"Math professor figures formula for Beatles success"
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- Noga Arikha
- Monday, 02 February 2009
- Blog Noga's blog
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, here. Jason Brown, math professor in Nova Scotia, identified rhythmic patterns in Beatles songs in order then to produce a "Beatles" song of his own. The result is quite impressive. The issue that arises here, though, is that, while the recognition of musical and mathematical patterns are closely related. music and maths are not the same cultural product. And while the WSJ report implies that Brown found the mathematical "key" to what makes a Beatles song so "fresh" and lovely, indeed so perpetually satisfying, the question at stake here regards the boundary between, on the one hand, the identification of a satisfying pattern and the possibly concomitant activation of a reward mechanism upon its finding, and, on the other, the artistic determination of what is aesthetically satisfying - a question that lies on the border between cognitive psychology and aesthetics. Mathematics as music of the spheres - that idea has an old appeal and ancient history. But it can be turned on its head: perhaps one may attempt to study the nature of mathematical cognition via musical cognition. Even if mathematics do underly all musical patterns (and Brown could have "created" a Bach, a Mozart, a Brahms), one might also ask whether Brown might not have used his sense of song - what one superficially may understand as the musical sense - to do maths. Open questions. But the song is worth listening to.
Journalistic teleology
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- Noga Arikha
- Tuesday, 25 November 2008
- Blog Noga's blog
(editor's note) This is Noga Arikha's first post here. She will be blogging regularly on cognitionandculture.net. A philosopher and science historian, Noga published Passions and tempers: a history of the humours, a New York Times Book Review editor's choice, in 2007 (go check her web page). Welcome, Noga!
From a New York Magazine article by Jennifer Senior on a study by John Cacioppo and William Norton of the phenomenon of loneliness in big cities (just indexed on Arts & Letters Daily, and also reported in a paper from Abu Dhabi) :
"Loneliness, like hunger, is an alarm signal that evolved in hominids hundreds of thousands of years ago, when group cohesion was essential to fight off abrupt attacks from stampeding wildebeests. It's nature's way of telling us to rejoin the group or pay the price. "Nature," they simply write at one point, "is connection."
It's a controversial theory, certainly, not least because it's post-hoc and therefore can't be proved. From Cacioppo's point of view, our large brains didn't evolve in order to do multivariable calculus or compose sonatas. They evolved in order to process social information-and hence to work collaboratively. "And if you look at any city," he says, "you see that we have the capacity, as a species, to do so. They show we can work together, we can trust one another. We couldn't even drive through city streets if we didn't trust that people would follow rules that protect the group."
But why contrast the processing of social information with the performance of calculus or the composition of sonatas?
Another possible alternative explanation for IFT
What's wrong with "intentional stance"?
Possible alternative explanation for IFT
Crushing a dispute with a smile (ahem, a bared-teeth display)
Impartial intervention, or pragmatic intervention?
Not fairness, not mutual interest ... cognitive dissonance maybe
A couple of references
Emotions as regulators of social behavior
Women are not allowed by social group to own their bodies
"Rigtheous" women and "promiscuous" men