Something You Should Know - Why The World is Doing Better Than You Think & What Your Musical Taste Says About You

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Did you know the can opener was invented 50 years AFTER the tin can? So how did they open cans before that? That’s one of the interesting stories about product packaging that kicks off this episode of the podcast. Source: Thomas Hine author of The Total Package (https://amzn.to/3mlNoC1). If you watch the news, you would think the world falling apart and going to hell. Yet it is totally NOT true. Sure, the world has problems not the least of which is the corona virus but when you look at all the indicators of well-being in the world, things are actually going pretty well. . In fact we are living in an age of enlightenment according to Harvard professor Stephen Pinker. Author of the book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science Humanism and Progress, (http://amzn.to/2FKuhNb). Listen as Stephen reveals why things are much better than you probably think. What he says will make you feel great! We all have our own musical tastes and preferences. Where do they come from? What do they say about us. That’s what Nolan Gasser is here to discuss Nolan is a composer and musicologist who was the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora Radio. He is also author of Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste (https://amzn.to/31BCtfy) What’s the difference between flammable and inflammable? It’s weird because they are two words that sound as if they are opposites but actually mean the same thing. Listen as I explain why one of the words is 400 years older than the other and where it came from. https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-flammable-and-inflammable-607314 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, product packaging

is sometimes more interesting than the product itself. Like the tin can, it was invented 50 years before the can opener. Then you might think the world is going to hell. It's not. Things are actually getting better. Diseases are being eradicated. Smallpox no longer exists. Polio is almost gone. Kids are going to school worldwide. 90% of people under the age of 25 can read or write. It's just unprecedented in human history. There are fewer wars.

Then, flammable and inflammable. Why do we have two words that sound opposite but mean the same thing? And your musical tastes. Why you have them and what they say about you. I think a lot of people will look at their musical taste and go back to when they were in middle school and high school and their first concert they went to, their first kiss, the music that really meant something to their budding identity. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan

Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back.

And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. Something I've always found interesting, and we've featured on this podcast from time to time, those stories of how products came to be, their origins, who invented them. Sometimes, though, sometimes the stories about the packaging are more interesting than the stories about the products. And so this episode we shall begin with some of those packaging stories, starting with oatmeal.

Oatmeal used to be sold in bulk, in huge barrels, and very few people ate oatmeal. After all, oats were, and I guess still are, for horses. Then a man named Henry Parsons Crowell came along. He had a mill that was able to produce more oatmeal in a year than Americans had ever eaten in a year. So he had this great idea of putting the oatmeal into smaller packages that still looked like barrels,

and giving these packages personality by putting a Quaker on it. It gave it a sense of purity. Quaker oatmeal was born, and oatmeal consumption soared. The first tin cans were actually these huge containers. They were used to feed British armies, and they were almost impossible to open. In fact, many soldiers suffered serious injuries trying to open these big cans with knives and rocks and bayonets

and anything else they could find. It wasn't until 50 years after the invention of the tin can that somebody invented the can opener. The Marlboro cigarette package was the first product packaging designed for television. In fact, the old box had some very delicate graphics on it, but they changed the Marlboro box

to the simple red and white design it has today so it could be seen more clearly on fuzzy black and white televisions back when cigarette commercials were legal. And that is something you should know. In these last several months, we've all been living under this coronavirus cloud, which I think warps our thinking somewhat. There's a tendency to look at the world as if it's falling apart. There is seemingly just a lot of bad news, bad things happening everywhere. It can really drag you down and give you that, I don't know, like a sense of

dread. I know I've felt it. And then along comes Steven Pinker. He's an experimental cognitive scientist, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and he is author of the book Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. And he's about to tell you why the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket, and why there's real hope for optimism. Hi Steven, welcome. So where does this notion that things aren't so bad, and in fact that things are getting better, where does this idea come from? This came from two sources.

One was discovering, to my surprise, that many aspects of human well-being have been increasing. That is, we are living longer, healthier diseases are being conquered, more children are going to school worldwide, higher levels of education, work weeks are shorter, we spend less time on housework. And coming across all of these graphs on improving life, not just in the West, but worldwide, made me realize that there's a story that most people don't appreciate because the news covers what goes wrong.

