Speaking to the wind

A scarily long list of friends who have been coping with serious illnesses in the last six months has brought home to me how fragile life is.

We all know that, of course, but usually it's in a purely theoretical sense.  We're aware that any day could be our last, any time we see a loved one might be goodbye.  But somehow, we rarely ever act that way.  We -- and I very much include myself in this assessment -- waste time in pointless and joyless activities, squander potential, treat the people we meet cavalierly.  In general, we act as if we have forever and don't have any reason to treat the time we have now as our most precious possession.

It's a sad truth that often when we find out our error, it's too late.  The time for the chances we could have taken is past, the person we cared for has moved out of our orbit (either temporarily or permanently), the opportunity to apologize and make amends for a wrong we committed has long since passed.  It's sad, but its ubiquity points to it all being part of the human condition.  The peculiar magnetism of books and movies where you can reverse the clock and fix past mistakes -- like Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future and the devastatingly poignant Doctor Who episode "Turn Left," as well as my own novel Lock & Key -- points to how universal this kind of longing is.

The Japanese have come up with two quirky, oddly beautiful ways of dealing with this.  The first was the brainchild of a garden designer named Ituro Sasaki, who in 2010 found out that a beloved cousin was suffering from inoperable cancer.  When the cousin died three months later, Sasaki designed a beautiful garden in his honor, and the centerpiece was...

... a phone booth.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Matthew Komatsu (https://longreads.com/2019/03/11/after-the-tsunami/)]

He calls it the "Wind Phone" (風の電話, Kaze no Denwa) because the telephone inside is "connected to nothing but the wind."  He wanted to be able to talk to his cousin, even knowing he couldn't respond, and after finishing the installation Sasaki spent hours sitting in this lovely spot telling his cousin about all the beauty he was seeing, and all the things he regretted not saying while he was alive.  He didn't think his cousin was actually listening, but still felt it absolutely necessary to say it all out loud.  "Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki explained, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind."

Then, in 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake killed almost twenty thousand people in the region, including twelve hundred in Ōtsuchi, Sasaki's home town -- around ten percent of the population.  This moved him to open his garden and the Wind Phone to the public, and it has since been visited by over thirty thousand people.

As strange as it sounds, it has become a place where people find an anodyne for the twin tragedies of human existence -- regret and grief.

The other one is located in Mitoyo, on Awashima Island in Kagawa Prefecture.  It's called the "Missing Post Office" (漂流郵便局, Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku), and was the creation of artist Saya Kubota.  Kubota came up with idea when she visited the island looking for inspiration for the Setouchi International Art Festival.  She was passing the Mitoyo Post Office and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and thought, "How did I wash up here?"  The idea struck her that we all are caught up in currents not of our own making, and sometimes end up very far from where we intended -- for good or bad.  "I wanted to create a space where people could experience the same sensation I did," Kubota said.

So she designed a small building that looked like a real post office, the purpose of which was to receive letters and post cards from people about whatever they most wanted to say, but had never had the chance.  It succeeded beyond Kubota's wildest dream.  The Missing Post Office receives almost four thousand deliveries a month, in which people talk about their first loves, dearly missed relatives and friends, regrets, hopes, dreams.  There have been messages directed at ancestors or future descendants.  Some people even send their favorite possessions, along with a description of why the items are so important.  Some are anonymous, but many are signed; more than one has written about how comforting it was to be able to speak their truth, even knowing that it can't change the past.  Kubota displays the letters and postcards, and visitors to the Missing Post Office have described how emotionally cathartic it is to read about what others have experienced and written about -- and to recognize that they are not alone in their own feelings.

The Missing Post Office, Mitoyo, Kagawa Prefecture, Japan [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nozomi-N700, Missing Post Office building（Japan, Kagawa Prefecture Mitoyo Takuma cho Awashima）, CC BY-SA 4.0]

If you would like to write your own message to the Missing Post Office, the address is c/o Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku, 1317-2 Takumacho Awashima, Mitoyo Kagawa 769-1108, Japan.

While the idea of being able to go back and fix past mistakes is attractive, time's arrow appears to point in one direction only.  "The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyám, "and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."  Correcting past wrongs, saying what we should have said to the people we love, and making different decisions at critical junctures (an astonishing number of which we never recognized as critical at the time) will always be out of reach.  But maybe there is some solace to be gained by saying what we need to say now, even if it's just spoken to the wind through disconnected phone, or written on a postcard and sent away to a distant island to be read and wept over by strangers.

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Music of the heart

I've wondered for years why certain pieces of music elicit such a powerful emotional response.

Partly that's because I react powerfully myself, and kind of always have.  I vividly remember being about fifteen years old and being moved to tears the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:

Well, "moved to tears" is kind of an understatement.  "Sobbing" or "bawling" would be closer to the mark.

Then, there's the first time I heard the moment when the sedate, tranquil "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" in J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor suddenly launches into the wild, triumphant trumpets and chorus "Cum Sancto Spiritu":

This one elicited a different response, although just as intense.  I was lying on my sofa with headphones on, and when that transition happened I felt like I had been bodily lifted into the air.  These experiences were what prompted me to weave both of these pieces of music -- and a number of others -- into the narrative of my novel The Chains of Orion, as experienced by the character of the kind-hearted, music-loving robot Quine.  One of my coolest experiences as a writer was being told by a reader that he'd been so intrigued to find out why I'd chosen the pieces I'd used as a framework for Quine's story that every time another one was mentioned, he'd sit and listen to it -- and doing this had really enriched his experience of reading the book.

