Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
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Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#2An 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!
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#3It'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?
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#4It'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 alw…
Well, all art is basically things with no clear value for survival. You could even say that's the definition of it :-)
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#5It'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 alw…
> 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.
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#6It'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 alw…
Well, all art is basically things with no clear value for survival. You could even say that's the definition of it :-)
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.
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#7If 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.
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#8It'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 alw…
> 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 t…
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 :-)
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
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 d…
This concept reminds me of the "uni-mind",a concept from Jack Kirbys comic series "The Eternals", which I read as a kid.
Re: Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music (2016)
#10I 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.