This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

В работе людей искусства и ученых есть похожие стадии: сначала «мозговой штурм», затем этапы тестирования и внесения уточнений, которые обычно включают заранее определенные процедуры, но при этом сопровождаются творческим решением задач.

Rosch, following Wittgenstein, showed that categories do not always have clear boundaries - they have fuzzy boundaries. Questions of membership are a matter of debate and there can be differences of opinion: Is white a color? Is hip-hop really music? If the surviving members of Queen perform without Freddie Mercury, am I…

Yes, for a female songbird, size matters; it indicates male-bird intellect and, by extension, a source of potentially good bird genes. This was shown in a study that played different songs over loudspeakers to female birds. The birds ovulated more quickly in the presence of a large birdsong repertoire than in the presence…

Офицальное определение, данное Американским акустическим обществом, состоит в том, что тембр - характерика звука, не связанная с его громкостью и высотой. Вот вам и научная точность!

Many of the problems we face today — cancers, heart disease, maybe even the high divorce rate — have come to torment us because our bodies and our brains were designed to handle life the way it was for us fifty thousand years ago. Fifty thousand years from now in the year 52,006 (give or take a few millennia), our species…

We let them into our living rooms and bedrooms when no one else is around. We let them into our ears, directly, through earbuds and headphones, when we’re not communicating with anybody else in the world.

We tell ourselves that if we only listen to it enough times, we may begin to understand it and to like it as much as our friends do. Yet, we recall other times in our lives when we invested hours of prime listening time in an artist and never arrived at the point where we “got it.” Trying to appreciate new music can be…

When the infant looks at one speaker, it starts to play music or some other sound, and when he looks at the other speaker, it starts to play different music or a different sound. The infant quickly learns that he can control what is playing by where he is looking; he learns, that is, that the conditions of the experiment…

One alternative explanation is statistical, and can be stated like this: “If you look hard enough, and make enough comparisons, you’re going to find some really weird coincidences that don’t really mean anything.”... Once in a while we find co-occurrences, and we’re surprised. But from a statistical standpoint, it isn’t any…

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these factors; caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in the encoding of the memory…