And they should be put between two covers and given an explanation. It was a similar process to the one that led me to write The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago. The subtitle of that book was Why Violence Has Declined, an idea that just shocks people because you would guess from the news that violence is increasing. But I wrote that one when I saw graph after graph showing declines in war and crime and violence against women and violence against children. And I realized that a story needed to be told there and an explanation.

And I wrote this book when I saw that the news was even better than I had thought. So when you say enlightenment, do you define that as what? The Enlightenment refers to the movement, mainly in the beginning of the second half of the 18th century, to use reason as opposed to authority and tradition and dogma to understand the world and to attempt to improve it, to improve people's lives. And we've been doing that pretty well. Yeah, with obvious setbacks. Progress isn't magic, so it's not that everything gets better for everyone. But yeah, if you try to measure human well-being, how many of us get sick?

How many of us get murdered? How many of us die in war? How long do we live? How educated are we? How much free time do we have? Then progress has occurred. It seems so counterintuitive because when you hear people, you know, on television

or just at a cocktail party talking about the world, no one talks about how great things are getting, and yet you have a whole list of things that are improving like crazy. Well, people are living longer. Extreme poverty has been in steep decline worldwide. About 10% of the world's population meets the definition of extreme poverty. Not so long ago, a few decades ago, it was 30%, so 40% even three decades ago. Diseases are being eradicated.

Smallpox no longer exists. Polio is almost gone. Kids are going to school worldwide. 90% of people under the age of 25 can read or write. It's just unprecedented in human history. There are fewer wars. Wars between countries, where country A declares war on country B, and they line up their tanks and they bomb each other's cities,

and their naval ships have at each other. Those are the wars that kill the most people. They've been in steep decline. There are hardly any of them. The American homicide rate has fallen by more than half just since the 1990s. So those are a few examples. Do you think that the decline in war and really most of the things you just mentioned are at least partly the result of just a different sensibility?

That when you think about war, you think about two countries going at each other, killing each other's people, killing each other's people, killing each other's people, that maybe that seemed like a good idea at some point, but today it just seems so barbaric. I think there is something to that, even though it does sound a little vague and fuzzy, but I think there really is something to it. Partly it's because that we do value human life more. The idea of sending tens of thousands of soldiers out of trenches so they could get machine gunned down for no reason, which is what happened during World War I.

Generals are a little more squeamish about doing that. Human life is worth more. The idea of sending your 18-year-old men to get slaughtered for national glory or to fight over a plot of land is not as appealing as it used to be. But the fact that it used to be, like it did used to be, like that's what we did, that was a good thing to do. It does, because I'll watch, you know, old movies and newsreels and documentaries about World War I or World War II, and I sometimes sit there and go, this is the stupidest thing

in the world. I totally, I completely agree. And that is part of enlightenment. That is, you scrutinize ways of doing things that your fathers did and your grandfathers, your great-grandfathers, you say, hey, do we have to keep doing it this way? Maybe we should give it a fresh think. And it was that kind of thinking that abolished slavery, which is as old as civilization. I mean, the Greeks, the Romans, every ancient civilization had slaves. But it was only starting in the 18th century that people thought, hey, these are human beings too. And just because it's a great labor-saving device for us, but what about their lives? Or another example is profligate capital punishment, executing people for poaching or shoplifting,

counterfeiting, and doing it in grisly torture executions where you disembowel someone in front of a cheering audience. Starting in the Enlightenment, they had second thoughts about whether that was such a great idea. That's why we have our prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the American Bill of Rights. And the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution and Bill of Rights, those are like the quintessential gifts of the Enlightenment. The framers were Enlightenment thinkers, and they had a lot of correspondence with their counterparts in Europe.