So music can generate some powerful emotions, but what's curious to me is how differently people can react.  I also recall a less-pleasant incident when as a teenager I got into a riproaring argument with my mom (who was one of those people who simply couldn't bear someone having a different opinion than her) over whether Mason Williams's brilliant guitar piece Classical Gas was melancholy or not.  I find the minor key riffs -- especially after the bright major-key brass passage in the middle -- to be deeply wistful, nostalgic, just this side of sad.  My mom's argument was basically "it's happy because it's fast," which to this day I don't understand.  (Although if I were to have the same conversation today, I'd be much quicker to let it go and say "okay, your opinion is your own."  Maybe my mom wasn't the only one who couldn't stand being contradicted.)

While it's still a mystery why some pieces of music can affect certain people viscerally and leave others completely cold, a paper that came out last week in the journal iScience has taken at least the first step toward cataloguing how those experiences are perceived.  A team led by Tatsuya Daikoku of the University of Tokyo used the impressions of over five hundred listeners to different chord changes to see if there was any commonality in the sensations those created.

And there was.  The authors write:

The relationship between bodily sensations and emotions can be elucidated from the perspective of the brain’s predictive processing.  Predictive processing operates on the principle that our brain constantly anticipates and predicts sensory inputs based on prior experiences.  When there’s a mismatch between the predicted and actual sensory input, a prediction error is generated.  Interoception, which refers to the brain’s perception of internal bodily states, plays a pivotal role in this context.  The brain generates emotions by minimizing prediction errors between the anticipatory signals derived from its internal model and the sensory signals through exteroceptive and interoceptive sensations.  Within the framework of music, when our musical predictions are not met, it can lead to a visceral, interoceptive response.  For instance, if we anticipate a musical chord progression based on our prior experiences and the music deviates from this expectation, it can generate a prediction error.  This error might manifest as a sudden change in heartbeat or a rush of emotions associated with surprise, both of which are interoceptive responses.

This certainly describes my mental levitation during Bach's Mass in B Minor.  

I wonder, though, how much of that sense of unmet anticipation is dependent upon the musical tradition we've grown up with.  I get together with two musician friends every couple of weeks to play Balkan music -- a tradition not only with chord progressions that can sound strange to Western European ears, but with time signatures heavily favoring odd numbers.  (One piece we play has the time signature -- I kid you not -- 25/16.)  So for example, would the progressions in this lovely and haunting tune sound unsurprising -- and therefore less poignant -- to someone who grew up in rural Macedonia?

In any case, that was beyond the scope of the study, but it would be an interesting next step to include volunteers from cultures with very different musical traditions.

So I think I'll wrap this up.  Maybe put on some music.  Stravinsky's Firebird never fails to pick me up by the tail and whirl me around a bit.  On the other hand, for an emotional rollercoaster, there's nothing like Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, which takes us from the joyful gallop of the first movement directly into the wrenching pathos of the second.  Or maybe I'll opt for the eerie atmosphere of Debussy's piano piece The Drowned Cathedral.

So much music, so little time.

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Music of the heart

A couple of days ago I was in my car, listening to Sirius XM Satellite Radio's station Symphony Hall, and was delighted when one of my favorite pieces of music came on -- Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

What has always struck me as marvelous about this symphony is the contrast between the first and second movements.  The first movement is one of the most joyous pieces of music I know, a galloping romp that never fails to make me smile.  Then... the second movement begins.  It's quiet, dark, deeply melancholic, achingly beautiful.  It brings home what a genius Beethoven was, able to take us from one emotional extreme to the other in a heartbeat.

I've always reacted to music emotionally, ever since I was four years old and begged to be allowed to put my parents' vinyl records on the turntable and play them.  My mom, not trusting my capacity to handle them carefully, at first refused, but when it became clear that I would keep asking till I got my way, she finally caved and taught me how to operate it.

To my credit, I never so much as scratched a single record.  Even at that age, I recognized that they were far too precious to me to mishandle.  I did, however, play certain records over and over and over, undoubtedly making my mother question her decision to teach me how to use the record player.  Interestingly, I never had any interest in children's music -- not that my parents had much of that in any case -- the pieces I fell in love with as a child were Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Dvorak's Symphony #9: From the New World.  I remember being blown away when I was about twelve, and had a little portable AM/FM radio my grandmother gave me, and stumbled on the one radio station near where I lived that had a classical music program once a week.  I was idly flipping channels, and -- all of a sudden -- the opening chords of the first chorus of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D came pouring out of the little speakers.

Three minutes later, when the piece ended, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom with tears streaming down my face.  It was, truly, a transformative experience -- so much so that I worked it, very nearly verbatim, into my novel The Hand of the Hunter.

But I didn't know then, and still don't know, why some music resonates so strongly with me, and other pieces don't generate any emotional response at all.  I was spellbound when I discovered Stravinsky's Firebird when I was seventeen; it's still my very favorite piece of music.  On the other hand, I've heard music-loving friends rave about the symphonies of Brahms, and I can say unequivocally that I've never heard anything by Brahms that has ever generated more than a "meh" reaction from me.

Why?  I don't think anyone could answer that.

What is certain is that music is, for most of us, a deeply emotional experience.  And two studies that just came out this week support the conclusion that this response is very likely to be innate.

The first, which appeared in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is perhaps not that surprising.  It studied the stress levels and mood of over seven hundred volunteers, and found that listening to music improved mood and reduced stress, pretty much across the board.  Most hearteningly, the stress reduction was greatest in those who registered the highest stress levels before the study.

