ASM066 Violence, Pessimism, and Music in Your Brain

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violence pessimism and music in your brain all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life i'm back after a one week break to recover from tour but i'm traveling again this weekend i'll be in frisco texas at hope fellowship for all four of their church services talking about science and faith so glad to be back with you guys so glad to do a show this week so what do you say let's get it started hey mike it's your friend kevin here now we both go way back initially meeting primarily due to music way back what sophomore year of high school and thanks for firing me as a drummer by the way for the very first time as everybody knows that's the pinnacle of being a legitimate drummer in the rock and roll music sphere so i've had that for my resume for a long time just kidding man maybe don't really hold it against you anyhow i have a question about music and its effect on the brain growing up in fundamentalist churches i often heard about the dangers of certain styles of music there were of course issues with the content of the music which is understandable from a religious perspective especially when the content was so often revolving around things such as drugs and sex and misogyny however taking it one step further my church also taught that things such as christian metal or christian rap were damaging as well now i get that much christian metal was extremely painful to listen to but that of course wasn't what they were referring to they were often instead referring to the tribal beats within the music or minor keys or the dark tunings like drop d or other types etc and said that those styles of music regardless of the message were damaging to listen to from a spiritual perspective now it all sounds like hogwash you and i grew up listening to bands like metallica and nirvana soundgarden and so on and so forth and i don't ever remember having demons invade my brain as a result however we do know that music can have an effect on us physiologically types of music have proven to lower blood pressure affect our mood etc as a result we have things like music therapy is a valid type of science now my question is directed to how different styles of music affect us both from a content's perspective to a physiological perspective is there any damage so to speak from listening to certain keys or types of beats what about content i'm sure that listening to content of a negative type can certainly reinforce certain types of maybe revolting behaviors likewise are there any studies on listening to church approved music such as southern gospel or hymns so to sum it up was tipper gore wright was twisted sister destroying the youth of america in the mid 80s what are the negative aspects of music what are the positives and what types of music should we listen to if we want to become peacemakers servants and people following after the mind of christ thanks mike i look forward to hearing your answer well kevin this was a surprisingly difficult question to research and the reason is music is such a complicated phenomenon that in order to answer all the subtleties and nuance of your question with confidence we'd have to devote i don't know probably more research just into people listening to music than we've done total research on the brain and fmris it's a pretty wild phenomenon but let's talk a little bit about what we do know looking at studies of music and the brain the first thing i found was at least at the level we can image the brain today is there's not a dramatic difference in the way our brains experience different genres of music be that pop or metal or classical there's a you know long-standing idea that listening to classical music makes you smarter it's not true what we have found in studies is that listening to music you enjoy improves cognitive performance immediately after listening to that music which is where that belief came from it was a a valid finding stretched too far and not put in context how could humans ever do that we kind of experience music very similarly with one distinction well let's think about what makes music music first of all neurologically speaking when you hear noise just regular old noise most of the processing happens in your brain's auditory cortex but when you listen to music more of the brain is engaged than when you listen to simple noise parts of the brain responsible for memory and movement and cognitive function as well as other sound processing activate in the brain especially in your temporal lobes but when you listen to music with lyrics it shifts the way you're processing music you know towards the left auditory cortex more than that happens when you listen to instrumental music so you have this distinction between classical and pop music mainly in the fact that one has vocals and the other does not but this is true of any instrumental versus any music with lyrics in terms of how the brain processes it and the thing is the reason music becomes such a hot topic because we love it people love music neurologically speaking um you know part of the draw of music is because it has a foundation that's built on repetition a repetition is a beat our prefrontal cortex likes to predict the rhythm of that beat that's why we tap our toes that's why we dance we're moving in time with music and celebrating our successful prediction our brains like to make predictions and be right that's why we like repetition and then we also find that music can create rewards that are similar to food and sex in our brain so when we experience music and we enjoy music we go to a similar place neurologically as we would eating good food or having sex and uh i think most people are like me they like good food and they like sex so we like music a lot we've also found and i think this is interesting when you talk about the church condemning some