In a study of hit songs to find out why they pleased people, Vincent k. M. Cheung and four other neuroscientists separated the chords of famous tunes from their lyrics and melodies and had people listen.* The participants didn’t know the songs being played, so they responded only to the sequence of chords. Cheung’s group discovered that those who listened found both unexpected chords and expected chords make music pleasant, depending upon the chord sequence.
I suppose you have always known this, at least intuitively. It’s a matter of prediction, something our brains do to help us survive. Knowing the near future means not stubbing one’s toe on a curb or rock. We anticipate the chords of the next measures, and in hearing them know our predictions hold true become satisfied by our knowledge. But, we also like “pleasant” surprises, i.e., surprises that do not endanger, but nevertheless drive adrenalin through our biological pipes. Scary scenes do that to us in movies where the threat jumps out unexpectedly from the shadows—though ominous music often serves as a warning. I think, with regard to this, of a couple of movies with daring heroes climbing near vertical cliff faces only to have a bird suddenly spring from a crevice about to be used for the next handhold, as in Gregory Peck’s climb in Guns of Navarone and Roger Moore’s climb to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora, in For Your Eyes Only.
The Max Planck researchers found that two chord patterns produced “pleasantness”: “Those with low uncertainty and high surprise, or the opposite, highly uncertain but not surprising…If the participant was sure what was coming next (low uncertainty) but the song unexpectedly deviated and surprised them, they found that pleasant. However, if the chord progression was harder to predict (high uncertainty) but the actual chord … did not surprise them, they also found the stimuli pleasant, possibly suggesting they had guessed correctly.” I think the research applies equally to movies, as in the two I mentioned above, and maybe, also, to life itself.
There’s a certain pleasantness to certainty and predictability. Knowing the near future—or at least thinking we know the near future—allows us to relax. With a reasonable guarantee that no grizzly or tiger is about to pounce on us from the underbrush, we feel secure. The absence of the unpredictable manufactures its own form of pleasantness. You can imagine, if you don’t live a place where threats abound, the unpredictable nature of living where predators like lions, alligators and crocodiles, muggers, and coronavirus wait in hiding.
And that brings me to the fears spreading around the world this spring, 2020, about the coronavirus threat which apparently started somewhere in or near Wuhan, China, and has spread, as of this writing to countries as far away as Brazil, Italy, and the United States. The predictability of seeing someone with a normal body temperature and regular breathing pattern provides a background of security for us when we are in crowds. When the general population seems to be healthy, individuals live in certainty. One person in a respirator or face mask, however, instills uncertainty. Those Max Planck researchers concluded that “the interactive effect between the uncertainty of the upcoming chord and its level of surprise was associated with brain activity changes in emotion…related areas. Importantly, activity of the nucleus accumbens (part of the basal forebrain) was associated only with the level of uncertainty.”
Now, the term basal suggests that where the activity occurs is a bit deeper in the brain than the area mostly associated with reason. In fact, that small section of the brain does appear to be part of the “reward system.” Thus, with regard to music, we guess (it’s just a guess) that the nucleus accumbens is important in rewarding us with the effects of dopamine, either during the surprise or shortly thereafter. But since it is deeper in the brain than our center of reasoning, we might also guess that it is somehow complexly related to what goes through the limbic system, you know, the system with which we associate the amygdalae and “freezing, fleeing, or fighting.”
What our brains do with uncertainty isn’t a new experience. Today’s reactions to the new coronavirus is reminiscent of a time not too long ago when Ebola was the threat du jour. People have always known that in a horror movie some shadowy figure will spring upon the unsuspecting victim, and they await the scare they predict will inevitably occur. The fictional threat is, in fact, no real threat, but the brain accepts it as such and releases the same neurotransmitters. In “real life,” however, the uncertainty drives people to hoard and hide to minimize the chance of unpredictable threat, that is, they mitigate the feeling associated with unpredictability.
Unfortunately, hoarding and hiding aren’t 100-percent guarantees against bacteria and viruses. The one-celled prokaryotes and semi-living whatevers are just too good at sneaking through the underbrush of life. Hoarding and hiding, long the defensive actions of those in fear of plagues, do provide us with a semblance of security through predictability, or seeming predictability. If we hoard and hide with others who haven’t been bitten by the bug, then we feel secure, but remain wary. Hoarding and hiding make some sense, and other than washing hands and avoiding unnecessary contact, they are the best we can do until we develop a vaccine that works. But in large part hoarding and hiding are mostly just a floccinaucinihilipilification that satisfies a deep part of the brain, the part stimulated by low uncertainty and high surprise or its opposite, high uncertainty without surprise.
"Expect the unexpected" is old, but valuable, advice. The interior of our brains evolved with—to attribute purpose to the process—safety in mind. We are so complex, however, that our brains have invented in music and drama the fictional equivalents of real-world unpredictability. Even when there are no real threats to our personal existence, we inundate ourselves with such unexpectedness.
