The Brain & Culture—it’s the title of one of the 2010 Pages & Places panels, but what does it mean? The brain is seated inside the body; culture happens outside of it, so where precisely is the intersection of neurology and literature or music or art or public policy?
That’s a good question, and of course it’s up to our panel is world class scholars to answer it with subtly and thoroughness—and hopefully no small dose of provocation—but this post ought to help give you the sense that what we’ve learned about the brain—in a very short period of time—is both answering and raising questions about the nature of our relationship with the world and how and why we find art, or at least particular works of art, beautiful.
The subject here is how the brain engages with music—a safe subject, as none of our panelists will speak specifically about music and because I’m relying on Jonah Lerher, probably the single most lucid writer on matters of neuroscience and culture, for my information.
In this post he illuminates a study conducted by researchers at the University of London who discovered, perhaps not unexpectedly, that the act of listening to music is really an act of neural prediction.
Here are the researchers’ conclusions:
The ability to anticipate forthcoming events has clear evolutionary advantages, and predictive successes or failures often entail significant psychological and physiological consequences. In music perception, the confirmation and violation of expectations are critical to the communication of emotion and aesthetic effects of a composition.
Our ability to predict sequences of notes, harmonies, and so on are predicated on our previous listening habits. Lehrer points out that because he listens to Bruce Springsteen his brain is very good at predicting the melodies of John Mellencamp (I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not that’s an enviable talent). But real pleasure from music requires surprise, that is, what strikes us as pretty—symmetrical chord structures and melodies, for instance—are really design to lull us into the safety of predictability before we encounter some startling dissonance, and in the unsettling back and forth between harmony and dissonance, we derive pleasure.
Beavis and Butthead put it differently: “Most of the song has to suck for that part to be good”—or something to that effect.
For the human mind,” Lerher quotes musicologist Leonard Meyer, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, through Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, say, for the resolution of E major, by which Beethoven’s established pattern is completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison d’etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.”
The uncertainty makes the feeling. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.
The famous debut of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 is a pretty dramatic test case of the impact of violation of expectations. If you don’t know the piece—an avant guard ballet—it is, upon first listen, at least the first listen, intensely dissonant.
What’s famous about the debut is that when well-healed Parisians heard the opening discordant tones they flew into a frenzy. Literally, a riot ensued. People beat each other with umbrellas, tore up theater chairs, punched and slapped each other, and pulled each other’s hair. Needless to say, the debut didn’t last terribly long. Stravinsky was escorted from the stage, as were the dancers and musicians. The threats to Stravinsky were taken very literally, and he returned home to Russia as quickly as he could.
Legend of the riot spread through Paris, and a year later Stravinsky was invited back to Paris to perform Rite of Spring again. This time the house was filled with excited gossip-lovers waiting for the next riot to break out. But this time, instead of responding to the dissonance, the audience heard the Romantic melodies built under the dissonance, and instead of chasing Stravinsky out of town, the audience carried him on their shoulders. A hero was born.
So what was the difference between the first performance and the second?
Turns out that the answer lies in the auditory cortex. Four of the five senses (smell being the exception—hence the power of Proust’s madeleine) process information through a separate designated cortex. The point of the cortex is to sift through the information it receives in search of familiar patterns. When it discovers some familiarity, it passes the filtered information on quietly. In the event it doesn’t find a pattern, it sends along with the information a signal to panic.
The dissonance of The Rite Spring made it impossible for the first audience to hear anything else, and so their brains received a signal to freak out. For the second audience, just the foreknowledge that they were going to hear dissonance prepared their brains to cut through the overload and hear the patterns beneath it.
And here’s the not so surprising link to the pleasures of difficulty, as put by Lehrer in his (remarkable) book Proust was a Neuroscientist:
“Before a pattern can be desired by the brain, it must play hard to get. Music only excites us when it makes our auditory cortex struggle to uncover its order. If the music is too obvious, if its patterns are always present, it is annoyingly boring. This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. Our auditory cortex rejoices. It has found the order it has been looking for.”