parts of the church condemning different genres of music they've studied people that grew up in bicultural households who listen to music that come from different genres of world music and found that to be neurologically beneficial that it creates uh more activity in the brain when listening to any music and maximizes that reward effect so it appears listening to different styles and different genres of music may actually be beneficial and not detrimental which is astounding and wonderful if you think about it now in terms of these ideas of bad music you know music that's aggressive or metal or hip-hop or some of the music that older people tend to frown on although today older people listen to that because metal and old-school hip-hop are now oldies but uh enough about me getting old what we're finding is it's less about the music itself and more about what you take into it the emotional state you take when you listen to the music in the first place so if you're feeling aggressive and you listen to aggressive music or angry and you listen to angry music yes it deepens that emotional experience and can leave traces in the brain same way that sadness if you're if you're very melancholy and you listen to music to really express and sit in that sadness you're going to amplify those feelings but the same music listen to for enjoyment or nostalgia or whatever affects the brain differently so it appears to be less about the genre of music and how it affects us and more the emotional state we approach music with that it seems that music is basically a force amplifier for human emotion in how we process it now again way more questions than research is answered today but i did pick out you know four resources i'll put on the show notes at asksciencemike.com about how music affects the brain you can go check that out and read more about different genres of music and how they live in the brain but the moral of the story is there doesn't appear to be good music and bad music but there does appear to be a linkage between how we approach music our emotional posture and how it affects us as people our next question came in via email and it reads mike my question is in regards to pessimism optimism and rationalism etc are these personality traits are hardwired into us i ask because i've been accused of being a severe optimist which might explain why i have such a hard time with my family which is full of severe pessimists take for example watching a football game i've never watched a football game but i'll take your war for it our team is up 24 to 10 the running back has rushed for a hundred yards and two brilliant tds already i don't know what a td is man anyway sorry uh however on the next play when the running back fumbles statements from family such as that kid is awful he can't do anything right and well here we go we're going to get killed now begin to populate the room i literally have to leave the room because it makes me so angry why is that i honestly feel like it's a terrible way to live but it gets me thinking i wonder if optimism and pessimism are ways of dealing with our anxiety it seems my family members are predicting a loss at that point in the game just in case we do lose and they can say well i told you so but in this case they did win and after the game everyone was talking about how great the team was even after coming up with this interpretation slash hypothesis these pessimistic statements still affect me and really get under my skin maybe such pessimistic statements are emotionally and mentally processed very differently to a pessimist what's going on here science mike okay there's a lot to unpack here scientifically and relationally so let's get to it first strictly on optimism and pessimism research has shown that there could be a genetic link between pessimism in one particular gene labeled ada 2 b that in studies people possessing that gene tend to follow a neurological pattern associated with being more pessimistic in outlook and whether that is well founded in research or not we do see differences in brain activity between optimus and pessimists for example pessimists have a hard time foreseeing positive outcomes to events and telling them to think positive actually makes it more difficult for them to foresee positive outcomes neurologically speaking and you can see this in brain scans pessimists tend to have a weaker connections or less activity association between their prefrontal cortex that's the part of the brain that does analytical thinking and focus and concentration and the amygdala the seat of the brain's most powerful emotional centers fear anger anxiety anytime you really have a strong feeling the amygdala is evolved in additionally pessimists tend to have more activity in their right frontal cortex than their left frontal cortex now researchers learn this by showing a lot of test subjects a series of negative images for example uh someone holding a knife up to a woman's neck while telling the subjects the situation had a positive outcome and what they found was that pessimists had a hard time accepting a positive outcome and they tended to dwell on the negative image longer now a couple of thoughts one is a quote from a researcher david hecht who said our survival and wellness require a balance between optimism and pessimism undue pessimism makes life miserable however excessive optimism can lead to dangerously risky behaviors so we tend to um look down on pessimists we tend to you know poopoo their experiences and tell them to just think positively but too much optimistic thinking isn't safe so i want to start with that we might overly highlight the advantages of optimism second much like the well-known introvert extrovert situation optimus pessimist is a spectrum there are very few people who would be pure extroverts or introverts and there are very few people who would be pure optimists or pessimists we tend to be more