always thought everybody did! - and it can change my mood dramatically and instantly. I always feel I should listen to MORE music, but it's such an all-encompassing activity I can't do much while music's around. Some people fall asleep to music, and my brain instead just goes into (positive) overdrive. EDIT: an anecdote about frissons: ages ago under the influence of strong psychedelics my frissons turned into multiple intense full body orgasms-like waves of pleasure, and it was clearly related to the music I was listening to, the relationship between instruments and the harmony and movement of dissonant sounds to final resolution. Such an amazing, transcendent experience I'll remember all my life. I've never been able to listen to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain album again after that day. And all this has no clear value for survival? How did it evolve? Is there anything else we do, apart from appreciating "aesthetics", that has no survival reason?

Darthy 9y ago
Well, all art is basically things with no clear value for survival. You could even say that's the definition of it :-)
- osense 9y ago
  I disagree that art is limited to things which have no clear value for survival. People have decorated every-day objects in their surroundings for millennia. Survival-themed video games have an innate attractiveness to many of us. Some even seek out to make their homes as plain & functional as possible and call it an art movement — minimalism.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Imagine an art-free world. Everything would be as functional and utilitarian as possible, with zero design and decoration. Our world looks and sounds nothing like that. We put an incredible amount of effort into aesthetics. Virtually nothing is 100% utilitarian. Shape, colour, texture, and sound are all considered essential. None of that has direct survival value, but it clearly has such deep emotional benefits that most people would find it very hard to be happy or functional in a purely utilitarian world.
    - slfnflctd 9y ago
      This is hugely visible in architecture. There is a gray, rectangular building made of cinder blocks not far from here. The lighting is sufficient for all tasks needed, and its heating, cooling and drainage functionality is optimal. A more recently built structure used for a similar purpose sits a few blocks away. Several pointless curves, colors and contrasting materials were used in its design. Light is allowed in from overly large windows near the roof line, leading to wildly varying amounts of illumination in much of the interior. It does not heat and cool evenly. The landscaping is excessive and requires additional maintenance. Strangely, construction projects seem to be trending away from the former type of structure and toward the latter. Which building would you rather work in?
    - pishpash 9y ago
      In fact we reject purely utilitarian landscapes as, variously, alien, cold, robotic, or dystopic. More specific to music, it clearly has a unique value even within art. Multiple directors have said something to the effect that a movie doesn't work until the music is put in.
hudon 9y ago
> has no survival reason? This is going to sound crazy but maybe it does have a survival reason. In societies where music is enjoyed (all major societies today), music has the capacity to not only gather people but also have them experience a shared emotion or thought. Not only that, but music has the capacity to carry a story through time, from generation to generation, and thus the capacity to carry the morals of that story through time too. Maybe music is a way to disseminate important cultural information across a population and across time, and the societies that did not have music were weaker (eg. due to less shared morals across the society and across time) and therefore lost when they were confronted in battle by a society with music. If music is used in war to inspire courage in soldiers, perhaps it has a function beyond aesthetics and is actually used for survival, in a literal darwinian sense.
- 1_player 9y ago
  Definitely makes sense. I imagine a prehistoric tribe dancing in trance around the fire, playing with improvised instruments. The human experience is so "lonely" - we all are separate entities in desperate need to belong - and sharing a common experience and emotion definitely bonds people. It would help glue a tribe together, which is decidedly a survival advantage. And the poor fella who didn't join in because he didn't care much for music would have been marked as an outcast :-)
  - aswanson 9y ago
    This concept reminds me of the "uni-mind",a concept from Jack Kirbys comic series "The Eternals", which I read as a kid.
  - stinos 9y ago
    I imagine a prehistoric tribe dancing in trance around the fire This is basically how I, and others, tend to feel when attending goa/acidcore/dnb (that one to a lesser extent though) parties. All together in front of the speakers, just us and the music, then the sun coming up. Pure bless. And that's even without drugs, or at least not a lot, go imagine what it's like with certain substances :P. I tried hard, but this doesn't work for me at all with more popular/known genres, presumably both because of music and audience, too much people just chatting instead of dancing etc, and also never got that connection with metal etc. Would love to see research on that.
jehlakj 9y ago
Could this be similar to attractiveness? Although there may be studies linking it to better “survival” genes, it doesn’t necessarily help with the situation at hand.
adamnemecek 9y ago
> And all this has no clear value for survival? Music very much creates a culture which is important for group cohesion which has evolutionary advantages.
pouta 9y ago
I will have to listen to that album today, thanks for sharing. Here's an album that has been very good to me lately: Masayoshi Takanaka - An Insatiable High LP Hope you enjoy it
montalbano 9y ago
Reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks at the moment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicophilia ), it sometimes misses the mark but does provide a little bit of insight into your questions.
lukas099 9y ago
"no clear value for survival" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection
- lukas099 9y ago
  Also, chanting, dancing, etc. could be a strong signal of social cohesion, making predators and other threats think twice about attacking. Look at the "haka" of the Māori and tell me you wouldn't be scared facing that.
- JoshMnem 9y ago
  > "Humans uniquely appreciate aesthetics, experiencing pleasurable responses to complex stimuli that confer no clear intrinsic value for survival." It seems to me like music has a clear value for survival. Music is a type of cultural transmission (memory technique), and humans do sexually select for musical ability (ask a musician).[1] Groups that sexually selected for the ability to transmit oral knowledge through generations (via memorization, including things like meter, rhythms, melody, and rhyming) probably had a greater chance of survival. Before writing, people stored their cultures' encyclopedias in their minds, which often involved music in some way.[2] Cultures also organize around music, people follow the ideas of musicians, etc. Napoleon made some interesting comments about the active use of music in leadership and group behavior.[3] A prehistoric human with an ability to organize groups through music probably had a higher survival/reproduction rate in general, or at least benefited the group through organizational techniques. [1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735613482025 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735613482025 [2] https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/popular-science/The-Memory-Code-Lynne-Kelly-9781760291327 https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/pop... [3] "Of all the fine arts, music is the one which has the most influence on the emotions, and it is this influence which the legislator must encourage most warmly. A piece of "moral" music, one by the hand of a master, cannot fail to touch the heart and has much more influence than a good, "moral" piece of writing, which moves the mind but has no effect on our behaviour."
  - nimrod0 9y ago
jug 9y ago
Same; I have called music a shortcut to emotions.

