COGNITO

No 174, May 2018

Newsletter of the
Psychology Special Interest Group
of British Mensa Ltd

(An International SIG)

SIGSec & Editor:

Mike Griffiths:
mike_g50@hotmail.com

COPYRIGHT: Copyright of each contribution to this newsletter remains with the

acknowledged owner. Permission to reproduce content in part or as a whole must be
obtained from the acknowledged owner. Contact the SIGSec in the first instance.

DISCLAIMER: This is the newsletter of the Psychology Special Interest Group (SIG) of
British Mensa, for controlled circulation within this SIG. Additional circulation is not
authorised unless sanctioned by the SIGSec. Published, printed and distributed by
British Mensa Ltd., St John’s House, St John’s Square, Wolverhampton WV2 4AH.
Mensa as a whole has no opinions. Views expressed in this newsletter are not
necessarily those of the editor, the SIGSec, the officers or the directors of Mensa.
 Response from Judy McLashan

THE FUTURE OF RELATIONSHIPS

Thank you, Timothy St Ather, for opening up a discussion on future

relationship ground rules in Cognito No 172.

You mention that your daughter is about to marry in a climate where there is a
less than 50% chance that the relationship will last. At the same time, you
are positive about the possibilities of successful online dating. My own
daughter got married last year having met her husband on her first and only
attempt at an online date. Their eyes did not meet across a crowded room,
but they did impress each other on the first encounter. I like to think their
relationship will last because they may observe some ground rules that seem
to me to be evolving, from my observation of couple’s behaviour over twenty
years’ practice as a marriage counsellor and relationship therapist. I think
these ground rules might look something like this:

1) Go into it with your eyes wide open.

People are committing to long term relationships and starting families later in
life, after the rose tinted spectacles have cleared. This gives them time to
have a good look at what they are getting themselves into, and whether they
like how their partner behaves to other people and in a variety of situations.

2) Expect to respect and be respected by your partner and to share

responsibility for everything.
Communication and listening skills are more valued than ever before, and
gender equality is arriving, if perhaps not arrived. There is a greater chance
that men and women will communicate thoughts and feelings calmly, clearly
and sensitively to each other. While women continue to carry the major
responsibility for domestic arrangements and childcare as well as careers,
men are gradually becoming more involved.

3) If you do not experience disagreement or conflict, you are probably

avoiding it, and storing up trouble in the future.
People are less afraid to air their differences, deal with them constructively,
and work out solutions.

4) Do not expect ever to feel that your relationship is perfect, just that
you would rather be in it than out of it.
Romantic notions of the perfect partner, and the relationship where there is no
discord are outdated. People are more realistic about how much harmony
they can reasonably expect.

5) If you really want to leave and you have tried everything you can
think of, go for an amicable separation or divorce.
It is easier than it has ever been to have a non-adversarial divorce, if
circumstances are straightforward. If you do not have children it is up to you
whether you continue to be friends.

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6) If you do have children, you can divorce and remarry, but you are
still in a relationship for life with your ex.
After perhaps a period of readjustment, couples are trying harder not to focus
on blame but to maintain a working alliance with their exes, to share parenting
and keep up contacts not just with each other but with each other’s families so
that family networks are affected as little as possible.

Following the above does not necessarily mean you staying in a relationship
for life, but it does create some damage limitation. Apparently, despite the
divorce statistics, people are staying together for longer than ever in the
history of relationships, because in the past they were more likely to end
through death. Nonetheless, people change throughout a lifetime, and
sometimes the relationship does not evolve accordingly.

There is also an increasing incidence of domestic abuse, which can be

emotional or financial as well as physical or sexual. These days, even the
Church of England is supporting victims in leaving abusive partners, rather
than encouraging them to stay no matter what.

I personally believe the ideal for everyone is a relationship for life that works,
and enduring family structures. But this is not easy, and you have to
experience a certain amount of luck, because the people we are attracted to
are not always the people that are good for us, and we ourselves are not
perfect. So, I agree with Timothy that “a number of successful relationships
in a lifetime” might not be a bad thing, providing some of the above rules are
respected. Also, that our capacity to enjoy them can improve as we ourselves
mature.

THE FUTURE OF RELATIONSHIPS (2)

By Timothy St Ather

I say we will have no more marriages (Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1)

In their book Nudge authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue against
the absurdity of a state backed marriage contract and suggest that the system
should be privatised. “If we were starting from scratch, no sane person could
possibly devise the existing system” they say. Indeed, people are increasingly
voting with their feet and not doing it.

Elsewhere I have argued that marriage, which was invented when people
lived to an age of about seventeen and never ventured more than two miles
from where they were born, is long past its sell by date.

Unless you want to buy an indentured servant (and some of you might!) is not
everything anyone could wish to do covered by mutually agreed contract?

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If I go into business, take out a mortgage or have children with another
person, we have agreement of intentions and also agreed rules for fulfilling
our obligations with agreed sanctions or compensations if either party does
not fulfil their contact or wishes to terminate the agreement. Generally,
contracts are expected to be reasonable and time determined but also open
to renegotiation or extension.

My grandfather who worked for two companies in his entire life found it almost
impossible to get a better job because he was considered to be an unstable
employee.

Nowadays, if you work for a company there is a contractual agreement.

