The attraction of the unexpected

I've always been fascinated by why people like particular pieces of music and not others.

It's extremely personal, and also rather mysterious and unpredictable.  This is why I find it funny when someone asks if I like classical music.  That's a little like saying, "Do you like food?"  I love some classical music, and some of it does nothing for me at all.  But what's eternally fascinating to me is that two people who are alike in a great many respects can come to completely opposite opinions about music.  Take my buddy Dave, for example, who is passionately fond of the Romantic composers -- Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky.  I, on the other hand, have never heard a piece of music by Brahms I've liked -- my tastes run more to the very early (Tallis, Susato, Praetorius, Palestrina, Bach) and the much more recent (Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Vaughan Williams, Holst).  If I had to pick one very favorite piece of music it would be Stravinsky's Firebird:

I'm hard-pressed to say why, however.  And what's the connection between that one, and the piece that had me bawling -- at age seventeen, no less -- the first time I heard it, Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis?:

One fascinating piece of the puzzle was discovered five years ago, when two researchers at Wesleyan University, Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui, found that people have strong physical reactions when listening to music they love, and if you hook them up to a fMRI or PET scanner, you find that at the climax of the piece of music, the same parts of the brain light up as when they have an orgasm.

No wonder we love music so much.

That whole tension/resolution thing, with its obvious parallels to sexual response, is pretty universal to music of all sorts.  I remember this being demonstrated to me when I was in the college chorus, and the director was telling us about dynamic tension in chord progression and resolution to the tonic, and demonstrated by going to the piano and playing us a line from the Christmas carol "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."  He played, "Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn."

And stopped.

About a dozen people sung out "KING" in tones that clearly communicated, "Don't leave us hanging, bro!"

So tension/resolution is part of it.  But just this week, a paper was published in Current Biology that added another piece to the puzzle.  Apparently, we also tend to like music that surprises us -- that takes us on a path that we didn't expect.

In "Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity," neuroscientists Vincent K.M. Cheung, Lars Meyer, and Stefan Koelsch (of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences), Peter M.C. Harrison and Marcus T. Pearce (of the Queen Mary University of London), and John-Dylan Haynes (of the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin) found that we're grabbed by twists and turns we didn't see coming.

The authors write:

Listening to music often evokes intense emotions.  Recent research suggests that musical pleasure comes from positive reward prediction errors, which arise when what is heard proves to be better than expected.  Central to this view is the engagement of the nucleus accumbens—a brain region that processes reward expectations—to pleasurable music and surprising musical events...  Here, we demonstrate that pleasure varies nonlinearly as a function of the listener’s uncertainty when anticipating a musical event, and the surprise it evokes when it deviates from expectations.

That certainly agrees with my experience.  I love being surprised, and my favorite music (in any genre) often contains unexpected or startling rhythmic patterns.  Take, for example, the brilliant "Ring Out, Solstice Bells," by Jethro Tull:

I've played Balkan music for years -- with mutant time signatures like 11/16, 22/16, and (no lie) 25/16 -- and I'm damned if I can figure out what time signature this song is in.

And I love that.

My passion for music has been with me for a very, very long time.  My mother used to love to tell the story about how I pestered her incessantly (I couldn't have been more than three or four years old) to learn how to use the record player so I wouldn't have to ask her every time I wanted to listen to music (which was basically all the time).  She finally acquiesced -- and she was impressed that I cared enough about the music that I never damaged either the record player or one of the fragile, easily-scratched vinyl LPs that were all we had back then.  And there was one piece of music I played over and over and over and over, and my mom couldn't figure out (and of course, at that point I couldn't articulate) why I loved it so much.  This was the tail-end of the Big Band era, and my parents had several LPs from Lawrence Welk's band.  Most of them were "meh," in my opinion, but there was one that was different.

It's called "Scarlett O'Hara."  Listen for the completely unexpected key change -- not at all characteristic of Big Band music -- from A Major to (of all the weird keys...) B Major that happens a couple of times.  I used to get a visceral thrill from that moment, even at the tender age of four.

My favorite example of surprise, though, comes from classical music.  I distinctly remember the first time I listened to Bach's magnificent Mass in B Minor, and the sweet, sedate aria "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" drew to a close, and without any warning I was launched forward into the breathtaking chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu:"

Talk about a brain orgasm.

So we're gradually figuring out some possible reasons for that mysterious phenomenon -- musical taste.

Since I'm on a roll and having way too much fun roaming around YouTube listening to music, I think I'll end with two more of my favorites, one rock and one classical.  I don't know if there's anything similar about them -- see if you can figure it out.  For now, I'm just enjoying listening.

The Kongos, "Come With Me Now:"

  

Jean Sibelius, Lemminkainen's Return:

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

Whispers, tingles, and brain orgasms

My wife sent me a link to an article a couple of days ago about a phenomenon that I'd heard a bit about, but never really researched.