extralego 9y ago

If visual aesthetics enter through the front door, music flows through the side window you always leave unlocked. What music lacks in observability, compared to visual arts, is made up for in low level access. I find it uncanny to even consider the meaning of achieving objective measurements along these lines. Very exciting for sure.

laythea 9y ago

I have a theory that music feeds other "essential for survival" sub-systems in the brain, in manners we don't understand. Don't just take a shallow look.

mantas 9y ago
E.g. certain sounds give alert of coming danger. People are good to remember previous events by traits they see. E.g. hear ice cracking - realise you may fall through soon. Music rides on the same thing. Since music is frequently enjoyed in specific settings (e.g. festivities), it brings back those memories. Even if subconsciously.

ItsMe000001 9y ago

Anecdote time. Just for background story before I come to the music: I had chronic heavy metal poisoning diagnosed almost a decade ago (fortunately I had all relevant values - hair, blood, urine significantly elevated, usually chronic exposure is much harder to prove). Using chelators for years I got amazing recoveries, for example, for a few months each time after getting a chelator IV (DMPS, DMSA) the area around the side of my thyroid was "working". It was the side that was double-sied with a cold nodule, tested and seen decades ago and again just before the chelation treatments started (going to the endocrinologist again was part of my desperate search for answers that ended when I finally had the crazy idea it might be heavy metals, something only "crazy people" think, but which the lab results fortunately supported). The nodule had disappeared and the thyroid was normal size when I had the endocrinologist do another UV check because I had that crazy idea that what happened through chelation was just that miracle. Anyway, to the music (slowly). My brain for long periods of time was not very usable. Lots of "brain fog", stuff that I had firmly in my hands falling out, periods where I crashed into every obstacle in my flat for no apparent reason, hands shaking when I was holding my kindle (had to hold it with two hands), lots of word finding issues, extreme focus on details combined with an ability to let go - very disturbing, for example, when (without wanting to) you concentrate on a tiny insignificant detail and cannot think of anything else, this one thing races through your head for hours, and believe me, I'm not talking about anything reasonable or sane here, it is quite extreme. After a few years my brain was doing very very strange things, but with experience of years I knew it now was on the path to recovery. I needed LOTS of time, lying down, and the brain would do very strange things that I cannot describe but which are definitely not part of normal life. During that time the one thing that helped me was music. My brain needed music! The beat ("time"), the melody. Especially the timing aspect. Music was medicine. And I'm not talking about some "nice to have" psychological needs, I'm talking about a hard requirement. The right music held my brain together and helped it get or remain organized. Of course, I making that statement "by feel", I wasn't hooked up to an EEG, I have no proof, just my own experience. I did take several neuroscience courses (the best one the big one from Duke on Coursera by an excellent teacher[0]) and lots of anatomy, physiology, statistics), during the last few years, but obviously no scientific rigor was applied to the stories of my own experience. I didn't have music running all the time. in fact I loathe "background music". I needed it during certain times, especially during the first half of the day, and I would go for a walk and with good inner-ear headsets concentrate on the music. Having it play in the background when I'm doing something else would not have helped at all, quite the opposite, my ability to endure distractions was very limited during those years. I did (involuntarily, broken equipment) perform tests of how I would fare with and without the music. I felt much worse without. I'm not talking about the usual "helps you in a bad mood" kind of benefit. It's impossible to convey unfortunately, I never did and by now I don't have any more the need for that kind of help from music, so I suspect the vast majority of people won't ever experience something similar in their lives. These days I can easily not listen to music for days, but during the height of my "strange brain activities" I could not, as I said, music was medicine (for my brain). So the article does not surprise me because I had already concluded such a relationship, including why different people will react very differently. PS: By the way, I think we can all agree that the Russian Dance from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake is the best piece of music ever written, right? :-) [1] [0] https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience https://www.coursera.org/learn/medical-neuroscience [1] https://youtu.be/5wOBNjgCg6M https://youtu.be/5wOBNjgCg6M (not actually my favorite peformance, but I could not find the one that I like most so easily)