There are termination agreements and in certain situations there are
restrictions that would prevent someone taking commercial secrets or
customers elsewhere but nobody would expect them not to be able to
terminate reasonably and work elsewhere. Why should that be different for a
relationship?

Many people work for one firm for life and some stay with one relationship for
life but that is a matter of choice. Others may have lifetime employment with
the London Borough of Greenwich but may have many relationships
throughout their life and some may have a number of jobs but one lifetime
partner.

Many of us with be familiar with comparative psychology and understand that

the genetic imperative mandates that species survival predominates over
individual survival. In the animal kingdom we get born, grow to maturity, find a
mate, reproduce and then well, die. Genes into the next generation in the
best possible condition; job done! There is no requirement for us to reproduce
with someone we like or with whom with have an intellectual bond. The
individual is unimportant.

In my next article I shall upset almost everyone by suggestion that nowadays

in many circumstances sexual fidelity is not all that important either. The
death do us part model assumes that we are committed to the first person we
ever have a relationship with, yet as we seem to have evolved to a state
where we hang about uselessly, (in species survival terms) for sixty more
years, most people will have moved on from the first ever relationship. The
fact that people alive today are part of the first generations able to recreational
rather than procreational sex has been a major game changer,

First relationships are entered into with little experience and absurd
expectations. Yet increasingly people are divorcing or uncoupling relatively
amicable and having a contractual relationship where everyone knows what to
expect makes this much more likely. Can it not be expected that each
subsequent relationship will be better than the last one? This is not
necessarily because we have managed to find someone “better” but more
because as in every other aspect of life, we get better at it with experience.
As most people aspire to upgrade the houses we live in over our lifetime, why
not upgrade the relationships that live in them as well.

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If this sounds calculating, indeed it is but there is no intended suggestion that
the person we are moving on from, hopefully amicable, is not moving onwards
and upwards from us.

The question about which I would now be interested to solicit your opinion is
should there be an etiquette for ending a contracted relationship? Should
there be a cafeteria of etiquettes and if so, what would they involve?

Note from the Editor: Androgyny

I feel I should put on record that I received a response from Sergio A. Silverio,
objecting strongly to some of Tim Bazely’s comments in the last issue of
Cognito. Sergio felt that Tim’s comments expressed hostility and intolerance
towards people who are homosexual or experiencing gender dysphoria.
Whilst I don’t read Tim’s words in the same way as Sergio, I do agree that
such an attitude is out of place. However I did not feel able to publish Sergio’s
response in the form that he sent it to me.

I do think it is worth mentioning some of the other points that Sergio made in
his response:
 There is a distinction to be made between sex and gender: the first
being biological and the second being social.
 Sexuality (preference regarding the sex or gender of one’s partner) is not
to be confused with gender identity (whether or not one identifies as
being of the sex that one has been identified as at birth)
 Sergio argues that questioning of sexuality or gender identity is not a
modern construct. It has, he says, been recorded as far back as from
the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, and most Native
populations across the Americas and Australasia. In support of this
Sergio cites the works of Bem (1993), Chodorow (1994), and de
Beauvoir (1949/2011) amongst others (see Patiño, 2018; and Scobey-
Thal, 2014 for more accessible texts).
 It is not correct to say that homosexuality affords a lifestyle advantage. It
is however psychologically healthy to live a life that is consistent with
one’s true gender and sexual identity.
 Before a person can access any sex reassignment surgery (certainly on
the National Health Service), they must be monitored by healthcare
staff for a minimum of 1-2 years.
 Once again, for further information you are referred to the Androgyny
SIG, or to Sergio A. Silverio on: S.A.Silverio@outlook.com.

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RESPONSE TO TIM BAZELY: A MULTITUDE OF RESPONSES

From Ros Groves

Tim Bazely posed some interesting thoughts in April’s edition of Cognito

(Issue 173). One which caught my eye in particular was the aspect of sexual
gender identity-confusion about which seems to be very much a la mode at
present.

The subject of gender behaviour would seem to conjure up a number of

topics: biology (largely indisputable at birth) and culture – of which there are a
number of implied subsets – namely tradition, hardwiring, bias and prejudice.
Therefore logic dictates that the earlier a young child is exposed to the aspect
of gender fluidity, the more readily it will be accepted as a normal part of life.
Right?

Hmmm – Now I am beginning to fidget uneasily, just as my brain is starting to

wage some sort of neuronal battle. It’s not happy.

Into my sixth decade, I will have to admit that my brain will have been skewed
along the route into certain ways of thinking which have to lie in the category
of either Right or Wrong. I have to confess I’m afraid that little Tommy in a
skirt fits into the Wrong column – unless it was a kilt of course. Yet as a
woman (whose understanding of fashion is not short of comprehending the
Theory of Everything), I live in trousers and jeans. Lots of us ladies do and
are very happy with it (unlike all the Paris fashion models who parade down
the catwalk looking as though there is someone at the end of it who they want
to punch on the nose). What is the difference between women in trousers and
men in skirts, you may well justifiably ask? So I now have to don my Hat of
Objectivity and start rethinking the whole gamut.