And it was that kind of thinking that led to institutions like democracy and bills of rights, the first hints of organizations of international cooperation. And we owe a lot of these ideas to the thinkers of the late 18th century. Is enlightenment just a natural progression of something? Is it impossible to stop? Does it always happen? I don't think so. It's actually, you know, it took thousands of years for it to really flourish in the late 18th century. And a number of things happened to light the spark. Partly it was the scientific revolution of the 17th century that just showed that a lot of intuitions

that people had had for a long time were flat wrong when you did the science, such as that the sun went around the earth. It was partly the wars of religion. The Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other over points of theological doctrine, and people thought,

gee, maybe this isn't really about anything. Maybe we should just get along and have people live good lives on Earth. And partly it was the age of exploration. All the new continents were being discovered, and people realized, my God, there's a whole world out there that we didn't even dream of. So all of these things, I think, pushed the Enlightenment. And pushing back are features of human nature that the Enlightenment had to overcome,

like our tribalism, the idea that it isn't all of humanity that should be flourishing, but just our tribe in combat with other tribes. Or authoritarianism, the idea that we need a strong leader, a king, and that the king or leader or dictator kind of embodies the goodness and virtue of the people. So we don't need laws to constrain him because he just embodies what's best in us, as opposed to democracy. So yeah, these things are continuing to push back. There's always been a tug of war between the Enlightenment and various counter-Enlightenment ideologies. My guest is best-selling author Steven Pinker. His book is Enlightenment and various counter-Enlightenment ideologies. My guest is best-selling author Steven Pinker.

His book is Enlightenment Now! The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that

made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, "'He's great, we love him,

"'but we're looking for like a really intelligent "'Dicovny type.'" With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So Stephen, isn't it interesting that we have this enlightenment and you've mentioned so many things that have happened that, you know, fewer people are dying, we're living longer, all these things. And yet, it's not the perception of many people because it's not that we celebrate it much. And in fact, what we do all pat each other on the back and say that instead of saying, yeah, but look how horrible everything is.

That's right. We pocket our good fortune. We kind of take it for granted. I mean, how many of us ever think the thought, wow, I can turn on a tap and clean water comes out and I can drink it and I won't get cholera? These are amazing accomplishments. And in poor parts of the world, they can't take them for granted.

They get poisoned by their water and they drink their own waste. But we have been so fortunate that these have been around and they work so well that we don't think, hey, these are great human accomplishments. And instead, I think we do a lot of moaning about what's going wrong. And of course, things will always go wrong and it's good to be aware of them. But we don't realize what the accomplishments that are responsible for so many good things in life. Even something like little pleasures of everyday life. Like when I was a student, if I wanted to see a great classic film,

you know, The Seventh Seal or Casablanca or Hitchcock film, you'd have to wait years for it to show up in a local repertory theater or maybe on late night TV in a little black and white set. Now you can stream it on demand. So even access to culture. And we all complain about how horrible social media are and the internet and what it's doing to us, the filter bubbles and the bullying.

But we never stop, pause to think about why we adopt these technologies in the first place. Namely, there are all these ways in which they do make our lives better. So what's the takeaway here? What's the big so what? I mean, it's nice to take a moment to realize that things aren't as bad as maybe we are led to believe, but so what? The takeaway is that we should realize what we're in danger of losing, namely the institutions of democracy and regulated markets and organizations of international cooperation that have prevented World War III from happening

and that have given us the benefits we take for granted. But also to keep in mind that the problems that are unsolved, and that there are plenty of them, are solvable if we remember that by applying reason and science to our problems, we can gradually succeed. Our ancestors did before us. That's why we live the good life, or at least why the good things that we enjoy came into being. And although there are plenty of problems, and some of them are really severe, the mindset should be, these are our problems that we can solve. Even if the solutions

themselves bring new problems, which then have to be solved in their turn, but we have to take a constructive problem-solving mindset to the dilemmas that we continue to face. As you look at this enlightenment from the late 1800s going forward, is there any reason to think it will stop, or does it just keep going? Do we become more and more enlightened and do more and more great things? Well, I think some of the positive developments could keep going. There are amazing breakthroughs possible in the pipeline in biomedical research,

therapies for cancer, treatments for Alzheimer's, ways of fixing horrible inherited diseases. There may be fantastic breakthroughs in the energy pipeline. Just the day before yesterday, there was a breakthrough announced at MIT in nuclear fusion, which had always seemed a dream. You know, 30 years away, and it always will be. But it may be just 15 years away. But is it the concern, the complaining, the worry,

that this administration or that group or whatever, that that's what fuels some of this? Because as you look back through this age of enlightenment from the late 1800s, I imagine that all during that, people were complaining then and up until now about all the things that are wrong, and does that complaining and worry about all the things that are wrong fuel the Enlightenment? Well, yes, to some extent it does.