Like I said, nothing too earthshattering.  But the second is absolutely astonishing.  A paper in Psychological Studies showed that newborns, when played music judged by listeners as "happy" or "sad," responded differently -- and that it seems to be independent of tempo ("happy" music generally having a faster rhythm than "sad" music).  Newborns listening to the tunes judged as "happy" showed greater focus, calmer facial expressions, reduced heartbeat, and less movement of the hands and feet; "sad" music produced no such effect.

So the hallmarks of a happy piece of music -- things like being in a major key, less harmonic dissonance, and wide pitch contours -- are markers we either learn prenatally, or else are (amazing as it may seem) hard-wired into our neural network.

I said earlier that this was "astonishing," but honestly, it shouldn't be.  Like I said, I've responded emotionally to music for as long as I can recall, and although my parents had a decent collection of records, neither of them played an instrument (nor made any real efforts to expose me to music).  Whatever capacity I had for music appreciation was already there somewhere.  And the fact that the link between emotion and music is so innate is pretty incredible.  I have to wonder what evolutionary purpose it serves.  We certainly get a lot of information about others' emotional states through the pitch contours of their speech; think about what it sounds like when an actor portrays a "robotic voice," for example.  The contours flatten out, leaving behind a monotonous, mechanical stream of words.

But is this really what drives our emotional response to music?  It's only a guess.  What's certain is that the current research explains why for so many of us, music is a critical piece of our lives -- something we return to again and again for solace, comfort, and emotional release.

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Songs of the heart

When I think about what my favorite song lyrics are, they can generally be sorted into two categories:

1.  Heartwrenchingly poignant/sad

examples:

"No Bad Days" by Bastille

"39" by Queen

"I Will Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie

"Dance in the Graveyards" by Delta Rae

"100 Years" by Five for Fighting

 2.  Relentlessly upbeat and cheerful

examples:

"I Was Born" by Hanson

"Try Everything" by Shakira

"Geronimo" by Sheppard

"Good to Be Alive" by Andy Grammer

"The Sound of Sunshine" by Michael Franti & Spearhead

I've often wondered what makes certain music captivate some people and not others.  For myself, I suspect the resonance these songs have for me is because my own mood can oscillate between the high peaks and the valleys pretty quickly, and -- especially when I'm down in the low points -- a good cry can help process some of those emotions.

To be fair, though, I'm one of those people who cries as easily at happy or touching moments as I do at sad ones.  It's why I'm a misery to sit next to in the movie theater, because while everyone else is smiling, I'm sitting there sobbing, choking out, "B...b...but it's just so beautiful!"

*brief pause to blow nose loudly*

My own mild neuroses notwithstanding, it's interesting to consider what triggers the surges of emotion most of us feel when we hear a song we really connect to.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the International Association for Relationship Research that looked at this topic -- specifically, how the lyrics of favorite love songs reflected an individual's own approach to romantic relationships.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kashirin Nickolai, Music listener, CC BY 2.0]

The first finding, which is perhaps unsurprising, is that people who are attachment-avoidant tend to like songs that describe an avoidant approach to relationships.  (You have to wonder if a favorite is Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats.")  Similarly, people with attachment anxiety are more attracted to songs that reflect their own insecurities about romance.

More interesting, though, were the overall trends in music over the past few decades.  From 1946 to 2015, the researchers found a steady increase in song lyrics reflecting social disengagement.  In the 1940s and 1950s the vast majority of lyrics that dealt with the topic of love were idealizations, happily-ever-after stories about Finding True Love And Never Letting Go.  Even the oddly popular subgenre Dave Barry calls "Teen Death Songs," while undeniably morbid, are really about how perfect and beautiful love is.  ("Last Kiss" by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers comes to mind, which was later -- weirdly -- covered by Pearl Jam.)

But as the years went on, lyrics about romance became more complex and nuanced -- and darker.  For example, consider Pink's song "Try," which is not only a song about how difficult love can be, but has some of the most stunning choreography of any music video I've ever seen, reflecting perfectly the clasp-and-crash relationship the lyrics describe.

A friend of mine and I were just talking about how disconnected we've all become, and how hard that is -- that so much of the depression a lot of us experience is due to disengagement and loneliness.  It's no wonder that gets reflected in the music we make, and the music that resonates with us.

Music is a powerful force in so many of our lives.  It touches us at a completely visceral level, and allows us to access incredibly intense emotions that are often walled off from us by the strictures and demands of daily life.  It's like a pressure valve for our hearts.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm gonna put on some songs.  Maybe I'll put my iTunes on "shuffle."  A sure way to get musical whiplash, but hey, it's all part of the experience.

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The sound of music

One of the most important things in my life is music, and to me, music is all about evoking emotion.

A beautiful and well-performed song or piece of music connects to me (and, I suspect, to many people) on a completely visceral level.  I have laughed with delight and sobbed helplessly many times over music -- sometimes for reasons I can barely understand with my cognitive mind.

And what is most curious to me is that the same bit of music doesn't necessarily evoke the same emotion in different people.  My wife, another avid music lover, often has a completely neutral reaction to tunes that have me enraptured (and vice versa).  I vividly recall arguing with my mother when I was perhaps fifteen years old, before I recognized what a fruitless endeavor arguing with my mother was, over whether Mason Williams' gorgeous solo guitar piece "Classical Gas" was sad or not.  (My opinion is that it's incredibly wistful and melancholy, despite being lightning-fast and technically difficult.  But listen to the recording, and judge for yourself.)

