Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing
Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing
Baptiste Alchourroun
MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It
doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish
predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music —
or well beyond prized, loved it.
In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts,
download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite
artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic
times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as
the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.
So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of
sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?
The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to
humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that,
neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.
More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show
that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward
system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be
important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently
we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional
moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a
musical passage — causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain.
When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum —
an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which
is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and
which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.
But what may be most interesting here is when this
neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak
emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might
call the anticipation phase.
The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the
prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience.
Making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to
be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine
neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording
which of our predictions turn out to be correct.
To dig deeper into how music engages the brain’s reward system, we designed a study
to mimic online music purchasing. Our goal was to determine what goes
on in the brain when someone hears a new piece of music and decides he
likes it enough to buy it.
We used music-recommendation programs to customize the selections to our
listeners’ preferences, which turned out to be indie and electronic
music, matching Montreal’s hip music scene. And we found that neural
activity within the striatum — the reward-related structure — was
directly proportional to the amount of money people were willing to
spend.
But more interesting still was the cross talk between this structure and
the auditory cortex, which also increased for songs that were
ultimately purchased compared with those that were not.
Why the auditory cortex? Some 50 years ago, Wilder Penfield, the famed neurosurgeon and the founder
of the Montreal Neurological Institute, reported that when
neurosurgical patients received electrical stimulation to the auditory
cortex while they were awake, they would sometimes report hearing music.
Dr. Penfield’s observations, along with those of many others, suggest
that musical information is likely to be represented in these brain
regions.
The auditory cortex is also active when we imagine a tune: think of the
first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony — your cortex is abuzz!
This ability allows us not only to experience music even when it’s
physically absent, but also to invent new compositions and to reimagine
how a piece might sound with a different tempo or instrumentation.
We also know that these areas of the brain encode the abstract
relationships between sounds — for instance, the particular sound
pattern that makes a major chord major, regardless of the key or
instrument. Other studies show distinctive neural responses from similar
regions when there is an unexpected break in a repetitive pattern of
sounds, or in a chord progression. This is akin to what happens if you
hear someone play a wrong note — easily noticeable even in an unfamiliar
piece of music.
These cortical circuits allow us to make predictions about coming events
on the basis of past events. They are thought to accumulate musical
information over our lifetime, creating templates of the statistical
regularities that are present in the music of our culture and enabling
us to understand the music we hear in relation to our stored mental
representations of the music we’ve heard.
So each act of listening to music may be thought of as both
recapitulating the past and predicting the future. When we listen to
music, these brain networks actively create expectations based on our
stored knowledge.
Composers and performers intuitively understand this: they manipulate
these prediction mechanisms to give us what we want — or to surprise us,
perhaps even with something better.
In the cross talk between our cortical systems, which analyze patterns
and yield expectations, and our ancient reward and motivational systems,
may lie the answer to the question: does a particular piece of music
move us?
When that answer is yes, there is little — in those moments of listening, at least — that we value more.
The 10 Smartest Pot Smokers on the Planet
Steve Jobs
It’s been reported the Apple co-founder smoked pot and took LSD in his first semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972. Since dropping out from the school, he’s only gone on to become one of the most successful and wealthiest people in America. In 1984, he received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named him the most powerful person in business and then California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted him into the California Hall of Fame. Fortune also named him CEO of the Decade in 2009 while Forbes ranked him #57 on their list of the World’s Most Powerful People that same year. The Financial Times named Jobs its person of the year for 2010.I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can have those kind of accolades being dumb. Plus, the guy’s a Beatles fan, dated Joan Baez, and sold one of his houses to Bono from U2. That’s some hip, hip company, my friend.
Carl Sagan
It’s hard to argue for pot slowing you down when you look at Carl Sagan’s record. Apparently a confirmed and admitted stoner, among his many achievements are a Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy, a best-selling novel, as well as more than 500 science papers and articles. He was a founding member of the Planetary Society, and he won a pipe load of scientific awards. Hardly surprising, he is said to have believed in the validity of stoned insights. I believe in them too, it’s just that Carl’s revolved around the origins of the cosmos, not which bagel store is open at 3 in the morning.
Stephen Jay Gould
Paleontologist, biologist, science historian.Most famous scientific contribution was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which says that most evolution is marked by long periods of stability. Kind of like most of us after a good bong hit. One of the most influential and best read writers of popular science, Gould became an advocate for medical marijuana following his diagnosis with cancer. He claimed it had an “important effect” on his recovery. He also testified in court to the benefits of marijuana, and is quoted as saying “it is beyond my comprehension that any humane person would withhold such a beneficial substance from people in such great need simple because others use it for different purposes.”