Inundate? Take the brain’s handling of caffeine or some other substance as an analog. The more caffeine we consume, the more receptors we develop. Satisfying the need for caffeine grows with increased consumption and develops a feedback loop. Is there analogous activity in the basal forebrain? When the unexpected does arrive as we expect it to arrive eventually, do our brains seem to thrive in its seeming unpredictability? Like children addicted to ever more violent video games, do we thrive emotionally on increasingly more serious threats to our health? In those video games, kids expect the unexpected and act from the basal parts of the brain to seek a return to pleasantness derived from restored, if temporary, predictability. Does a similar drive for predictability manifest itself in hoarding and hiding—or in scapegoating? You can see in reports online, in print, and on TV that the media delves into the inner brain and fosters hoarding, hiding, and scapegoating.
You don’t have to be very old to remember when the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the United States in 2014. Scary. Right? Remember, compared to the current coronavirus, Ebola was deadlier at that time, taking the lives of nearly half of its victims in West Africa (e.g., 3,091 deaths in an infected population of 6,500). The coronavirus is less deadly, currently some 2,000+ deaths out of 60,000+, most of those in the earliest stages of the epidemic before the medical community knew there was a problem. One death out of every thirty infected is very serious, obviously, but it is far less than Ebola’s toll of nearly one out of every two infected. But relative numbers are no solace to those infected or killed by the disease.
You will always be subjected to drives originating in basal parts of your brain because of their interconnectedness and their relationship to neurons in other parts of the brain. Not even those neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute can fully explain the complex responsible for triggering emotional responses. That basal part appears to be reactive. But you do have that other part of your brain, the proactive and largely rational part. It understands that the world is full of the unpredictable. It isn’t one solely concerned with immediate responses to whatever is expected or unexpected, but rather also with what might surprise over the long term. You have the ability to make plans, and if hoarding and hiding are part of those plans, hoard and hide. You will not, however, eliminate totally the world’s unpredictability, including contagious diseases. Yet, would you want a world so predictable? Music’s uncertainty and certainty both give us pleasure. Drama also provides it through similar mechanisms. If you listen to music and watch movies with surprises, you probably crave the pleasantness both provide through the juxtaposition of the predictable and unpredictable.
Unlike people succumbing to the Black Death in the fourteenth century, we have more than slow word of mouth communication about the spread of disease. That foreknowledge spread round the world makes the coronavirus the expected unexpected. That in itself is means to turn the most unpleasant of surprises into a mitigated unpleasantness. Turning the unexpected into the expected is what we do not with our basal brain, but rather with our frontal cortex. Use yours in trying times to compose the music you deem most pleasant.
*https://maxplanckneuroscience.org/the-science-of-a-billboard-hit-song/
I suppose you have always known this, at least intuitively. It’s a matter of prediction, something our brains do to help us survive. Knowing the near future means not stubbing one’s toe on a curb or rock. We anticipate the chords of the next measures, and in hearing them know our predictions hold true become satisfied by our knowledge. But, we also like “pleasant” surprises, i.e., surprises that do not endanger, but nevertheless drive adrenalin through our biological pipes. Scary scenes do that to us in movies where the threat jumps out unexpectedly from the shadows—though ominous music often serves as a warning. I think, with regard to this, of a couple of movies with daring heroes climbing near vertical cliff faces only to have a bird suddenly spring from a crevice about to be used for the next handhold, as in Gregory Peck’s climb in Guns of Navarone and Roger Moore’s climb to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Meteora, in For Your Eyes Only.
The Max Planck researchers found that two chord patterns produced “pleasantness”: “Those with low uncertainty and high surprise, or the opposite, highly uncertain but not surprising…If the participant was sure what was coming next (low uncertainty) but the song unexpectedly deviated and surprised them, they found that pleasant. However, if the chord progression was harder to predict (high uncertainty) but the actual chord … did not surprise them, they also found the stimuli pleasant, possibly suggesting they had guessed correctly.” I think the research applies equally to movies, as in the two I mentioned above, and maybe, also, to life itself.
There’s a certain pleasantness to certainty and predictability. Knowing the near future—or at least thinking we know the near future—allows us to relax. With a reasonable guarantee that no grizzly or tiger is about to pounce on us from the underbrush, we feel secure. The absence of the unpredictable manufactures its own form of pleasantness. You can imagine, if you don’t live a place where threats abound, the unpredictable nature of living where predators like lions, alligators and crocodiles, muggers, and coronavirus wait in hiding.
And that brings me to the fears spreading around the world this spring, 2020, about the coronavirus threat which apparently started somewhere in or near Wuhan, China, and has spread, as of this writing to countries as far away as Brazil, Italy, and the United States. The predictability of seeing someone with a normal body temperature and regular breathing pattern provides a background of security for us when we are in crowds. When the general population seems to be healthy, individuals live in certainty. One person in a respirator or face mask, however, instills uncertainty. Those Max Planck researchers concluded that “the interactive effect between the uncertainty of the upcoming chord and its level of surprise was associated with brain activity changes in emotion…related areas. Importantly, activity of the nucleus accumbens (part of the basal forebrain) was associated only with the level of uncertainty.”