optimistic or pessimistic based on our circumstances and in different areas of our lives i tend to be very optimistic about my friends about people about my family about situations that are personal in nature i tend to be very pessimistic about anything involving my work or business and how people will receive it so in my i.t days when i did mainly network architecture and systems design i was very optimistic about my capabilities because it was just me and machines and i controlled all the variables but now every time i release a podcast or do a live event or my book's coming out part of my brain is convinced it's not going to work it's going to fail no one's going to show up to the event no one's going to download the podcast and no one's going to buy the book so am i an optimist or am i a pessimist well depending on who you ask and in what context they know me you would get different answers and that's true for almost everyone so we have a tendency towards optimism or pessimism that is affected by our circumstances and our nature we are born with a tendency one way or the other and it gets reinforced over time like almost every aspect of human personality there's an interaction an intersection of nature and nurture and because of our prefrontal cortex because of our elaborate model of reality we're an animal that can also self-condition so we can nurture ourselves for good or for bad now there's another thing i pulled from your question and forgive me if this is wrong but it seems you also may be conflict diverse and i say that because i'm very conflict verse and when i was growing up and you know my family would scream at the football game i couldn't handle it i had to leave the room and so you may want to look in your own life how much of this is conflict aversion versus optimism and pessimism and how you can come up with coping or mitigating strategies to be more comfortable with healthy conflict and to manage unhealthy conflict and by the way optimism and pessimism have to do with forecasting future outcomes you can still have a positive temperament or a very open accepting affirming posture towards other people and have some pessimistic outlooks in some situations we're we're very very very complex creatures neurocognitively and we want to be careful not to sort everything into either or binaries because although they tend to be useful constructs and and help us understand a spectrum of human behavior uh we're we too naturally as humans say it's a or b it's just there's a lot of values in fact there's an infinite number of values between 0 and 1. [Music] hey dude i have a question about race and justification so after the liturgist podcast i felt the moral obligation to create the most stay woked up amazon cart and i did just that so what i ended up doing was getting a black theological history of liberation and god of the oppressed by james h cohn and so upon starting the primary stages of the first chapter of god of the oppressed he started talking about how the white protestant apparatus responded to the 12th street rights in detroit um and how is deemed as irresponsible and deplorable which even as a white protestant i vehemently disagree with for whatever reason i tend to find a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in violence so like even specifically with baltimore for whatever reason i found myself either subconsciously acted or actively admonishing the violent behavior so i wanted to know how are those two linked in my brain violence as justification or sense of vindication thanks mike human beings are the most violent species of ape on planet earth the next most violent species of ape is chimpanzees and they are less likely to go into war and less likely to engage in personal conflicts than homo sapiens have been historically in fact human beings participating in or watching violence show physical symptoms of arousal not quite sexual in nature but with changes in our hormonal levels in our bloodstream elevated activity in the pleasure centers of our brain humans love violence so why boxing is so popular it's why people sometimes like to watch cars flip over when they're watching nascar we are violent animals and we love stories of vindication and revenge we love when the bully gets their comeuppance and these are behaviors and biases that have been rewarded by evolution because if the whole tribe cheers when you're punished for your wrongdoing maybe people are less likely to do wrong i used to love to watch violent movies whether it was uh like bloodsport with sean claude van damme and people fighting or rambo where you know with guys with guns take out the bad guys but at the heart of those stories is people winning via physical force physical violence breaking other bodies i've lost my appetite for it now let me be clear i'm not equating the natural pleasure humans get from observing violence and the thrill we get from stories of retribution with supporting the genuine plight of people of color in america today but what i am talking about is the zeal we can feel the excitement yes even the arousal from seeing bodies broken and that might be a police officer or a storefront being destroyed a riot on news media which by the way the news tends to focus on the most sensational images so so often in america peaceful protests have small pockets of violent activity which these riots are the language of the oppressed they have no other voice but the news media shows that and not the people peacefully demonstrating either way i'm not equating these things what i am saying is sometimes we enjoy those images in the same way why do we like to show the body of a black man in the street on the news after a shooting regardless of what we think what where does that curiosity come from i i hear those stories i say their names but i don't i don't look at their bodies broken in media how you relate to violence and retribution is affected