Which brings us back to yesterday's subject of artificial intelligence, albeit a different facet of it.  Recently there has been a lot of work done in writing software that composes music; composer David Cope has invented a program called "Emily Howell" that is capable of producing listenable music in a variety of styles, including Bach, Rachmaninoff, Barber, Copland, and Chopin.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons http://www.mutopiaproject.org, BWV 773 sheet music 01 cropped, CC BY-SA 2.5]

"Listenable," of course, isn't the same as "brilliant" or "emotionally evocative."  As Chris Wilson, author of the Slate article I linked, concluded, "I don't expect Emily Howell to ever replace the best human composers...  Yet even at this early moment in AC research, Emily Howell is already a better composer than 99 percent of the population.  Whether she or any other computer can bridge that last 1 percent, making complete works with lasting significance to music, is anyone's guess."

Ryan Stables, a professor of audio engineering and acoustics at Birmingham City University in England has, perhaps, crossed another bit of the remaining 1%.  Stables and his team have created a music processing software that is capable of recognizing, and tweaking, recordings of music to alter its emotional content.

"We put [pitch, rhythm, and texture] together into a higher level representation," Stables told a reporter for BBC.  "[Until now] computers represented music only as digital data.  You might use your computer to play the Beach Boys, but a computer can't understand that there's a guitar or drums, it doesn't ever go surfing so it doesn't really know what that means, so it has no idea that it's the Beach Boys -- it's just numbers, ones and zeroes...  We take computers… and we try and give them the capabilities to understand and process music in the way a human being would."

In practice, what this has meant is feeding in musical tracks to the program, along with descriptors such as "warm" or "dreamy" or "spiky."  The software then makes guesses from those tags about what features of music led to those descriptions -- what, for example, all of the tracks labeled "dreamy" have in common.  Just like children learning to train their ears, the program becomes better and better at these guesses as it has more data.  Then once trained, the program can add those same effects to digital music recordings in post-production.

Note that like Cope's Emily Howell software, Stables is not claiming that his program can supersede music as performed by gifted human musicians.  "These are quite simple effects and would be very intuitive for the amateur musician," Stables said.  "There are similar commercially available technologies but they don't take a semantic input into account as this does."

Film composer Rael Jones, who has used Stables' software, concurs.  "Plug-ins don't create a sound, they modify a sound; it is a small part of the process.  The crucial thing is the sound input -- for example you could never make a glockenspiel sound warm no matter how you processed it, and a very poorly recorded instrument cannot be fixed by using plug-ins post-recording.  But for some amateur musicians this could be an interesting educational tool to use as a starting point for exploring sound."

What I wonder, of course, is how long it will take before Cope, Stables, and others like them begin to combine forces and produce a truly creative piece of musical software, that is capable of composing and performing emotionally charged, technically brilliant music.  And at that point, will we have crossed a line into some fundamentally different realm, where creativity is no longer the sole purview of humanity?  You have to wonder how that will change our perception of art, music, beauty, emotion... and of ourselves.  When you talk to people about artificial intelligence, you often hear them say that of course computers could never be creative, that however good they are at other skills, creativity has an ineffable quality that will never be replicated in a machine.

I wonder if that's true.

I find the possibility tremendously exciting, and a little scary.  As a musician, writer, and amateur potter/sculptor, who values creativity above most other human capacities, it's humbling to think that what I do might be replicable by something made out of circuits and relays.  But how astonishing it is to live in a time when we are getting the first glimpses of what is possible -- both for ourselves and for our creations.

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Talking to the animals

We just got back from a week-long trip to visit friends in Seattle, which meant boarding our two dogs with a local kennel.  We know and trust them -- we've used them for years -- and they love our dogs, quirks and all.  So we can leave them and be sure that they're in good hands.

Guinness, for the most part, has no problem with kenneling.  He knows he's going to get treats and play time, so for him it's kind of like sleep-away summer camp.  He jumps right into the car like it's going to be a great big adventure.

Cleo, on the other hand.

Our little Shiba Inu rescue was caged during much of her four years with an abusive breeder, and she has an absolute terror of being locked up.  She's relaxed considerably since we got her in December of 2021 -- especially once we installed a dog door so she can go in and out of our big fenced back yard whenever she wants -- but she still freaks out when the door closes behind her.  And she gets very, very wary when she knows we're going to pick her up and put her in the car (for example, on trips to the vet).  She's really snuggly and friendly if it's on her terms -- but if she knows she's going to be restrained, good freakin' luck.

Cleo in a calm moment

So we've tried everything we can think of to (1) lower the stress surrounding the situation, and (2) make it easier to get her when we absolutely have to.  Bribing her with food barely works; she's the least food-motivated dog I've ever met.  Calm talk has zero effect.  And my wife pointed out to me that my tightly-wound personality comes through in my voice, that if I say in as friendly and non-threatening a manner as I can, "Hey, Cleo, c'm'ere!  Want some cheese?" she not only isn't gonna respond to the bribe, she knows that I'm up to something.

I've tried whatever I can, but I don't seem to be able to help having it show when I'm anxious about something, like when we have to drop the dogs off at the kennel by 9 AM, and it's 8:45, and we're chasing Cleo all around the back yard.  At first, I was a little reluctant to believe that Cleo is really that sensitive to subtleties in my tone of voice, but after a few frustrating hour-long battles to come closer to her than ten feet, I have to admit Carol's got a point.

And some research out of the University of Copenhagen that appeared last week in the journal BMC - Biology bears out her contention that domestic animals are way better at picking up on vocal tone than anyone thought.  It's an odd claim, when you think about it; why should domesticated animals -- even ones like dogs, who have been in association with humans for tens of thousands of years -- recognize human social signals?  Even between closely-related primate species, the same signal can mean entirely different things.  For example, smiling is a sign of friendliness amongst humans, but smiling to a chimp is basically baring the teeth, and is considered an indicator of aggression or fear.