Gould used pot to help retain his health for twenty years, the same period during which he wrote The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, not what you might call an insignificant work.
Francis Crick
Won a Nobel Prize for figuring out the double-helix structure of DNA. Rumor has it that he was on acid at the time. Crick wasn’t the first to see twin twisted monsters coming at him during an acid plunge, but he was the first to recognize as an important scientific discovery. As a founding member of Soma, a legalize cannabis group, he also experimented pot, which he believed helped to remove the filters of abstract thought.
Margaret Mead
Ok, so it’s probably not totally accurate to describe Margaret Mead as a pothead, but she was a major proponent for marijuana, so we’re going to widen the definition a bit.When she died in 1978, Mead was possibly the most famous Anthropologist on the planet. Time had named her Mother of the World in 1969. She authored or co-authored around 40 books, received 28 honorary doctorates, and was President of both the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Most famously, she testified before Congress on the legalization of marijuana. She testified on lots of stuff, but it’s this one everyone remembers. Afterwards, she was called a dirty old lady, crazy, and no doubt many other things.
Andrew Weil
Had a mushroom named after him. Do we need to know any more? Well, yes, we do. Although he looks like he’s been binging on an all-night high, Dr. Weil has medical and biology degrees from Harvard, is a naturopath, as well as a widely acknowledged expert on medicinal herbs, alternative medicines, and mind and body interactions. He was on the cover of Time, has written a bunch of books, and used to write for High Times. He talks about the advantages of stoned thinking, as well as an innate need to alter consciousness. Is that him or us? Whatever, it’s clearly worked for him.
Kary Mullis
Another Nobel Prize winner, another stoner. Mullis tried heavier drugs than just pot. He invented the polymerase chain reaction, which if it’s slipped your mind, is the one that allows duplication of parts of DNA. He says acid helped him to develop it, perhaps along with pot, which he allegedly smoked just before his first trip. While most of us have trouble figuring out how a chair works when we’re high, this guy was working out how to mimic nature.
Oliver Sacks
If you’ve seen “Awakenings” with Robin Williams, you already know something of Oliver Sacks’ work. He’s a neurologist, the film based on his book of the same name. He also wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks is an Oxford graduate and professor of neurology at Columbia Medical Center. He’s been referred to as the poet laureate of medicine, and received numerous awards and honorary doctorates in the field of neurological science. Not bad for a man who’s admitted to using marijuana on a more that recreational level, seeing it as a potential gateway to other minds and other consciousnesses.
Richard Feynman
Physicist who helped design the atomic bomb. Well, nobody said anyone on this list was wise, just smarter than average. Feynman used pot to enhance his out of body experiences while in a sensory deprivation tank. When he came out, he won a Nobel Prize for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.
Sergey Brin
He has a BS from the University of Maryland, a MS from Stanford and took PhD courses at Stanford before putting that on hiatus to co-found Google with Larry Page. His dad’s a math professor at the University of Maryland. His mom’s a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His wife, Ann Wojcicki, is a biotech analyst who graduated with a B.S. in biology from Yale in 1996. She and Brin are working with leading researchers to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the human genome data and try to repair “bugs” as if DNA were HTML. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, which is “among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer” and received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the “Highest Award in Engineering”. Like Jobs (see above), he’s among the wealthiest in the world.I can only imagine the first time he described DNA as HTML to someone, he/she must’ve been like, “are you high?” To which, he responded, “No! Why? You holdin’?”
one step beyond
THE BEST OF ONE STEP BEYOND With your "Guide into the world of the unknown" John Newland. 4 bizarre & creepy episodes based on true events: Legacy of Love/The Captain's Guests/The Darkroom/Echo 1959-60/b&w/1 hr. 41 min.
Family Guy - Brians Drug Horror Movie
Brian's high on Mushrooms when he cuts off his own ear! Stewie spends
the evening comforting Brian before his soft hands become horrifying
claws!
24 types of weed smoker
This day and age, it seems like damn near everybody smokes pot. And with weed quickly coming into the mainstream in a big way, that number is only going to go up. So whether you’ve been smoking for years or are just getting into this awesome herb, here is a quick guide to the different types of pot smokers you’ll run into during your toking travels.