by your experiences i'm weird about race for a white person i've learned that as i've gotten older and it comes down to a couple of things i didn't have any friends in elementary school i was a nerdy kid and uh all the white kids and i went to a overwhelmingly white elementary school and all the white kids picked on me they made fun of me brutally in many cases but there was a young black boy who would play with me so often he was the only person the only play companion i had i wouldn't say we were friends but we were both lonely and uh i don't know the most positive social experiences i had from kindergarten to fifth grade was a young black child and then middle school the bullying i experienced intensified and um an older i hate to say child black boy he was uh he'd been held back a few times physically powerful became my protector and my advocate he grabbed a bully off of me one time and said if you ever touch him again you touch me and the space created by that man allowed me to become who i am today for the first time in my life i wasn't afraid every time i walk down the hallways because of that i associate the presence of black people with physical safety i feel more comfortable whenever a black person is in the room now that story led to an exchange between me and propaganda before we recorded the liturgist podcast on black and white america propaganda told me some things that brought me to tears about how that black child recognized the oppression i experienced and felt empowered because he could lift me from oppression even though he could not lift himself and so when propaganda called me a stay woke white boy something that twitter has picked up and championed my face burned with shame and not because i'm ashamed to be identified with the black experience but because i understand all too well i did nothing to be woke nothing that it was my experiences that shaped me that it was the compassion and yes the patience of black people that allowed me to read contextual my experiences so that creates a responsibility for me my response to oppressors must be grace why because i'm not the oppressed because i can be gracious because i can host conversations that feel safe for the oppressor because so often the oppressor is unaware or unknowing or simply asleep and if they are startled too quickly they'll simply go back to sleep they won't become woke so when i see these responses that you've talked about that in some ways seem violent i understand the motivation of someone who would push over a car in frustration over a system of economic and social dominance that keeps them down but i also have the responsibility to be aware of how many of my white brothers and sisters were not defended by black children when they were children whose only encounters with these stories have been through media have been through curated narratives you see my goal is to create knowledge and insight in white america about white supremacy white privilege and the systemic disadvantages people of color face because once people have that knowledge and that insight they have a responsibility to act and most people can't arrive at that knowledge and that insight unless they are taken there via some kind of trust-based relationship that even if their actions like mine cause harm to others someone has to consider their intent and someone has to say i understand you are a good person but somehow our actions still cause harm and that means acknowledging yeah we get excited by images of violence but we're also motivated when we can hear the stories of people who don't have the same shot this is the mechanism by the way which has driven america so rapidly to accept lesbian gay bisexual trans queer and other people of non-traditional gender or sexual orientation because their stories were told and the job now is to expose white america to the stories of people of color so they may see that as well and we can reach tipping point statistically where change can happen at the legislative level and where every single american truly is able to exercise their inalienable right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness our last question is a short one it says when you went from being an atheist to becoming a christian again what happened to all the questions and reasons you had accumulated for not believing in god or jesus or the resurrection or the bible it's a great question and i don't have a satisfying answer because nothing happened to them absolutely nothing happened to my doubts and my questions if you haven't heard my story i grew up in the church i was southern baptist as an adult i became an atheist because i questioned the foundational claims of christianity that the bible was god's word that jesus was the son of god or even a real person i could go on and on name a foundational idea behind christianity and i rejected it because i didn't think christianity could provide evidence to support its claims and i became an atheist and then then i had these weird experiences where i experienced god directly you know in very powerful ways if you haven't heard this episode six and seven of the liturgies podcast i talk about it in detail also i've got a book coming out in september called finding god in the waves where i go through that story and my response to it how i came to have something i could call a christian faith again on the other side of atheism and at first none zero of my questions had answers so here i'd heard jesus talk to me in english and i thought the most likely explanation was that it was a hallucination and i had this profound experience with a blinding light on the beach and i thought probably neurologically induced social pressure kind of thing and yet and yet it was so life-changing so beautiful i just kind of sat with the experience and those questions and then i went on this mission to find out what had happened to me and who or what god may be and that