Coincidentally, as I was pondering the subject (yet again for the umpteenth
time), the latest edition of New Scientist featured an article on the bias of
many societies towards the patriarchal (The Ascent of Man by Anil
Ananthaswary and Kate Douglas). In consideration of nature versus nurture,
they maintain – as research has shown – that culture plays an indisputable
and crucial role in shaping our brains and therefore logically, our behaviour.
While from a biological point of view, pre-natal testosterone levels particularly
in girls may well tip the balance into later behaviours reflected in their varying
degrees of stereotypical female behaviour: as Davis and Risman1 claim,
“Bodies themselves may trigger socialisation that sticks.”

A study of 80 children in 2007 showed that fathers, tending to be more

protective of their daughters than their sons, will therefore instil into their
daughters a sense of vulnerability which will then shape how they choose to

1 Shannon Davis of George Mason University in Virginia and Barbara Risman at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, in an analysis of 50 year of data collected by the Child Health and Development Studies in
California

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behave which will in turn, shape the way their brains develop. The article
continues:

“The cultural amplification of small biological differences results in a

huge gap between how men and women think of themselves.”

Humans, with their inborn instinct to categorise (a self-preservation tactic from

the earliest of times when we needed to know who and what was safe and
who and what wasn’t) will then lead themselves into the formation of male and
female templates or stereotypes. Children too, show categorising instincts:
they decide who and what boys are; who and what girls are and how each
should behave – thus precipitating their own gender stereotypical behaviour.
In other words, they assume the behaviour not only of what society has
assigned to them but in turn, what they have assigned to themselves.

With this in mind, let’s return to little Tommy in his skirt. Culture is an innate
consequence of human existence: moreover of any living species. For a
society to function, rules have to be made and sometimes get adapted or
broken altogether. Thankfully, some of the more social practices of culture
are being brought into question and challenged such as the subjugation of
women and of certain races – as indeed are barbaric practices such as female
genital mutilation (FGM). But what of gender definition?

Whatever our race (and whatever the species), male and female constitute
the two paramount divisions. Combine this with our most dominant sense –
the visual – and we immediately know – or almost always know – whether
another human being is male or female, physiology having always preceded
psychology. It is this overriding visual sense which I believe, has led to men
traditionally to hold positions of power in society. On average, men are larger,
stronger, hairier and have deeper voices – all seen as symbolic of physical
strength and consequently – by assumption – intelligence, mental strength
and therefore the ability for significant decision-making. Culture has therefore
assigned certain defining properties to each gender – not least of all
behaviour and attire; again a global human trait. Today, we are rightly
questioning the concept of women as not being suited to executive roles in
their careers or male-equivalent remuneration for it (though interestingly, we
are not seeing men being encouraged into the caring or stereotypically
‘female’ professions).

The more recent science of psychology has taught us more about what may
be going on in the male or female brain – previously invisible other than post
mortem and about which little of its active functioning was known until the
advent of MRI. It turns out that bar a few physical differences (which could be
the result of brain-shaping through culture anyway), a study has shown that
brains tend to display a unique mosaic of features without gender specificity2.

2
Study of 1400 human brains, Joel et al. Published in PNAS November 30, 2015

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Stripping away years of cultural and information bias and prejudice which
undoubtedly my brain has stalled into, I am keen to look for objective and
practical arguments as to why I feel uncomfortable with young children being
exposed to issues of gender dysphoria.

Firstly, as knowledgeable and experienced adults, we are very good at

forgetting what exactly it is like to be a small child. A small child starts life with
simple concepts. The sun shines during the day when it is light. The moon
shines at night when it is dark and when the stars become visible. At that
stage, they do not need to know about the chemical composition of the sun,
its nuclear fusion, supernovae or the landscape on the far side of the Moon.
We start maths lessons with one-plus-one and not differential calculus.

In the same way, please let’s begin with ‘Male’ and ‘Female.’ OK – so today,
some children have Mummy and Mummy while some have Daddy and Daddy.
For a young child in that particular family set-up, that is the only explanation
necessary at that stage. The rest can wait until the child has accumulated a
little more of life’s experiences.

Secondly, focus can act for good or for evil. If we focus on a task in hand, we
will complete it more quickly and efficiently. Similarly, if we focus too much on
whether or not a child wants to use the toilet; on whether or not he or she is
feeling ill – or to what degree he or she feels like a boy or girl, the jobs again
will be executed more quickly and efficiently – respectively those of toilet,
health and gender identity anxieties.

Thirdly, children have little concept of the future. For them, the ‘future’
consists of who they might be playing with at break time and what they might
be playing. The promise of a “nice doctor who can give you some medicine to
stop your body from changing until you decide whether you would like to be a
man or a woman” means little to an nine year old – that is unless he or she
has been brainwashed on a daily basis into acting in terms of the particular
adult-assigned gender.

Fourthly, what are the ramifications of puberty-delaying medication? How

much research has been undertaken on the long-term effects of this
medication – not only on the individual child taking it but also on future
generations? Epigenetics is a hot topic at the moment: yet do epigeneticists
and the psychologists ever talk to each other?