It's called an "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response," ASMR for short.  The nickname, though, is more telling; people call it a "brain orgasm."

Of course, on some level, all orgasms are about what happen in the brain.  fMRI studies of people during orgasm show that during arousal and climax people experience a surge of neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphin, as well as the "cuddle hormone" oxytocin (explaining why most of us feel snuggly after doing the deed, not to mention sleepy).  Without a brain response, there's no arousal, and I think just about everyone can think of times when what was going on in their brains -- worry, fatigue, frustration, anger -- interfered with their desire, or even ability, to have sex.

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]

It brings up the question, however, of who is volunteering for those studies.  I mean, I'm as comfortable in my skin as the next guy, and in fact in my twenties would have been voted the captain of the co-ed skinnydipping team.  But doing a solo performance while hooked up to a fMRI, with lots of people wearing white lab jackets and holding clipboards and peering at me and taking notes, gives new meaning to the phrase, "no way, José."  I mean, if getting off with an audience turns you on, more power to you, but even with a significant cash incentive I don't think I'd participate.

But I digress.

Anyhow, my point is, there have been a good many studies of the neurochemistry of the human sexual response, so this ASMR thing is interesting because apparently for some people, hearing certain noises (or, less commonly, seeing particular images) triggers a brain response that is very similar to orgasm but without the involvement of your naughty bits.  Here's how one person describes it:

While watching videos of space... a tingling spreads through my scalp as the camera pulls back to show the marble of the earth.  It comes in a wave, like a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of my spine and leaving behind a sense of gratitude and wholeness.

The similarity to an actual orgasm is obvious.  But why was it happening?

Turns out, we don't know.  Also unknown is why the people who experience ASMR are (1) nearly all female, and (2) have particular triggers that are specific to them.  The article in the New York Times (linked above) said that there are five hundred new ASMR-inducing videos uploaded to YouTube every day, which I suppose is understandable given what they can allegedly do to you.  Most of them are some combination of people whispering, rubbing fabric or combs or the like across microphones, stroking rough surfaces with fingernails, crunching paper, brushing hair, or chewing food.

This last one was a little puzzling right from the get-go.  A lot of people hate the sound of others chewing.  My older son, for example, was as a teenager really sensitive to sounds like that, and became nearly homicidal when he was around someone eating Doritos.  But apparently not everyone responds that way, and some people feel exactly the opposite.

So I was intrigued, and got onto YouTube and checked out a couple of the videos.  Here's a typical one:

 I went into it figuring I wouldn't respond, given that I'm male, also was a little dubious from the outset, and...

... sure enough, nothing, or at least nothing positive.  In fact, I found the noises intensely annoying.  Not only was I not soothed or tingly, after about 45 seconds I wanted to climb out of my skin.  So if you watched the video and had a brain orgasm or whatever, I'm happy for you, but that was certainly not my experience.

It does bring up the fascinating question of how the same stimuli can provoke entirely different responses in different people.  And this applies outside of the realm of listening to people brush their hair, or even what specific things are a sexual turn-on; consider how unique people's reactions are to music.  My wife and I, for example, both love music, but what particular pieces of music grab us are completely different.  When I find a piece of music I love, it definitely gives me chills, and has been known to bring me to actual tears.  The first time I heard Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for example, I ended up sobbing, and couldn't have explained why.

Now there's something I'd be willing to do while hooked up to a fMRI machine.

My point, though, is that these kinds of emotional and physical reactions are pretty common in humans, as is the fact that what specifically triggers them is highly personal.  I think we're a long, long way from figuring out why that is, though, even on the level of being able to comprehend as individuals why a particular trigger is a turn-on for us.

In any case, the whole ASMR thing is curious enough that it deserves more research.  It's understandable that scientists have been reluctant to do so, I suppose; both the variability of response, and the general oddity of the phenomenon, probably pushes researchers to look into phenomena that are more likely to get grant approval.  (In fact, the New York Times article said that there have only been ten academic papers addressing ASMR ever published.)

But given the popularity of the videos, there has to be something to it, and it'd be cool to find out what that something is.  So even if the sound of someone whispering or twisting bubble wrap or chewing gum doesn't turn me on, I'd sure like to know why it has that effect on others.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one; Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton.  The book is based upon a website of the same name that looks at curious, beautiful, bizarre, frightening, or fascinating places in the world -- the sorts of off-the-beaten-path destinations that you might pass by without ever knowing they exist.  (Recent entries are an astronomical observatory in Zweibrücken, Germany that has been painted to look like R2-D2; the town of Story, Indiana that is for sale for a cool $3.8 million; and the Michelin-rated kitchen run by Lewis Georgiades -- at the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera Research Station, which only gets a food delivery once a year.)

This book collects the best of the Atlas Obscura sites, organizes them by continent, and tells you about their history.  It's a must-read for anyone who likes to travel -- preferably before you plan your next vacation.

(If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!)