led to studying cosmology and neuroscience and quantum physics and all the most basic sciences that explain our reality and how humans experience it and i started to find answers but they weren't answers that were acceptable inside my faith tradition or frankly most christian faith traditions i'm pretty out there theologically but it led to me creating these axioms where i had these self-evident belief statements about what i could believe about god what i could demonstrate about god scientifically and over time i need those axioms less because i'm finding an incredible comfort in not knowing things and just experiencing things and learning things so i still love science it's still my favorite i love learning with high degrees of confidence facts about reality but science can't complete a human experience right it's just a methodology for learning facts it doesn't give us a a meaning in life science doesn't give us a moral philosophy or ethic and so i let my faith inform those areas but without making fact claims i don't i don't i don't have any i mean any claims from my faith my faith is it's much more like falling in love than making a logical argument and i would have the same difficulty explaining my faith in logical concrete terms that i would have explaining my love for my wife in logical concrete terms i'd have to sing you a song or paint a picture to describe that experience and even then i'd miss something you wouldn't feel what i feel you just have to experience it yourself you know what i mean like to know what it's like to love someone as much as i love jenny you just have to be deeply and love yourself and that's faith to me it's a mystery it's a posture of gratitude towards life towards living toward the experiences we have the soaring highs of joy and even an appreciation for sorrow and loss the dynamic range that make up our days an appreciation for a beautiful spring day like today but also boy that hot hot swampy august we have in tallahassee or the crisp cold winters that burned my face when i was uh up in minneapolis this winter all of these things are gifts all of them are beautiful what does that have to do with god or jesus or the resurrection or the bible these have become ways i contextualize those experiences and honestly i go into incredible detail literally hundreds of pages of detail in my book finding god in the ways that comes out this september you can learn more about that at finding god in the ways.com and i am not trying to turn this answer into a commercial it's actually the reason i wrote the book is because the question you just asked me is the most common question i get and i just found i can't answer it in a satisfactory way in a blog post or a podcast question or even on stage for a whole hour that it takes like 250 pages to explain what happened to all the questions i had about god jesus the resurrection and the bible so the only way i can do that answer service is with that book [Music] okay that's another episode of ask science mike listen i gotta just share some gratitude and some love here i've just got to do it i took last week off because i was so tired uh and i appreciate all of you offering me the grace to take a week and just rest but boy this spring and late winter i went everywhere man i met so many of you in cities across the country and can i just say thank you thank you for taking time out of your week to come to a venue and hang out with me for a while or if you saw us on the one wildlife tour with me and with gunger i loved seeing you you have no idea so you come up to me and you shake my hand or some of you cry and then you apologize to me for crying or some of you feel weird because listen you have to know i have nothing but joy getting to know you all you're a blessing to me i mean just imagine for a second that you have an experience with god and all it does is make you feel weird and like an outsider and like you don't belong anymore you don't belong in your church and you don't belong with your friends who are atheists you're just a weirdo and then you go to events and people from all over come and they say they're there because they felt alone you have no idea how good that feels how affirming that is so let me give you permission come up to me and bawl your eyes out i'll cry and i'll ask if you're okay getting a hug and then we'll just hug it out and if you feel awkward don't feel awkward i am genuinely thrilled to see you genuinely thrilled i mean when portland screamed so loud at the start of ask science mike live that they clipped the microphones or when los angeles chanted science mike as soon as i walked out on the stage you just make me feel so loved and i am so thankful for all of you and not only that holy cow i want to thank all of you who have dug deep and helped make the show possible on patreon there's been an influx of people digging deep and offering a lot of money every month and there's also been so many people now who are sending a dollar or five dollars or twenty dollars a month thank you you make my life possible you make this show possible like like i eat food and have health insurance because of you so thank you thank you i am just overwhelmed with gratitude and i just had to burn some air time saying how thankful i am for you and how much i love you thanks for helping make these conversations possible i also want to thank as always andrew gallucki who's doing our pre-production work for the show greg nordine the show's producer and jeb botiford my good friend who wrote the ask science mic theme song i've got way fewer events coming up over the summer this fall will be much more intense with the finding on the waves book tour as well as the liturgists gathering in denver and chicago so if you'd like to see me in person know i'd love to see you go to asksciencemike.com and click on events and we'll get together thanks for listening everybody and i'll see you next week