Fifthly, those of us of a certain age have all experienced changes of fashion

along the way from Teddy Boys, miniskirts, maxi skirts; short-back-and-sides
and then flowing long hair for men: and the inevitable long-hair-with-Alice-
Bands then leading to short-cut hair for women. Fashions come and go but
have in common, the effect of ‘statement.’ Yes – Tommy in a skirt is a
‘statement’ admittedly, but Tommy is far more likely to be in a minority
whereas fashion tends to encompass larger numbers of people into a feeling
of belonging to a large entity. In any case, the adults in young Tommy’s life
are clearly openly publicising and freeze-framing his gender-identity of that
moment: something which lies at the very heart of his basic identity and which

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is at a very dynamic stage of development. Even if Tommy decides in six
months that actually, yes – he does prefer being a boy after all; will he feel in
some way that he is letting down his nearest and dearest by refuting their
concepts of him and that it is actually much easier to think and dress like a
girl? Dare I say it but could one reason for parental encouragement of their
child’s identifying as his or her opposite gender be as a result of the parents’
thwarted desire to produce a child of that gender, no matter how strong their
denial or how subconscious their sentiment?

(My suggestion to school headteachers is to introduce a ‘gender-neutral’ form

of non-negotiable and compulsory school uniform consisting of shirt, trousers
and jumper: traditionally acceptable by both male and female. Please let’s
not rubber-stamp children at a tender young age by allowing them to dress
blatantly in clothes traditionally ascribed to the opposite gender).

In conclusion, I have watched TV programmes about children and young

teenagers who are going through the early processes of transitioning and I
cannot help but feel a sense of despair for them. I absolutely do not deny that
there are genuine cases of gender dysphoria which certainly must be
addressed at the right stage and in the proper manner for the individual to
lead a happy and rewarding life. But for every genuine case, there seem to
be a myriad of youngsters who have been goaded into a false belief about
themselves: that their caretakers and consequently they themselves, are
failing to appreciate that a certain degree of gender fluid behaviour is
absolutely normal and should not be addressed by freeze-framing the moment
and thus perpetuating what could turn out to be a disastrously misguided
opinion of the self. Transitioning is a permanent and major life event and
deserves more than glib talk. Often, the apparent gender dysphoria can be a
smokescreen for other issues going on in the child’s life, the real issue
possibly being one of generally feeling lost or ignored and looking for ways to
stand out and be taken notice of. Who knows?

We look back on dated opinions on TV – some of which make us truly cringe

with their bigotry and prejudice. We watch old comedy programmes and
wonder whatever we saw in them that seemed so hilarious at the time.
Perhaps one day in the future, we will all have become happy hermaphrodites
and look back with horror at the days when we used to be divided into two
genders.

Somehow however, I’m afraid I will have to say that I can’t help but feel that
the term ‘mixed-up kid’ may well come to mean far more than we had ever
anticipated.

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 MASKING MELANCHOLY

By Jim Emerton

Many people hide sadness and depression under a cloak of good nature,
feeling and humour. This can be role play, acting, con with people who are
not true to themselves. This type of ambivalence and duplicity is frequent with
humans who do not accept themselves, are fronting it out in pursuit of fame,
acceptance, recognition or other reward-seeking behaviours. Often the result
may be alcoholism, drug dependence and or breakdown and suicide. I
understand the spiritual/emotional aspects of this inward state, yet the brain
function complexities are nebulous to me. A perceptive person can probe
beyond the mask and penetrate some of the interior, as many folk harbour
demons. The battlefields of celebrity are full of troubled souls ,hooked on
psychotropic drugs.

Welcome back, Jim – Ed.

INAUGURAL LECTURE: PROFESSOR LAUREN STEWART

PRESENTED AT GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
ON FEBRUARY 6TH, 2018

‘MUSIC OF THE HEMISPHERES’

Reviewed by Ros Groves

The Editor contacted me about this lecture a few days beforehand as it

combined my interest in Psychology with my career in music teaching and
orchestral playing. How grateful I am to Mike that he told me about this event.
Right up my street, it was a marvellous opportunity to put off all those boring
jobs I had been planning!

Seriously though, I knew that the lecture would prove to be of far more interest
and value than a mere excuse to get out of something else. The Psychology
of Music is a relatively new field but one which has the potential for
discovering so much about how the brain works and indeed widening and
corroborating what we already know. For me, what is so sad is that music is
increasingly being removed from school curricula along with instrumental
teaching, the latter now gradually slipping back into the private domain. What
has been an integral part of all walks of society for thousands of years is now
in danger of being removed through reasons dubbed as ‘elitism.’ Ironically as
a consequence, music is now once again becoming the preserve of the elite.

Enough of my rant and on to the lecturer for the evening, Professor Lauren
Stewart.

***

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 Professor Lauren Stewart

A talented clarinettist, Lauren received her higher education at Balliol College,

University of Oxford where she studied Physiological Sciences. Though
having a strong interest in Human Biology, she knew that she did not want to
pursue a career as a medical doctor. It was some modules in Psychology
which she took at Oxford which began to strongly fuel her interest in the
subject and which led to her MSc degree in neuroscience, specialising in
magnetic stimulation to understand the mechanism of schizophrenia.

From Oxford, Lauren attended University College London where she

undertook a PhD under the supervision of Uta Frith and Vincent Walsh,
studying how the brain changes in the acquisition of language.

