The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [34]
In other words, what the song sounds like and how you hear it depends on one’s familiarity with music, with rock’n’roll as a tradition, with The Stones, and with particular songs and performances of theirs and of other bands. Obviously certain elements of a song that were once surprising cease to be surprising on repeated listening, as Mill tells us:
the pleasure of music … fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. (Mill, Autobiography, Holt, 1873, p. 145)
But here’s a little grist for Mill: a listener is a dynamic being, changing in ways that make it possible to be surprised by compositions heard a zillion times. Contra Mill, sometimes elements emerge as novel and surprising upon repeated listening due to subjective, learned changes in the receptivity and the expectations of the individual listener.
Tell Me, Sister Dopamine
You cannot understand the pleasures of The Stones, nor the channels of the human brain through which they work their emotional magic, without directing your attention to what have been called life’s four F’s: feeding (“The Spider and the Fly”), fighting (“Street Fighting Man”), fleeing (“Before They Make Me Run”), and fornicating (too many to count). To survive and perpetuate their kind, humans and all other animal species require adaptations for each of these functions. The human brain has evolved to derive pleasure from rock’n’roll—and drugs—by hijacking the basic brain mechanisms associated with these fundamentals of survival. For a readable account of the neuroscience of music, read Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music (Dutton, 2006).
From a neurological standpoint, the higher pleasures are inextricably linked with the lower. They share a motivation and reward system that produces a two-phase rush associated with the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a feel-good chemical. The first phase occurs in anticipation of a pleasing stimulus, such as the part of a song that sends shivers down your spine. Research by Valorie Salimpoor’s lab at McGill University has shown that the music listener’s brain releases a mild dose of dopamine in the period just before the chill-inducing segment of a song. The second, larger dose accompanies the spine-tingling sensation itself. We can think of these two hits of dopamine as positive reinforcement for anticipation and fulfilled prediction of the pleasing stimulus. This two-hit high relies on exactly the same brain chemistry as the animal appetites. Take feeding. The brain does not simply reward eating a meal. There is also the thrill of the hunt. Or sex. Before orgasm comes foreplay. In each case, the first, anticipatory dose of dopamine correlates with motivation (for seeking the pleasure), and the second is involved in reward (for having succeeded). Drug addiction exploits the same pathway—the heroin addict feels an anticipatory rush upon seeing his blood enter the needle, well before the dope enters his veins and reaches his brain.
What about the pleasures of listening to a piece of music one has never heard before, such as the first time Keith heard Chuck Berry? How does one anticipate a pleasing stimulus one has never experienced? The answer lies in the expectancy structures of the listener. Perception and sensation are active processes, even when we’re not consciously attending to sensory inputs. Neural networks constantly feed back with stimuli from the environment to develop a working model of the outside world, on the basis of learning, experience, and innate elements of brain architecture.
The brain is constantly anticipating what the next sensory input will be, generating predictions which