Now, the term basal suggests that where the activity occurs is a bit deeper in the brain than the area mostly associated with reason. In fact, that small section of the brain does appear to be part of the “reward system.” Thus, with regard to music, we guess (it’s just a guess) that the nucleus accumbens is important in rewarding us with the effects of dopamine, either during the surprise or shortly thereafter. But since it is deeper in the brain than our center of reasoning, we might also guess that it is somehow complexly related to what goes through the limbic system, you know, the system with which we associate the amygdalae and “freezing, fleeing, or fighting.”
What our brains do with uncertainty isn’t a new experience. Today’s reactions to the new coronavirus is reminiscent of a time not too long ago when Ebola was the threat du jour. People have always known that in a horror movie some shadowy figure will spring upon the unsuspecting victim, and they await the scare they predict will inevitably occur. The fictional threat is, in fact, no real threat, but the brain accepts it as such and releases the same neurotransmitters. In “real life,” however, the uncertainty drives people to hoard and hide to minimize the chance of unpredictable threat, that is, they mitigate the feeling associated with unpredictability.
Unfortunately, hoarding and hiding aren’t 100-percent guarantees against bacteria and viruses. The one-celled prokaryotes and semi-living whatevers are just too good at sneaking through the underbrush of life. Hoarding and hiding, long the defensive actions of those in fear of plagues, do provide us with a semblance of security through predictability, or seeming predictability. If we hoard and hide with others who haven’t been bitten by the bug, then we feel secure, but remain wary. Hoarding and hiding make some sense, and other than washing hands and avoiding unnecessary contact, they are the best we can do until we develop a vaccine that works. But in large part hoarding and hiding are mostly just a floccinaucinihilipilification that satisfies a deep part of the brain, the part stimulated by low uncertainty and high surprise or its opposite, high uncertainty without surprise.
"Expect the unexpected" is old, but valuable, advice. The interior of our brains evolved with—to attribute purpose to the process—safety in mind. We are so complex, however, that our brains have invented in music and drama the fictional equivalents of real-world unpredictability. Even when there are no real threats to our personal existence, we inundate ourselves with such unexpectedness.
Inundate? Take the brain’s handling of caffeine or some other substance as an analog. The more caffeine we consume, the more receptors we develop. Satisfying the need for caffeine grows with increased consumption and develops a feedback loop. Is there analogous activity in the basal forebrain? When the unexpected does arrive as we expect it to arrive eventually, do our brains seem to thrive in its seeming unpredictability? Like children addicted to ever more violent video games, do we thrive emotionally on increasingly more serious threats to our health? In those video games, kids expect the unexpected and act from the basal parts of the brain to seek a return to pleasantness derived from restored, if temporary, predictability. Does a similar drive for predictability manifest itself in hoarding and hiding—or in scapegoating? You can see in reports online, in print, and on TV that the media delves into the inner brain and fosters hoarding, hiding, and scapegoating.
You don’t have to be very old to remember when the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the United States in 2014. Scary. Right? Remember, compared to the current coronavirus, Ebola was deadlier at that time, taking the lives of nearly half of its victims in West Africa (e.g., 3,091 deaths in an infected population of 6,500). The coronavirus is less deadly, currently some 2,000+ deaths out of 60,000+, most of those in the earliest stages of the epidemic before the medical community knew there was a problem. One death out of every thirty infected is very serious, obviously, but it is far less than Ebola’s toll of nearly one out of every two infected. But relative numbers are no solace to those infected or killed by the disease.
You will always be subjected to drives originating in basal parts of your brain because of their interconnectedness and their relationship to neurons in other parts of the brain. Not even those neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute can fully explain the complex responsible for triggering emotional responses. That basal part appears to be reactive. But you do have that other part of your brain, the proactive and largely rational part. It understands that the world is full of the unpredictable. It isn’t one solely concerned with immediate responses to whatever is expected or unexpected, but rather also with what might surprise over the long term. You have the ability to make plans, and if hoarding and hiding are part of those plans, hoard and hide. You will not, however, eliminate totally the world’s unpredictability, including contagious diseases. Yet, would you want a world so predictable? Music’s uncertainty and certainty both give us pleasure. Drama also provides it through similar mechanisms. If you listen to music and watch movies with surprises, you probably crave the pleasantness both provide through the juxtaposition of the predictable and unpredictable.
Unlike people succumbing to the Black Death in the fourteenth century, we have more than slow word of mouth communication about the spread of disease. That foreknowledge spread round the world makes the coronavirus the expected unexpected. That in itself is means to turn the most unpleasant of surprises into a mitigated unpleasantness. Turning the unexpected into the expected is what we do not with our basal brain, but rather with our frontal cortex. Use yours in trying times to compose the music you deem most pleasant.
*https://maxplanckneuroscience.org/the-science-of-a-billboard-hit-song/
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