Lauren was appointed to Goldsmiths in 2006 under a RCUK Fellowship

scheme and founded the MSc course in Music, Mind and Brain. This course
is now 10 years old and has seen the graduation of 225 of its students of
which 37 have had dissertations published in academic journals, 40 have
been awarded doctorates and 13 are recipients of post-doctoral posts, leading
their own particular research.

Lauren is currently Professor in Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of

London where she leads the Centre for the Science of the Performing and
Creative Arts. In addition, she is co-director of a major new research centre,
‘Music and the Brain’ based at Aahus University, Denmark. She has received
a grant to research the role of music in mental health and is currently working
on a number of studies to explore the therapeutic potential of music in stroke
patients, childhood hemiplegia and in neurodevelopmentally at-risk infants.

***

‘Music of the Hemispheres’

Processing music is a conscious and active process of construction – and we

have to create it. Scientifically speaking, sounds are a collection of air
molecules vibrating at our eardrums.

In Western culture, music tends to be performed by the few for the many. In
many other parts of the world however, music has a highly participatory role.
The Verdean people of Cape Verde in South Africa both perform and listen to
music, constantly swapping between roles of audience member and
performer. We are all performers.

Listening to music is a perceptual ability where the air molecules are

converted into pitch, pitch intervals, pitch contours, rhythm and meter. Music
is also a durational art which unfolds over time from its beginning to its end
while we integrate what we have just heard with what we next hear. The three
watchwords we can associate with this process therefore are namely:
Integrate – Predict – Anticipate.

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We are born with the ‘machinery’ to learn the rules of the music of the culture
which we are born into. Babies can detect musical irregularities in a very
detailed way which is lost or ‘pruned out’ as the child grows older. An
experiment was conducted comparing how 6-month old North American
babies perceived musical irregularities compared to their adult counterparts.
Whether or not babies can spot a difference can be determined by a change
in their attention span. On spotting a difference in a predictably patterned
sequence (this can apply to the visual as well as aural), babies will look or
listen for longer.

For both adult and baby groups, a tune was played in a simple meter (a
persistent, strong and regular 3 or 4 beats per bar-something we are all highly
familiar with in Western culture). A rhythmic irregularity was then introduced,
disrupting the metrical structure. Both groups were able to detect this
irregularity. However, when a tune with a complex meter was played (e.g. 7
beats in a bar: culturally awkward for Westerners to follow as there feels to be
a superfluous beat at the end) and moreover which was then further
compounded by an introduced metrical irregularity, adults failed miserably at
this test while the babies’ attention spans again, changed at the point of
irregularity. I found this quite astonishing, particularly as a trained musician, I
too failed miserably at this latter test!

Babies are more ‘open-eared’ whereas adults tend to be immersed into

cultural patterns through perceptual narrowing leading to a rapid loss of the
ability to identify irregularity in a non-native stimulus. The loss is so rapid that
by the age of 1 year, infants act as adults do in their perception of this form of
irregularity. However ... if one-year olds are exposed to e.g. Balkan music for
a two-week period (music which is characterised by complex rhythms), they
can quickly and readily adapt whereas adults cannot!

Interestingly, the acquisition of language works in exactly the same way. A

child is born with the potential to hear and therefore to master any sound of
any language. However when immersed in one particular language – what
will become the child’s native tongue – the child’s concept of language
becomes more specialised, losing the ability to hear non-native sounds.

Lauren asks: “Why do we listen to music?”

We listen to music largely for pleasure of course. Brain scans have been
conducted on subjects while they listen to a piece of music and at any point
where the music has the familiar effect of ‘sending a shiver down the spine,’
the same areas of the brain are activated as those connected with sex, drugs
and rock and roll!

“Why is music so pleasurable? Is it adaptive in any way?”

Lauren cites two possible reasons why music can be said to be adaptive:

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a) Our brains are essentially pattern-detectors and seek out structure,
repetition, hierarchical levels and the order and violation of patterns. Music is
shown to fit all these criteria. Basically, music gives the brain a ‘workout!’
Anything adaptively advantageous for the brain is rewarded by the production
of the neurotransmitter dopamine, proving that making sense of a complex
stimulus is indeed good for us.

b) The social bonding created by music-making leads to the release of

endorphins – Nature’s painkillers. The larger the group, the greater the
release of these endorphins. It was therefore no coincidence that our early
ancestors, progressing from organising themselves into small social groups to
much more enlarged social groups, discovered music – making to be a way of
creating social affiliation in large numbers. Even today, we are seeing the
emergence of community choirs creating community adhesion; various ‘pop’
choirs of around 70 people amalgamating with other such choirs forming a
larger group of around 200 people and putting on annual performances at the
Royal Albert Hall.

In consideration of the above therefore, it would appear that music is

adaptively significant as well as simply being pleasurable to listen to!

With Uta Frith, Lauren conducted an experiment to determine brain changes

in people who received a short course (15 weeks) in music notation and
keyboard skills. Subjects were selected on the basis of having a fairly naive
experience of music with no experience of either keyboard skills or musical
literacy, though with some knowledge of general decoding processes in other
areas. Their brains were scanned before the commencement of the
experiment and again at its conclusion, together with cognitive tests.

Notable changes were seen in brain structure and brain activity was also
specialised according to whether the subject was decoding for pitch or for
rhythm. After the training programme had been completed, activation could
be seen in the motor planning area of the brain when the subject was
preparing to play the tune, without having as yet played a note.