There is a danger of complacency, and if we're not aware of a problem, then we'll never try to solve it. I just argue in Enlightenment now that it can go way too far in the direction of fatalism and doom-mongering and radicalism, that if too much pessimism, everything is a crisis, everything is an existential threat, everything is the end of this and the dawn of a post-something era, that people can say, oh, these are just intractable, we'll never solve them, let's just have a good time day to day. So where does that come from? That's the optimal amount of pessimism.

Where does this come from? I mean, you could argue that we're already there, that a lot of people believe that it's too late, we've gone to hell in a handbasket, that our president is an idiot. And, you know, you never used to say things like, our president is an idiot because And, you know, you never used to say things like our president is an idiot because he was the president, but, and people of opposing political parties could still be respectful of each other. And it seems like a lot of that is just gone and not coming back. Yes, there is a,

and I mean, you mentioned President Trump, and he above all wrote to office on a narrative of gloom and decline and decadence. He wrote that pessimism into office. And part of the problem was that the people on the liberals, the centrists, didn't have a counter-narrative. They weren't willing to say, actually, things aren't that bad. People are moving back into cities. Unemployment is pretty low. The crime rate is low. There was so much pessimism on

both sides that Trump had the field to himself. Certainly, the general pessimism about society is not new. In the 19th century, there were plenty of philosophers and artists who were saying, the country is doomed. It's decadent, any day now it'll collapse. And it became very popular among a lot of intellectuals and professors and artists and writers. There was a moment in the post-war years, after World War II, where there was a great deal of American optimism. We were going to fight poverty. The United Nations was going to bring world peace. And then a lot of American optimism. We were going to fight poverty. The United Nations was going to bring world peace. And then a lot of cynicism came in in the 60s with the war in Vietnam, the discovery of

so much poverty and racism in the United States. And it turned into the pendulum swung so that most intellectuals and academics started to kind of hate the United States, to say that, and the West more generally. Well, in this atmosphere of cynicism and doom and gloom, where everybody thinks that, you know, we're all going to hell in a handbasket and, you know, there's no hope for humanity, that you've come out and proven that that's just not the way it is. That may be where the focus is, but it's not the reality, that we are in this Enlightenment period.

There are so many great things going on, and it's great that you especially have come out and said this because you have such a big following, and it's such a great message to hear. It is amazing. When you step back and you not only look at graphs and data, which I've tried to do, but even if you think back not so long ago about our recent history. In the 1970s, which a lot of people are nostalgic for, we had double-digit inflation, rates of inflation of 15%, 18%, and double-digit unemployment. The so-called misery index is what you get when you add them together. We had to line up around the block to get gasoline.

People worried whether there was going to be enough heating oil to last the winter. So part of the problem is just not to be nostalgic for the good old days. As Franklin Pierce Adams said, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. Right. Well, that's human nature is to remember the good and forget the bad. That's literally true in that there are studies of memory that show that as events fade into more distant memory, a lot of their negative emotional colorings tend to fade.

So we forget how awful it was. Well, it's a good message you bring, and I appreciate you spending some time talking about it. Steven Pinker has been my guest, and his new book is called Enlightenment Now, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Steven. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.

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Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture.

Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. What would you say is your favorite type of music? And maybe more importantly, why is it your favorite type of music? Everyone seems to like some kind of music, but where do we get our taste in music? And what does it say about us? That's what Nolan Gasser is here to discuss. Nolan is a composer and musicologist and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project, which powers Pandora Radio. It breaks down what musical taste is, where it comes from, and what our favorite songs

say about us. He's also author of the book, Why You Like It? The Science and Culture of Musical Taste. Hi, Nolan. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you, Michael. It's nice to be here. So is it your sense, or is there research that tells us that we've come to learn to like music?