But the research seems unequivocal.  And they weren't even working with dogs; they primarily worked with pigs and horses.  They even controlled for the possibility that animals might learn certain words and have associations (positive or negative) that come along with them, something that is certainly true of most dogs.  (Say "do you want to play fetch?" to Guinness and he immediately turns into the canine ping-pong ball.)  What the researchers did was to hire a trained actor and gave him various gibberish phrases, with the instruction to speak them in a variety of differing tones.  They then recorded the animals' reactions on a lot of benchmarks -- ear position, facial tension, pupil dilation, and so on.

The animals had no problem picking up on the actor's emotional tone.  "Our results show that these animals are affected by the emotions we charge our voices with when we speak to or are around them," said Elodie Briefer, who co-authored the study.  "They react more strongly -- generally faster -- when they are met with a negatively charged voice, compared to having a positively charged voice played to them first.  In certain situations, they even seem to mirror the emotion to which they are exposed."

So Carol, apparently, is spot-on about Cleo picking up the tension in my voice.  The open question is what I can do about it.  Even when I'm aware of it and trying to moderate it, it apparently comes through loud and clear.  At least this is the last time for a while that we're going to kennel them, she doesn't have any upcoming vet appointments, and maybe just time and trust-building will convince her that whatever happens, she's safe.

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Remembrance of stress past

About eighteen years ago, my wife and I went on a vacation to Hawaii.  The trip was awesome, and we had a fantastic time in Kauai, appreciating the beauty of the Garden Island, where "chill out" is the order of the day and there are signs that say "No shoes, no shirt, no problem."

Then we started on the voyage home.

I won't belabor you with the entire story.  Suffice it to say that it involved:

• two missed connections
• sleeping on the tile floor of two different airports on two successive nights
• a teenager breaching the security checkpoint, resulting in evacuating the entire airport and everyone having to be re-checked-in
• the airline crew "timing out," meaning they had to take a mandatory eight hours of rest while the passengers sat and waited
• a whole case of fine California wine... and no corkscrew
• a blackout that shut down the electrical grid in the entire northeastern United States for a day and a half
• a limo ride ending with the limo overheating and conking out just outside of Scott Run, Pennsylvania

Of course, I'm entirely to blame, because after each increasingly-ridiculous mishap, I said to my wife, "Well, what else could go wrong?"

Never ever say those words.  I'm not superstitious, but in this case I'm convinced that the universe waits for some hapless schlub to say that before dropping a piano on his head.

What is interesting about this whole thing -- besides the fact that in retrospect, it makes a hilarious story -- is that I remember the unpleasantness and stress of the trip back much better than I remember the relaxing and enjoyable vacation we were coming back from.  I'm hard-pressed to recall a single specific detail from being in Hawaii, other than a vague memory of sun, hiking, scuba diving, and drinks with little umbrellas -- but the memories of what it was like trying to return from Hawaii are so vivid it's like they happened yesterday.

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding that stressful experiences stick in our brains better than pleasant ones do.  A study released last week in Current Biology found that pretty much all of us remember trying situations much more vividly than we do positive ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Psy3330 W10, Sleeping while studying, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's more, the researchers who did the study -- a team made up of Anne Bierbrauer, Marie-Christin Fellner, Rebekka Heinen, Oliver Wolf, and Nikolai Axmacher, of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany -- found the underlying mechanism for why awful memories seem to have such durability.  When a memory is connected with a stressful experience, the "memory trace" (neural firing pattern associated with recalling the memory) is linked through the amygdala -- a part of the brain associated with anxiety, fear, anger... as well as emotional learning and memory modulation.

The researchers write:

Recent evidence has further shown that amygdala neurons do not only respond to fearful or stress-related stimuli, but exhibit mixed selectivity as well: their firing may represent various different emotional and social dimensions, depending on task and context.  In humans, amygdala neurons respond to faces and to perceived emotions, and fMRI studies showed that the amygdala represents both fear memories and the subjective valence of odors.  Such multidimensional representations may serve to bind the diverse aspects of an emotional experience into one integrated episode.

Which certainly is the case with my memory of the Hawaii debacle.  My pleasant memories from the holiday -- which took place over six days -- are fragmentary and vague as compared with the memory of the trip back, which took only two days but plays out in my mind as a single coherent story.

When you think about it, it makes evolutionary sense.  Thag and Ogg having a vivid, detailed memory of the nice mammoth dinner they had two weeks ago is far less critical to survival than the memory of where they almost got killed by a saber-toothed tiger.  (That's an oversimplification, of course; complex behaviors are almost never the result of a single evolutionary driver.  But the value of remembering dangerous situations more strongly than happy ones can't be denied.)

The downside, of course, is that really negative memories get seared into our consciousness more or less permanently.  This can result in memory patterns that actively interfere with our ability to live a normal life -- better known as post-traumatic stress disorder.  So getting to the bottom of how this happens in the brain is the first step toward addressing that debilitating condition.

As for me, my silly return-voyage story doesn't cause me any anguish, and in fact, I've told it many times to various friends over pints of beer, to the general amusement of all.  The experience did, however, stop me from ever saying "What more could go wrong?"  Because I've found that not only is there always something else that can go wrong, when it does, you'll remember it forever.

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Falling into the uncanny valley

As we get closer and closer to something that is unequivocally an artificial intelligence, engineers have tackled another aspect of this; how do you create something that not only acts (and interacts) intelligently, but looks human?