Professor Tim Griffiths of Newcastle University has researched into the

complex auditory experience of music, particularly with respect to those who
experience amusia – a congenital condition where a person is unable to
distinguish between 2 different notes or even 2 different tunes (of their
particular culture). It is commonly referred to as tone-deafness, though strictly
speaking, tone-deafness refers to the inability to vocally reproduce pitches i.e.
to sing in tune. This could have many root causes, not least of all a lack of
confidence perhaps due to criticism in childhood in not being able to sing in
tune. True amusia is more of a musical disorder and while it often appears
solely as an inability to reproduce a pitch, it is a defect in pitch processing,
encompassing musical memory and recognition.

The MBEA test (Montreal Battery of the Evaluation of Amusia), developed by

Perez, Champod and Hyde at the University of Montreal (2003) is an online

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test to evaluate congenital amusia and which members of the general public
were invited to take part in.

*(The following is an extract from the site demonstrating this type of test,
which I found at: http://www.psy.mq.edu.au/me2/index.php/tests/ - RG).
This 20-minute on-line test includes three blocks:
1. Block 1: listen to pairs of tunes and decide whether they are the same or
different. This test is from MBEA (Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia)
developed by Peretz, Champod and Hyde (2003).
2. Block 2: listen to some melodies and detect whether there is an out-of-
key note in each melody.
3. Block 3: fill-in a checklist about your reading ability. This checklist is
developed by Ian Smythe and John Everatt (2001).

In the original MBEA test, 152,117 people responded. Most people did well,
achieving around 27-28 out of a possible 30. For those who achieved 21 or
less, it was considered that they may well be predisposed to congenital
amusia and so were invited to the laboratory for further tests which
substantiated the hereditary aspect of this condition.

One example of the hereditary aspect of amusia can be seen in the O’Neill
family in Northern Ireland. Though they ran a family business selling
traditional Irish instruments e.g. accordions, a substantial proportion of them
showed traits of amusia. Lauren met all 33 of the family and subsequently
plotted an ‘amusia family tree.’ Both parents were affected, plus half of their
children’s generation. As there was nothing odd about their environment
which could have precipitated this, it was therefore clearly a genetic condition.
In fact, it appears to be a disorder of many genes, all having a small effect,
rather than the result of a single faulty gene having a large effect.

I have summarised the following extract from The Psychologist written by

Lauren herself, (main article can be found in
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-22/edition-12/lost-music) which
gives a fuller insight into the O’Neill family:

John O’Neill ran a music shop in Gortin, County Tyrone. Though it seems an
unlikely occupation for an amusic, he had great musical aspirations for his
children, having struggled with music himself and so purchased instruments
for them.

This had an influence on the local neighbourhood and so many friends and
neighbours similarly began buying instruments for their children, resulting in a
considerable boom for John’s business. While his son Sean flourished in his
musical ability, daughter Anne and many of her siblings struggled even though
they had participated in accordion lessons and Irish dancing lessons. Anne
was upset at being deterred from joining the local church choir by the local
choirmaster and despite a suggestion that she could try the tambourine, this
too proved difficult as she was unable to keep in time.

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Anne then read an article about congenital amusia and persuaded three
generations of her family to take the online version of the MBEA.
Astonishingly, half of the family participants scored in the amusica range.

However, this did not prevent Anne from enjoying being surrounded by music
as the emphasis lay in involvement rather than achievement.

In London, an experiment was conducted using a total of 80 subjects. 40

were diagnosed amusics while 40 were controls without amusia. Matched in
age and demographics, they participated in experimental research into pitch
sensitivity with respect to pitch change detection. How big a change between
two individual pitches did there have to be before the subject was able to
detect it?

There were two basic categorisations of pitch detection in the test:

Pitch change detection. Could the participants tell if a pitch had changed?
In this respect, the amusics were able to do so.

Pitch direction detection. Could the participants tell which direction the pitch
had changed to?
Here, the amusics were shown to be significantly limited compared to the
control group.

As pitch contour is one of the most salient features of a piece, the amusics
would therefore be unable to build up a representation of the pitch contour (or
rise and fall) of a piece.

Lauren cited the case of a nun living at a convent in Wimbledon where a

typical part of the day’s schedule would be the call and response in plainchant
(a form of medieval church music which involves unaccompanied chanting).
Sometimes she was requested to lead the call and response, but proved to be
completely unable to do so successfully. When the music had finished, she
claimed that it felt as though it had “gone and had never happened” and that
she “simply couldn’t understand tunes in her head.”

In the pitch experiment, subjects were presented with short sequences of

tones to establish the threshold of the number of tones possible for amusics to
hold in their memory compared with the control subjects. It was found that the
control subjects could hold an average of 2 more musical tones in their
memory than the amusia subjects. A control task was then undertaken by all
participants where instead of pure tones being played, the tones were sung to
number labels, e.g. “one three four five.” There was no difference in outcome
between the 2 groups compared to the pure tone experiment. Amusia
therefore would appear to be a memory deficit in pitch-based material.

What about prosody: the music of speech? For most people, it is perfectly
possible to distinguish between the prosody of a statement and a question –
the vocal pitch descending at the end for the former and rising at the end for
the latter. First of all, a sentence was read using normal prosody and with

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words. Secondly, exactly the same prosody was used but without the words.
Amusics had more difficulty in deciphering if the sentence was a statement or
a question in both instances.

