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The subject of music-evoked frisson, the way that certain pieces of music can send chills down your spine, is one near and dear to me. My personal method of rating music in iTunes is that 5 stars goes to music that evokes this response, and to nothing else. In fact, when I started this blog, I toyed with the idea of, once a week perhaps, posting about a song that evoked frisson in me, but concluded that it was rather too egotistical and pointless, that chances are very few other people would be interested in this (as opposed to my hope that pointing out good lectures on the web is generally useful).

So when I came across this talk@, given by David Huron at Stanford on May 17, 2008, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, however, while the talk is interesting, it feels to me, like it is ultimately wrong, or at least misguided; in very much the same way that every “scientific” theory of humor that I’ve encountered feels like it might be part of the truth, but only a very small part.

Huron points out some very interesting and significant details of the music-evoked frisson response, in the first place the physiological details of what is happening, in the second place the musical correlates of the experience. Notable points are that the physiological responses very much seem to match the physiological responses to fear; that frisson is surprisingly rare (only about 50% of people asked have experienced it); that the passages that “work” for individuals are very distinct, so chances are high that the same passage that moves you will not do much for the friends you insist listen to it; that there are personality correlates with the effect, specifically that it is people who do go out of their way to avoid thrills and new experiences (like myself) who are most susceptible; and that there are particular aspects of the music that appear to be correlated with the effect.

So far, so good. Where Huron goes with this, then, is to suggest that (a) frisson is correlated with “surprise”,or more specifically perhaps, “threatening surprise”, in the music and (b) that our sub-rational brain gets hit with the threatening surprise, initiates a fear response, and then right after that our rational brain quashes the fear part of the response, since there is nothing to be afraid of, but is left with the physiological residue of the fear.

This all sounds very clever, but, at least for me, comes across as very unsatisfactory, for the simple reason that what Huron discusses seems very much tied in to “pure” music, instrumentals only, whereas my experience is that frisson is pretty much always the result of music plus lyrics, and that music alone does not do it. This appears to be very unusual; at least Huron discussed pretty much everything in terms of classical music (and the non-classical music genres he discussed, the “screaming” genres like heavy metal and punk, do nothing for me). While Huron’s musical correlates of frisson match my experience, for me the words also appear to be necessary, which does not appear to fit with his theory. Of course this is only one lecture, and it seems like the reasonable thing to do at this point would be to read his book, Sweet Anticipation and learn the full range of his theory.

Brian Walker lectures on politics at UCLA, and has two very interesting courses available on the web.

The more interesting course, IMHO, is Political Science 114B - United States Political Thinking from 1865@ which, as the name suggests, discusses various theories of politics in the US, to some extent historically, but more in terms of the ideas that have been put forth by various individuals over this time. (This course was given in Spring 2008.)

The second course, Political Science 10 - Introduction to Political Theory@ is in many ways the same sort of idea, a survey of political ideas, but now covering all of history and geography, including for example, Aristotle and Confucius. (This course was given in Winter 2007.) I found this course somewhat less compelling than the 114B course, but I think his is more because I was already rather familiar with the subject matter, not because of any deficiencies in Prof Walker’s lecturing. The 114b course has the advantage of going into material into rathe more detail which, naturally, means that there was much more material covered that was new to me.

The post on Jonathan Haidt has been updated to include Haidt’s recent appearance on Bloggingheads.tv.

The Malcolm Gladwell post has been updated, adding, at the end, a reference to Gladwell’s talk at the New Yorker 2008 conference.

I discovered this podcast@ by accident. While no individual item really meets the criteria by which I recommend audio material, taken as a whole I think most people will love it.

As the website explains, the podcast (providing one short high quality item a week, no flood of dodgy material here) offers up people telling a short story (usually an incident from their lives) to a live audience. The speakers are routinely magnificent orators, and the material is universal.

If you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon podcast@, but I appreciate that Garrison Keillor is something of a minority taste, so don’t feel bad if you try this one and don’t like it much.

Gabriel Rossman teaches sociology at UCLA. This course@, given by him in Spring 2008, is entitled Sociology M176 - Sociology of Mass Communication. It’s difficult to characterize, but is perhaps best described as “the social science of media production”.

Rather than concentrate on the psychology of the tortured artist (which is not Rossman’s field) or on such fuzzy concepts as how “zeitgeist” defines the art of an era (the sort of non-quantitative, non-falsifiable theorizing with which Rossman has little patience), the course discusses the mass media through the lens of all the social sciences.
We get exposed to a variety of interesting results from economics, political science, and sociology, along with some interesting bits of history and law. Think of the course as dealing with such questions as why pretty much every Chinese movie you see is a medieval kung-fu drama (hint: it has nothing to do with “the Chinese national psyche”) or why, paradoxically, a monopoly of the radio stations in a town can lead to a wider variety of music stations.

The Robert Lefkowitz post has been updated to refer to a talk given by Lefkowitz at Stanford in November 2007.

Patrick o’Brien’s three lectures on economic history@ given at CESifo in July 2003 are somewhat more rambling than Gregory Clark’s (and rather more focussed on China), but are nonetheless fascinating.

Gregory Clark’s book, A Farewell to Alms is one of those books that you absolutely should read.

Its first great point is that, unlike almost everything you read, it actually explains Malthus’ argument correctly, and provides evidence of the truth of what Malthus was saying.

Its second great point is that it provides a great deal of striking evidence on various issues related to economic history, from the literacy or otherwise of various societies, through the relative fecundity of different groups in various societies, through the social mobility (or otherwise) of different societies, to their relative labor productivity. Unlike so much economic history, Clark, in the best Freakonomics tradition, bends over backwards to find ways to get at actual data for his statements rather than simply making claims.

Much of what Clark says has not gone down well; people are really really not interested in hearing what Malthus had to say. He himself would be the first to agree that at least his preliminary studies of the data from China and Japan paint a rather different picture from his work on Britain. (Britain showed a pronounced pattern of the wealthy having many more children than the poor, leading presumably to a long-time drift of cultural attitudes and perhaps even genes throughout society; whereas Japan and China do not appear so show such differential fecundity.) Anyone who knows me knows I am throughly with Clark on this one; but we are both academic creatures most interested in the data, and one can only hope that a substantial part of the fallout from this book will be much more aggressive data gathering on the subject, to replace the basically ideology driven writing that has occupied so much of the field.

You can find a short discussion of the book here@.
A somewhat longer discussion (three lectures by Clark given at CESifo in July 2002) can be found here@.

I’ve little patience with claims about the wisdom of most people, and this skepticism doesn’t evaporate when those people are voters. This talk@ given by Bryan Caplan at SXSW 2008 on March 8th, 2008, discusses the various ways in which voters are not rational, and, more generally, the ways in which aggregated information gathering ala The Wisdom of Crowds does not work.

You can find a nice (text) summary of the talk here.