It's a harder question than it appears at first.  We're all familiar with depictions of robots from movies and television -- from ones that made no real attempt to mimic the human face in anything more than the most superficial features (such as the robots in I, Robot and the droids in Star Wars) to ones where the producers effectively cheated by having actual human actors simply try to act robotic (the most famous, and in my opinion the best, was Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation).  The problem is, we are so attuned to the movement of faces that we can be thrown off, even repulsed, by something so minor that we can't quite put our finger on what exactly is wrong.

This phenomenon was noted a long time ago -- first back in 1970, when roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the name "uncanny valley" to describe the phenomenon.  His contention, which has been borne out by research, is that we generally do not have a strong negative reaction to clearly non-human faces (such as teddy bears, the animated characters in most kids' cartoons, and the aforementioned non-human-looking robots).  But as you get closer to accurately representing a human face, something fascinating happens.  We suddenly start being repelled -- the sense is that the face looks human, but there's something "off."  This has been a problem not only in robotics but in CGI; in fact, one of the first and best-known cases of an accidental descent into the uncanny valley was the train conductor in the CGI movie The Polar Express, where a character who was supposed to be friendly and sympathetic ended up scaring the shit out of the kids for no very obvious reason.

As I noted earlier, the difficulty is that we evolved to extract a huge amount of information from extremely subtle movements of the human face.  Think of what can be communicated by tiny gestures like a slight lift of a eyebrow or the momentary quirking upward of the corner of the mouth.  Mimicking that well enough to look authentic has turned out to be as challenging as the complementary problem of creating AI that can act human in other ways, such as conversation, responses to questions, and the incorporation of emotion, layers of meaning, and humor.

The latest attempt to create a face with human expressivity comes out of Columbia University, and was the subject of a paper in arXiv this week called "Smile Like You Mean It: Animatronic Robotic Face with Learned Models," by Boyuan Chen, Yuhang Hu, Lianfeng Li, Sara Cummings, and Hod Lipson.  They call their robot EVA:

The authors write:

Ability to generate intelligent and generalizable facial expressions is essential for building human-like social robots.  At present, progress in this field is hindered by the fact that each facial expression needs to be programmed by humans.  In order to adapt robot behavior in real time to different situations that arise when interacting with human subjects, robots need to be able to train themselves without requiring human labels, as well as make fast action decisions and generalize the acquired knowledge to diverse and new contexts.  We addressed this challenge by designing a physical animatronic robotic face with soft skin and by developing a vision-based self-supervised learning framework for facial mimicry.  Our algorithm does not require any knowledge of the robot's kinematic model, camera calibration or predefined expression set.  By decomposing the learning process into a generative model and an inverse model, our framework can be trained using a single motor dataset.

Now, let me say up front that I'm extremely impressed by the skill of the roboticists who tackled this project, and I can't even begin to understand how they managed it.  But the result falls, in my opinion, into the deepest part of the uncanny valley.  Take a look:

The tiny motors that control the movement of EVA's face are amazingly sophisticated, but the expressions they generate are just... off.  It's not the blue skin, for what it's worth.  It's something about the look in the eyes and the rest of the face being mismatched or out-of-sync.  As a result, EVA doesn't appear friendly to me.

To me, EVA looks like she's plotting something, like possibly the subjugation of humanity.

So as amazing as it is that we now have a robot who can mimic human expressions without those expressions being pre-programmed, we have a long way to go before we'll see an authentically human-looking artificial face.  It's a bit of a different angle on the Turing test, isn't it?  But instead of the interactions having to fool a human judge, here the appearance has to fool one.

And I wonder if that, in the long haul, might turn out to be even harder to do.

***********************************

Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Thanks for the memories

I've always been fascinated with memory. From the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, to the peculiar (and unexplained) phenomenon of déjà vu, to why some people have odd abilities (or inabilities) to remember certain types of information, to caprices of the brain such as its capacity for recalling a forgotten item once you stop thinking about it -- the way the brain handles storage and retrieval of memories is a curious and complex subject.

Two pieces of research have given us a window into how the brain organizes memories, and their connection to emotion.  In the first, a team at Dartmouth and Princeton Universities came up with a protocol to induce test subjects to forget certain things intentionally.  While this may seem like a counterproductive ability -- most of us struggle far harder to recall memories than to forget them deliberately -- consider the applicability of this research to debilitating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the study, test subjects were shown images of outdoor scenes as they studied two successive lists of words.  In one case, the test subjects were told to forget the first list once they received the second; in the other, they were instructed to try to remember both.

"Our hope was the scene images would bias the background, or contextual, thoughts that people had as they studied the words to include scene-related thoughts," said Jeremy Manning, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, who was lead author of the study.  "We used fMRI to track how much people were thinking of scene-related things at each moment during our experiment.  That allowed us to track, on a moment-by-moment basis, how those scene or context representations faded in and out of people's thoughts over time."

What was most interesting about the results is that in the case where the test subjects were told to forget the first list, the brain apparently purged its memory of the specifics of the outdoor scene images the person had been shown as well.  When subjects were told to recall the words on both lists, they recalled the images on both sets of photographs.

"[M]emory studies are often concerned with how we remember rather than how we forget, and forgetting is typically viewed as a 'failure' in some sense, but sometimes forgetting can be beneficial, too," Manning said.  "For example, we might want to forget a traumatic event, such as soldiers with PTSD.  Or we might want to get old information 'out of our head,' so we can focus on learning new material.  Our study identified one mechanism that supports these processes."