So why don’t amusics report difficulty in understanding everyday

conversation? The reason lies in the fact that speech has greater, wider pitch
changes than music; moreover, the words of speech act as an additional aid
(with the statement-question effect, the prosody had only a slight fall or rise at
the end). When listening to music, amusics need the pitch changes to be
bigger in order to differentiate between them. However, as pitch is such an
intrinsic aspect of music, changes are frequently very small.

Can amusics detect emotion in the voice? Can they detect any combinations
of emotions such as happiness, tenderness, fear, irritation, sadness or even
no emotion within the same sentence? Again they fared worse in this respect
than non amusics which is not surprising given that music and speech share
resources in the brain to detect emotion.

What about non-verbal vocalisations such as facial expressions, hand

gestures and body language? The real surprise outcome here was that
amusics again fared worse than non-amusics in this test. One possible
reason could be that if they have faulty decoding ability for emotion early in
life, this may lead to decoding problems later in life, together with all its
implications.

How do these drawbacks impact on an amusic’s appreciation of music?

Music is not just about notes. Music also conveys a message and a genre,
both of which are connected with a sense of identity e.g. “I like this;” or “I don’t
like this.”

Claire McDonald, another researcher who has collaborated with Lauren,

distributed a questionnaire to those who had a diagnosis of amusia in order to
ascertain how likely it would be that this group would listen to music in
everyday life. The participants agreed to be texted at random times during the
day with questions such as:

a) “Is there music where you are?”

b) “What is the music?”
c) “Who are you with?”
d) “Why are you listening to it?”

Results showed that those with amusia tend to incorporate music into their
everyday lives to a lesser extent than the controls and also felt fewer changes
in psychological states when listening to music than the controls did. They
also felt more negative emotions about music which was imposed on them
than the control group did. However, significantly more amusic subjects
scored within the control range on the ‘attention and liking’ part of the
questionnaire showing that having perceptual difficulties in listening to music
is no bar to enjoying it. The genetic components for amusia still await
discovery.

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‘Earworms:’ The term ‘earworm’ originates from an auditory similarity of the
German word ‘Ohrwum,’ (Earwig). Earworms are tunes which pop into the
head spontaneously and while most people feel positively about them, for
some it can prove bothersome. They prove an interesting model for studying
spontaneous thought processes as mind-wandering occupies most people’s
minds for around an incredible 40%-50% of their waking hours.

Through Shaun Keaveny, a BBC Radio 6 presenter, Goldsmiths issued a

questionnaire for listeners to participate in, regarding earworms. Volunteer
listeners to Shaun’s show were texted with various questions and asked to
report their answers by text message. The questions were as follows:

a) “What is your earworm?”

b) “Which bit of the song is repeating for you?”
c) “What were you doing/where were you when you noticed this
earworm?”
d) “Do you have any idea what triggered this earworm?”

(The participant’s name, town or city and Email address were also requested).

The text data was then analysed to see what the trends were in triggering
earworms. A number of factors proved to be a common thread:

a) The constant exposure to the same piece of music.

b) The action of memory processes, e.g. the association of the piece
of music with another event.
c) The mood state of the listener (affective states can cause an
association of that mood with a certain piece of music, e.g. if the listener
was feeling stressed at the time of hearing a particular piece of music,
that same piece of music can provoke the same emotional response
when heard on a later occasion).
d) Low attention state (the music became an earworm when the
participant was engaged in another activity and not consciously listening
to the piece when hearing it in the first place).

It would appear therefore that earworms are not caused solely by constant
exposure to the same piece of music (as one might imagine), but rather that
regular exposure to a piece is merely one of a number of possible triggers for
an earworm to form. Are earworms therefore an interesting by-product of the
brain at rest or are they something more useful – more adaptive?

Oliver Sacks recounts an interesting story about staying in a Norwegian

village and deciding to go for a walk one day up a steep mountain path.
Coming across a sign: ‘Beware of Bull,’ he thought nothing of it until the bull
appeared for real and began to charge at him. In his haste to escape, Sacks
fell and broke his leg badly. Realising that if he was not rescued before it
became dark-and there was little hope of rescue – he would somehow have to
make his own way back down the mountain path. This he did by a process of
wriggling and slithering, the whole time (as he reports) being plagued by

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thoughts and even quotations about death. To counteract such negative
thoughts, he found himself being urged on by an earworm as he reports:

I fell into a rhythm, guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes

the Volga Boatmen’s Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my own,
accompanied by the words “Ohne Hast, ohne Rast! Ohne Hast, ohne Rast!”
(“Without haste, without rest”), with a strong heave on every Hast and Rast.
Never had Goethe’s words been put to better use! Now I no longer had to
think about going too fast or too slow. I got into the music, got into the swing,
and this ensured that my tempo was right. I found myself perfectly
coordinated by the rhythm—or perhaps subordinated would be a better term:
the musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded
obediently—all save those in my left leg, which seemed silent—or mute?...

...Somehow, with this “music,” it felt much less like a grim anxious struggle. ..