1. The ADHD Kid
Signature smoking method: Steamroller
He stopped taking his Ritalin a long time ago because it made him feel dead inside. But then he was a total spaz. So to keep himself from jumping around like a psychotic banshee, he started smoking weed. After a few hits, the smoke calms him down to a level of energy just above the average person. Which is good, because if it didn’t, he’d have no friends.
Signature smoking method: Cute pink bowl that fits in her purse
When she’s smoking, this usually liberal arts-educated chick is cool as hell. She listens to good music, has a good laugh, often goes without a bra and is an all-around smokeshow. Plus, she’s usually friends with old guys who think she wants to screw them so they give her bud. But when you’re not stoned you realize she’s just kind of boring.
Signature smoking method: Homemade bong
It’s no secret – creative people smoke pot. It’s just how it is. But since this person is more productive when he smokes, he basically has a life-long free pass on smoking weed whenever he wants. That said, he’ll rarely talk about smoking weed because he doesn’t want to admit that his last four good ideas came to him while watching episodes of “Blues Clues”.
Signature smoking method: Vaporizer
With 16 states having already made medical marijuana legal, it seems everyone these days has some serious medical condition requiring the magical powers of marijuana. But for the truly terminal, life doesn’t get much better than steaming up some pot in a vaporizer and watching re-runs of “Murder She Wrote”. Not that you have to be dying to enjoy that or anything…
5. The OutdoorsmanSignature smoking method: Bowl
This guy doesn’t f**k around. He knows what to do when you encounter a grizzly and how to tell time with the sun. He can make a bowl out of anything, knows which mushrooms to eat – and which ones to never eat. You almost want to be him, until you realize his best day possible consists of hitting a bowl of kind bud at the base of Mt. Everest, followed by a week-long trip up a g*ddamn mountain.
6. The Creepy Old Hippie Signature smoking method: Joint – Sri Lanka Buddhist Monk Pipe
Yeah, he’s stuck in the ’60s – but why? My guess it’s because this grimy bastard likes to pick up chicks, smoke them down and touch them – just a hunch. Add that to the fact, he’s smoked too much weed and doesn’t have much else going on. You almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.
Signature smoking method: Expensive pipe/bong
These Boomers have been waiting for this moment since Woodstock. After growing up in the 60s, they did the responsible thing, made their money, sent their kids to college and are now settling into the glory years of reading The New York Times, gardening and smoking a sh*tload of weed. They mostly smoke at home, probably in “the den,” while listening to Leonard Cohen and Kris Kristofferson records and daydreaming about not being old.
8. The ConnoisseurSignature smoking method: The Hurricane Bong Despite the fact that this guy always has the best weed available, The Connoisseur is kind of a douche to smoke with. On top of just talking way too much about weed all the time, he only smokes organic weed, only takes ‘green’ hits (the first hit of a bong or pipe – which wastes a ton of grass, obviously) and is just an all-around buzzkill. But like I said, he does have great weed, so you’ll still hang out with him, you mooch.
9. The Moocher Signature smoking method: Whatever you’ve got
Not necessarily a bad guy – but still a pain in the ass – The Moocher only smokes weed when you smoke weed. You realize he’s doing it, but he seems to always have something terrible going on in his life that can only be remedied by a couple of pulls on your bowl. (What are you gonna do?) And if he finds out you always have weed, forget about it – you’ll have to kill him to make him leave.
10. The True Stoner Signature smoking method: Roach
This easy-going, goofy bastard always starts his days off with a wake-and-bake courtesy of his bedside bowl, followed by as much additional weed smoking as possible. He’ll always have just enough weed on him to keep him going through the day. That is, unless he just re-upped is stash, in which case he’ll smoke most of his bag the first night.
11. The ProfessionalSignature smoking method: Something strong
If you don’t catch this guy in the act, you’d never know he smokes at all. That’s because, most of the time, he’s working his ass off. But when he comes home from a hard day, the only way he can chill out is by getting really, really high. I mean really high. He gets good weed, but often doesn’t know the difference between specific strains of marijuana. But that’s OK, he doesn’t have time for that bullsh*t.
12. The TeenagerSignature smoking method: Coke Can/Apple/Toilet Paper Steamrollers
As if they weren’t whacked-out of their minds already on mind-altering hormones, teenagers love to smoke pot. These newbies always think they have the best weed, but half the time it’s just a bag of grass clippings and sage. But when they have real weed, they’ll smoke anytime they have more than an hour away from their parents – who are probably at home doing the same thing, anyway.