What's even cooler is that because the study was done with subjects connected to an fMRI, the scientists were able to see what contextual forgetting looks like in terms of brain firing patterns.  "It's very difficult to specifically identify the neural representations of contextual information," Manning said.  "If you consider the context you experience something in, we're really referring to the enormously complex, seemingly random thoughts you had during that experience.  Those thoughts are presumably idiosyncratic to you as an individual, and they're also potentially unique to that specific moment.  So, tracking the neural representations of these things is extremely challenging because we only ever have one measurement of a particular context.  Therefore, you can't directly train a computer to recognize what context 'looks like' in the brain because context is a continually moving and evolving target.  In our study, we sidestepped this issue using a novel experimental manipulation -- we biased people to incorporate those scene images into the thoughts they had when they studied new words.  Since those scenes were common across people and over time, we were able to use fMRI to track the associated mental representations from moment to moment."

In the second study, a team at UCLA looked at what happens when a memory is connected to an emotional state -- especially an unpleasant one.  What I find wryly amusing about this study is that the researchers chose as their source of unpleasant emotion the stress one feels in taking a difficult math class.

I chuckled grimly when I read this, because I had the experience of completely running into the wall, vis-à-vis mathematics, when I was in college.  Prior to that, I actually had been a pretty good math student.  I breezed through high school math, barely opening a book or spending any time outside of class studying.  In fact, even my first two semesters of calculus in college, if not exactly a breeze, at least made good sense to me and resulted in solid A grades.

Then I took Calc 3.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but when I hit three-dimensional representations of graphs, and double and triple integrals, and calculating the volume of the intersection of four different solid objects, my brain just couldn't handle it.  I  got a C in Calc 3 largely because the professor didn't want to have to deal with me again.  After that, I sort of never recovered.  I had a good experience with Differential Equations (mostly because of a stupendous teacher), but the rest of my mathematical career was pretty much a flop.

And the worst part is that I still have stress dreams about math classes.  I'm back at college, and I realize that (1) I have a major exam in math that day, and (2) I have no idea how to do what I'll be tested on, and furthermore (3) I haven't attended class for weeks.  Sometimes the dream involves homework I'm supposed to turn in but don't have the first clue about how to do.  Sometimes, I not only haven't studied for the exam I'm about to take, I can't find the classroom.

Keep in mind that this is almost forty years after my last-ever math class. And I'm still having anxiety dreams about it.

What the researchers at UCLA did was to track students who were in an advanced calculus class, keeping track of both their grades and their self-reported levels of stress surrounding the course.  Their final exam grades were recorded -- and then, two weeks after the final, they were given a retest over the same material.

The fascinating result is that stress was unrelated to students' scores on the actual final exam, but the students who reported the most stress did significantly more poorly on the retest.  The researchers call this "motivated forgetting" -- that the brain is ridding itself of memories that are associated with unpleasant emotions, perhaps in order to preserve the person's sense of being intelligent and competent.

"Students who found the course very stressful and difficult might have given in to the motivation to forget as a way to protect their identity as being good at math," said study lead author Gerardo Ramirez.  "We tend to forget unpleasant experiences and memories that threaten our self-image as a way to preserve our psychological well-being.  And 'math people' whose identity is threatened by their previous stressful course experience may actively work to forget what they learned."

So that's today's journey through the recesses of the human mind.  It's a fascinating and complex place, never failing to surprise us, and how amazing it is that we are beginning to understand how it works.  As my dear friend, Professor Emeritus Rita Calvo, Cornell University teacher and researcher in Human Genetics, put it: "The twentieth century was the century of the gene.  The twenty-first will be the century of the brain.  With respect to neuroscience, we are right now about where genetics was in the early 1900s -- we know a lot of the descriptive features of the brain, some of the underlying biochemistry, and other than that, some rather sketchy details about this and that.  We don't yet have a coherent picture of how the brain works.

"But we're heading that direction.  It is only a matter of time till we have a working model of the mind.  How tremendously exciting!"

***********************************

Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Finding the quiet

I've recognized for some time that I'm very sound-sensitive.  When I'm around loud, chaotic noise for too long, I get a little frantic, and if I can't get away it can bring on a full-blown anxiety attack.  What I've found interesting is how suddenly the switch can flip between "I'm okay" and "I've got to get out of here now."  In the pre-pandemic days, my wife and a few of our friends used to go to a local bar after Cornell hockey games, and like just about every bar in the world, it was noisy and crowded.  For a while, I'd be fine.  Okay, it wasn't my preferred environment even so, but I was coping.  Then, with a startling suddenness, I'd find I couldn't even hear what my friends were saying -- it was all lost in a gigantic roar of what sounded to me like white noise.

At that point, it was get out or risk a panic attack.

I've often wondered what the difference is between my brain and the brains of people who actually enjoy noisy chaos.  Along the same lines, you might be questioning how I managed to survive for 32 years as a high school teacher, because public schools are kind of inherently loud places.

As far as the latter goes, I coped by taking breaks.  I closed my classroom door during my planning period, and student contact during that time was by prior arrangement only.  I avoided the worst parts of it -- I very early on decided that rules or no rules, I wasn't attending pep assemblies or chaperoning school dances.  Most importantly, I made sure to take rests after the school day was over -- not naps, per se, but silence breaks.  Fortunately, my wife and I live in a big old house out in the country, so after school I usually had a good couple of hours after work to relax and play with my dog and, most importantly, enjoy the comparative quiet.

Turns out I'm not alone.  There are lots of people who have what neuroscientists call SPS (sensory processing sensitivity).  This phenomenon, and how people like me have coped with the extra stress of the pandemic and everything that's come with it, was the subject of a paper in the journal Neuropsychobiology by a team led by Bianca Acevedo of the University of California - Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  In "Sensory Processing Sensitivity Predicts Individual Differences in Resting-State Functional Connectivity Associated with Depth of Processing," Acevedo and her team took test subjects who had been evaluated for their proneness to SPS, and gave them an emotionally evocative task -- looking at faces of people experiencing various strong emotions (positive and negative), and either going from one photograph to the next without a break or doing the equivalent of a mental palate-cleansing in between (counting backwards from a large number by sevens).

