
Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016) - miobrien
https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/11/6/884/2223400
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1_player
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?

~~~
hudon
> 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
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 :-)

~~~
stinos
_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.

------
extralego
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.

------
vixen99
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!

------
laythea
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
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
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)

~~~
amag
> 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?

As great as it is, the one that always gives me the chills the article spoke
of is the third movement in Vangelis Mythodea[1].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AHAX_QGHTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AHAX_QGHTU)

~~~
p1esk
Wow, I didn’t like it at all. Stopped it half way because it was boring. What
do you like about it?