...It was only after chanting the song in a resonant and resounding bass for
some time that I suddenly realized that I had forgotten the bull. Or, more
accurately, I had forgotten my fear—partly seeing that it was no longer
appropriate, partly that it had been absurd in the first place. I had no room
now for this fear, or for any other fear, because I was filled to the brim with
music. And even when it was not literally (audibly) music, there was the
music of my muscle orchestra playing—“the silent music of the body,” in
Harvey’s lovely phrase. With this playing, the musicality of my motion, I
myself became the music—“You are the music, while the music lasts.” A
creature of muscle, motion, and music, all inseparable and in unison with each
other—except for that unstrung part of me, that poor broken instrument which
could not join in and lay motionless and mute without tone or tune.

Similarly, in 1985, Joe Simpson set out to climb the 21,000-foot Siula Grande
in the Peruvian Andes. On the way down, he suffered a bad fall shattering his
leg. Assuming Joe was probably dead as he was hanging in the void, his
climbing partner who was roped to him, had to make the terrible decision to
cut the rope in order to save his own life. Joe in fact was not dead, instead
falling into a large crevasse and spending the next four days inching his way
back to the base camp in unimaginable pain. He later reported that during
this agonising process, his head was filled with the sound of a Boney M song
and resolved there and then that there was no way was he going to die to
Boney M!

Lauren postulates that perhaps the brain needs a certain optimum level of
stimulus and therefore when consciousness decreases to too low a level, the
brain seeks out additional stimuli, one of which may be the earworm effect.

Tempo: Although few people possess ‘perfect’ or ‘absolute’ pitch (the ability to
identify a tone without the need to relate it to another named tone), the vast
majority of people possess a form of ‘absolute’ tempo, i.e. they can identify
whether or not a piece is being played at the correct tempo. That is to say
that we readily encode music at its precise speed. To illustrate this point,

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Lauren played 3 versions of a well-known tune, each at a different tempo. A
show of hands demonstrated that over 90% of the audience identified which of
the 3 tempi was the correct one.

Further to the earworm study, 17 volunteer subjects were tested over a period
of 4 days to see if we capture the correct tempo of an earworm in the stream
of everyday life . The volunteers were all male, comprising both musically
trained and untrained participants and recruited on the basis that they
reported experiencing earworms several times a day. They were also
screened in advance to exclude any participant who exhibited difficulties in
tapping to the beat of an earworm. Recording the tapping of the beat of an
earworm was done by means of their wearing of an accelerometer that
recorded their movements. Alongside this, they were asked to record
information about their earworms in a diary during their daily lives over a
period of 4 days.

The results showed that the subjects displayed significant precision in tempo
reproduction of their earworms, the tapping deviating less than 10% from the
original tempo. There was also a direct relationship shown with the self-
reported physiological arousal. Rather than hearing an earworm of mid-tempo
speeded up or slowed down in order to reflect the state of physiological
arousal, the subject would experience an earworm in its original tempo which
would suitably reflect the arousal state.

Interesting facts from the Internet - RG: Halpern (1988)3, as well as

reporting a close correlation between the tempo of an earworm and its original
tempo, also found evidence for a ‘regression to the mean’ when hearing an
earworm. That is to say that slow songs are often heard at a faster speed as
earworms while conversely, songs with a faster tempo are often imagined at a
slightly slower speed.

There is also a link between music and movement. Many previous studies
have revealed a link between musical tempo and arousal. Listening to fast
tempo music can increase subjective arousal. Those participating in vigorous
exercise for example, prefer to feel this state of arousal reflected in fast music.
(Husain et al., 20024 ).

Music as Therapy: Goldsmiths MSc Music, Mind and Brain student Pedro
Kirk has been awarded the ACM Chi student research award for his
undergraduate project which involved tangible musical interfaces to assist
stroke patients in rehabilitation therapy. Some examples of this include the
use of soft tennis balls pitched (when squeezed), to the first 5 notes of the
diatonic scale, used in the tune ‘Frere Jacques.’ The patient has to squeeze
the tennis balls in the right order, to play Frere Jacques correctly.

***

3 http://mp.ucpress.edu/content/6/2/193
4 http://mp.ucpress.edu/content/20/2/151

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This proved to be a highly informative evening and I was privileged to be able
to chat to Lauren and other staff members afterwards at a drinks reception, to
discuss various aspects of music and the mind. It is certainly a fascinating
area of psychology, particularly as while much has recently been discovered,
much still lies in wait to be discovered in the future.

EVENTS

Anyone who is going (or thinking of going) to any events featured here and
wants to be put in touch with other such readers is welcome to contact the
Editor. Also contact him if you know of any psychology-related events that
may be of interest to other readers.

And if you can write a review of any such event, please send it in to the Editor!

Association of Business Psychologists conference, 11-12 October 2018,

the Holiday Inn, Brentford Lock, London
Details at theabp.org.uk (although it looks as if you may have to wait until
nearer the time for full details). Thanks to Timothy St Ather for bringing this to
my attention.

SOMETHING TO SAY FOR THE NEXT ISSUE?

Introduce yourself and tell us about your interest in psychology.

Comment on something that was said? Or even several comments!

Your own article?

A question?

A contribution for Psychology in the News, or an event of interest?

Cognito comes out monthly, so it is always the right time to send it in.

See front cover for contact details.

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