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are at times satisfied, at other times close enough for rock’n’roll, and at other times completely frustrated. The brain has a reward system for correct predictions, sometimes even for predictions that are close enough, and registers surprise when predictions are unmet. In the wild, unmet predictions (a predator’s yowl when we were expecting dead silence) kick the nervous system into alertness: hair stands on end, goose bumps form, and so forth. Our conscious and unconscious expectations help us navigate our world, and the satisfaction or frustration of those expectations feeds back into the neural network and updates our working model of reality.

We depend upon these mental models far more than we realize. When it comes to processing each and every stimulus from the real world, time is literally not on our side. There’s not enough time for all of these stimuli to pass through our nervous system, into our brains, and for another nervous impulse to be sent back out from the brain to move our muscles. Our mental models, reinforced by correct predictions, and updated by encounters with the unexpected, serve as a surrogate for external reality, so much so that for us, they usually pass for reality (Bo Digg was only half wrong when he sang, “reality is a parody of my fantasy”). If you’ve ever texted while driving, you’re allowing a mental model of the road to pass for reality until you look up again to update the model.

Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind

All Western music (including honky tonk blues) is composed of the same basic elements of melody, harmony, and rhythm. In most rock’n’roll, this has been simplified to the basic elements of the blues: four beats to the measure (or bar), a repeating pattern (often, but not always, twelve bars long), and a chord progression that often goes from the tonic (or I [one], which corresponds to the key the song is in), to the subdominant (or IV, corresponding to the fourth note of the scale in that key), then the dominant (or V, corresponding to the fifth note of the scale in that key), before returning to the I.

If you’re not up on your music theory, you must already be convinced that anything this complicated has got to qualify as a higher pleasure (although Levitin’s primer to music theory in This Is Your Brain on Music makes it all seem easy). Not so fast. The fact is, as with much learning, a lifetime (or even a short time) of listening suffices for the brain to forge enough neural connections that, even lacking the vocabulary to talk about it, the casual listener can intuitively feel the moment when a song should come slamming back into the I, and likewise can sense the tension when a song lingers on the IV or the V without resolving to the I. Western music theory has simply developed terminology to capture these intuitively felt phenomena. But much of the tension and release that is rock-’n’roll involves the delay, frustration, and eventual satisfaction of our learned expectation that eventually the melody with return to the I.

This kind of expectation is so crucial to the experience of listening to music that David Huron aptly called his book on the psychology of music Sweet Anticipation. If Huron and other neurorockologists are right, this manipulation, frustration, postponement, and fulfillment of expectations is precisely what allows rock’n’roll to tap into the animal-pleasure pathways of life’s four F’s.

In his engrossing autobiography, Life, Keith returns periodically to something he calls “Keef ’s Guitar Workshop” and it is clear that, coming at it from the performer’s end, rock’n’roll is about as high a higher pleasure as you can imagine. I mean, Keith, Mick, and especially Brian Jones before he checked out, really paid their dues with careful study of the blues. Keith is especially clear in his dissection of the guitar technique of bluesman Jimmy Reed. What he soon figured out from listening to a lot of vinyl was that Jimmy seldom played exactly the chord that was expected—he’d leave notes out or allow open strings to drone on partly because it was easier