They found some fascinating patterns.  People who scored high on the SPS scale showed greater activity during breaks between the parts of the brain called the hippocampus and the precuneus, which are known to be involved in episodic memory consolidation.  From the fMRI studies, highly sensitive people showed a progressive weakening of signals between the periaqueductal gray matter and the amygdala, two parts of the brain controlling our perceptions of anxiety and distress, especially when they weren't given breaks.  Both trends were not as pronounced in people who scored lower on the SPS scale.

"Behaviorally, we observe it as being more careful and cautious when approaching new things," Acevedo said in a press release.  "In a new situation, those with the trait are more likely to hang back and see what happens.  Another broad way of thinking about it, that biologists have been using to understand people’s individual differences in responses to different things, is that the person with high sensitivity will be more responsive, both for better and for worse.  So while people with high sensitivity might get more rattled by uncomfortable situations, they might also experience higher levels of creativity, deeper bonds with others and a heightened appreciation of beauty.  What we found was a pattern that suggested that during this rest, after doing something that was emotionally evocative, their brain showed activity that suggested depth of processing, and this depth of processing is a cardinal feature of high sensitivity."

So SPS isn't all bad.  Besides my weird reaction to loud environments, it also explains why I get overwhelmed when I spend too much time doomscrolling through social media, something that occupied way too much of my time during the Former Guy's administration.  I found that if I didn't go on periodic news fasts, it would effectively short-circuit my ability to concentrate.  So emotional noise can be as debilitating to people with SPS as actual noise is.

"Take a break," Acevedo said.  "For all of us, but especially for the highly sensitive, taking a few minutes’ break and not necessarily doing anything but relaxing can be beneficial.  We’ve seen it at the behavioral level and the level of the brain."

Good advice.  These days we all need to be more cognizant of what helps us to cope with the ramped-up emotional stress we've been exposed to.  For me, listening to a quiet piece of music, walking around outside, or going for a run has the effect of discharging a lot of the built-up anxiety.  It's all a matter of finding what kind of pressure valve works for you.  But as the Acevedo et al. study shows, if the result is a better ability to manage the chaotic world we live in, it's well worth the search.

********************************

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Music on the brain

It is a source of tremendous curiosity to me why music is as powerful an influence as it is.  Music has been hugely important in my own life, and remains so to this day.  I remember my parents telling me stories about my early childhood, including tales of when I couldn't have been more than about four years old and I clamored to be allowed to use the record player myself.  At first they were reluctant, but my insistence finally won the day.  They showed me how to handle the records carefully, operate the buttons to drop the needle onto the record, and put everything away when I was done.  There were records I played over and over again (that I wasn't discouraged is a testimony to my parents' patience and forbearance) -- and I never damaged a single one.  They were simply too important to me to handle roughly.

The transformative experience of music is universal to the human species.  A 43,000 year old carved bone was found in Slovenia that many think was one of the earliest musical instruments -- if this contention is correct, our drive to make music must be very old indeed.

The neurological underpinning of our musical experience, however, has not been easy to elucidate.  Until recently, there was speculation that our affinity for music had something to do with the tonal-based expression of emotion in language, but that is still speculative.  And recently, three scientists in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that we have a dedicated module in our brains for experiencing and responding to music.

A team led by Sam Norman-Haignere did fMRIs of individuals who were listening to music, and others listening to a variety of other familiar sounds (including human speech).  They then compared the type of sound to the three-dimensional neural response pattern -- what the scientists call a voxel -- to see if they could find correlations between them.

The relationship turned out to be unmistakable.  They found that there were distinct firing patterns in regions of the brain that occurred only when the subject was listening to music -- and that it didn't matter what the style of music was.  Norman-Haignere said, "The sound of a solo drummer, whistling, pop songs, rap, almost everything that had a musical quality to it, melodic or rhythmic, would activate it.  That's one reason the results surprised us."

The research team writes:

The organization of human auditory cortex remains unresolved, due in part to the small stimulus sets common to fMRI studies and the overlap of neural populations within voxels.  To address these challenges, we measured fMRI responses to 165 natural sounds and inferred canonical response profiles ("components") whose weighted combinations explained voxel responses throughout auditory cortex...  Anatomically, music and speech selectivity concentrated in distinct regions of non-primary auditory cortex...  [This research] identifies primary dimensions of response variation across natural sounds, revealing distinct cortical pathways for music and speech.

This study opens up a whole new approach to understanding why our auditory centers are structured the way they are, although it does still leave open the question of why music is so tremendously important across cultures. "Why do we have music?" study senior author Nancy Kanwisher said in an interview with the New York Times.  "Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it?  How early in development can we see this sensitivity to music, and is it tunable with experience?  These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address."

What I find the most curious about this is that the same region of the brain is firing in response to incredibly dissimilar inputs.  Consider, for example, the differences between a sitar solo, a Rossini aria, a Greydon Square rap, and a Bach harpsichord sonata.  Isn't it fascinating that we all have a part of the auditory cortex that responds to all of those -- regardless of our cultural background or musical preferences?

I find the whole thing tremendously interesting, and can only hope that the MIT team will continue their investigations.  I'm fascinated not only with the universality of musical appreciation, but the peculiar differences -- why, for example, I love Bach, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Vaughan Williams, but Chopin, Brahms, Mahler, and Schumann leave me completely cold.  Must be something about my voxels, I suppose -- but wouldn't it be cool to find out what it is?

****************************************

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]