Recent
research from MIT (1) shows that the underlying attributes of music –
consonance and dissonance – are not hard wired. Contrasting preferences of tribes
with little exposure to Western music such as some Amazon tribes and those with
gradually increasing exposure, culminating in accomplished American musicians,
they prove that the preference toward consonance over dissonance is learned.
Music, thus, appears to be personal and preferences largely generated by
experience rather than an innate mechanism in the brain.
In the
contemporary regime of accelerating data, the brain is bombarded with an
information stream, it was never designed to tackle. An intricate quantum
computer, specialized in pattern finding but with rather limited memory, the
brain has been stretched to undervalue its advantages and it has been
struggling to keep large swaths of data in its limited memory banks. The
learning processor, however, has been able to efficiently design and store
information in heuristics and dump the underlying raw data as fast as it can.
As it loses history, the stored heuristics drive function and generate preferences,
as if they are part of the original operating system.
The
finding has implications for many areas not the least of which is in the
treatment of Central Nervous System (CNS) diseases such as racism, alcoholism
and ego. Fast discarding of underlying information due to a lack of storage
capacity, prevents back testing of learned heuristics. A limited training set
of underlying data could have irreversible and dramatic influences on end outcomes.
More importantly, a brain that is trained with misguided heuristics, cannot
easily be retrained as the neurons become rigid with incoherent cycles.
You
are what you listen to, you are what you eat and more importantly, you are what you
learn.
(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/07/13/why.we.music.we.do
(1) http://esciencenews.com/articles/2016/07/13/why.we.music.we.do