13. The Gen-X ParentsSignature smoking method: Brownies
Deep down, these people are cynical and pissed off. In their spare time, they do yoga and attend wellness seminars and have the worst children on the planet – I mean real sh!theads. They work at ad agencies and have time shares and generally suck to hang out with. But you know what the perfect cure for all that is, don’t you? Yep, it’s weed. High five!
14. The QuitterSignature smoking method: Whatever you’ve got
These poor saps are trying to quit something – usually alcohol or cigarettes – but can’t handle the glaring horrors of reality completely sober. So they smoke pot. And when they do, one of two things will happen: a) they only take a puff or two and then say nothing the rest of the night, or b) they take a puff, hang out for a bit, then sneak into the kitchen, steal your bottle of peach schnapps and leave for a night of good ol’ fashioned self-destruction.
15. The DrinkerSignature smoking method: Anything besides a blunt or a giant bong – it’ll scare them off
At first, The Drinker never wants to smoke. They approach the proposition of some herb with a healthy dose of reluctance. But before you know it, they’re all ‘Well, maybe just a hit.’ Two bowls later, they’re elbow-deep into a bag of Doritos, talking non-stop about how amazing his life is and swearing off liquor to make room for herb. Next day, he’s back on the bottle.
16. Ghetto kidSignature smoking method: Dutchie, peach/grape blunt
No matter the The Ghetto Kid’s race or where he’s from, when he gets high, nine times out of ten, he’ll throw on a beat and start freestyling for hours, until it’s so boring you can’t even have fun smoking pot anymore. And when he’s not doing that, he complains about anything that’s pissed him off within the previous 36 hours, then shrugs it off like it’s nothing. And after all that, he’s still one of the best people to smoke with, ever.
17. The Sorority GirlSignature smoking method: Her boyfriend’s gravity bong
Like the moocher (but significantly hotter/more obnoxious), the Sorority girl only smokes weed when someone else buys it. But every time she does, she gets way too high and passes out within 20 minutes of burning a fattie. But before she’s out, The Sorority Girl will complain to you about how awesome she is – compared to Vicky, who’s a total b*tch, BTW.
18. RastafarianSignature smoking method: Fat joint
Like The Connoisseur, The Rastafarian takes his pot-smoking deadly serious. You can’t understand a word he says before he lights up, and just forget about it if he’s already stoned. However, if communication is a must, your best bet is take a few tokes for yourself and everything will become crystal clear. You’ll see why they call it a religious experience.
19. The RedneckSignature smoking method: Sh!tty metal bowl
This dude ‘just don’t give a f**k.’ He smokes and drinks at the same time, gets crazy at parties and loves to blow sh!t up. Chances are he grows all his own kick ass weed (in somebody else’s corn field). And he usually falls into one of two categories: really funny or really dumb. But regardless, either one is fun as hell to toke-up with.
20. The Metal KidSignature smoking method: Bowl
Short of going backstage at a Slayer show, nothing makes The Metal Kid happier than sitting in his basement apartment, listening to bands like Skeleton Witch (on vinyl) and watching Metalocalypse. And for some reason, when a group of these surly fellows smokes, nobody talks – but nobody’s uncomfortable. Except you.
21. The SkaterSignature smoking method: One-hitter
You might mistake this guy for The Stoner or The Teenager. But unlike either of those assclowns, The Skater has an extremely high potential for raw havoc, no matter how much he’s smoked. In fact, if a bunch of skaters who you don’t know show up at your house, expect to see the cops sometime before dawn, I promise.
22. The TeacherSignature smoking method: Spliff
When you only know this guy as your hard-ass literature professor, it’s hard to imagine him doing anything but re-reading The Taming of the Shrew in his spare time. But you know what makes the The Taming of the Shrew more hilarious? Of course you do – and so does the prof…
23. The Frat GuySignature smoking method: Joint
Because of constant sporting obligations in high school, The Frat Guy never smoked weed until just before graduation, or when he moved away to college. If you smoke him down, from then on, every time he sees you, he thinks you’re stoned, even when you’re not. And the only thing he ever talks about is how high he is, was or is planning to be later this evening at the Tri-Del party, bro.
24. The DruggieSignature smoking method: Anything that works
The first way to know that weed is not a real drug is by seeing someone who’s taken real drugs after a real binger. And since coming down off of drugs like heroin, meth, etc is about as fun as trying to screw a pillow case filled with broken beer bottles, the only good thing to stave off the nausea, headaches and all-around suckitude, is a few quick hits and a room without light. Now, when has anyone ever had to do that with weed?…
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