Or are we humans just naturally a musical group? Well, we are. I think it can be said that we as a species have evolved to be musical. There's a big debate out there as to whether music was an adaptive trait that actually helped us to evolve and become human pros and cons on that argument, which we can avoid. But I actually would argue that our inherent musicality, our ability to find and keep a pitch, our ability to be able to keep time with music and create that social bonding

that happens when we all participate. The kind of emotional connection we get with music, the way that music can help us make friends and even sort of attract a mate. I think these and other elements really helped us to survive. And almost everybody on earth, obviously, there are some exceptions, you know, loves music has music that means something deeply to them. So there's, we are hardwired, as I like to say, in our brains and our bodies to be musical. And typically, when you ask people what their favorite music is, is it music from a particular

time in their life? Or how does some kind of music become my favorite kind of music? down to the actual place where you stand. And so collectively, we as Americans, if we, you know, grow up in, you know, in the 20th century and 21st century, there's obviously a lot of music that's tonal, as we call it, built on major and minor scales. We hear a lot of piano. We hear a lot of electric guitar and violins. If you grew up in India and a small town, you will hear different kinds of scales, more microtones, you'll hear different instruments like the sitar. And so that shapes a collective musical taste. And then as you go further down our subcultures, I actually call them

intracultures, those cultures within our own broader culture that define who we are, our cliques and communities, that helps shape the kinds of music that we think is okay. And then at the end of the day, your taste is going to be yours alone. Even if you have a twin brother or sister, yours will be somewhat different, even though they'll obviously, you'll share many traits in common with those that you grew up with. And when you ask people, if you've ever asked this, or if anyone's ever asked this, why do you like the music you like? Do people know why they like the music they like? Or do they just like the music they like? Well, you know, I think on different levels, people have an intuition about what music means to them. And it actually comes

back to what you mentioned earlier, there's no doubt that as we grow and we move from childhood where we're exposed to music that our parents play and music in our community and church and synagogue and that kind of thing, that becomes music that we accept as ours. But as we get into our teens and early adulthood, the music that we listen to becomes ours. We take ownership of it. It becomes a window into who we can be as individuals and a badge of our own identity. So I think a lot of people will look at their musical taste and go back to when they were in middle school and high school and their first concert they went to, their first kiss, those kinds of things, the music that really meant something to their budding identity. When I think of my musical taste I don't know if I'm normal or an oddball

so I don't necessarily have a musical taste I like lots of different music and I like different kinds of music in different situations and at different times. But I don't have any big passion for a specific type of music so much as, yeah, I like that. Yeah, I'll listen to that. That's nice. Yeah, I remember that.

That was good. But I'm not lying in bed at night going, oh, God, I really want to hear Black Sabbath. Well, if you're lying in bed at night, hoping to go to sleep, Black Sabbath may not be the best thing to play. But you're absolutely right that most of us are not single-minded in our musical tastes. We have some level of being eclectic, some of us more than others. And you're also absolutely right in something that I think a lot about, and we should all understand ourselves. There's different contexts where different kinds of music or different amounts of music make sense. If we're trying to relax, if we're out with friends,

if we're doing homework or working on something that kind of takes concentration. Music can be a great sort of support to that. But there's other times when listening to music as a dedicated activity, putting the headphones on, tuning out the world and following the musical discourse can be something incredibly enriching. And so it's good to have a broad taste. It's good to keep an open mind. And really, I think it's something that we should all be aware of, that we all have inherent bias. We're all, you know, we all think that we are open-minded more than we usually are. And we think, well, that music is fine for some people, but that's not my music. Well, if you actually give it time, music of a different culture or a different style.

I grew up in an environment where country music is not something that we listen to or whatever, but there's so much great country music if you open your ears to it, even if you were raised on rock and roll and vice versa. In terms of the actual passion level, it is a little bit of an individual story. There are certainly a lot of people who couldn't survive a day without certain kinds of music that they would listen to

or even a particular album. Other people, less so. There actually are 4% or so of the population that actually have a condition known as amusia, where to some degree or another, music is not necessarily a pleasant thing. I'm not saying that's you, but that does exist too as an outlier. 4% of the population doesn't like music at all? To some degree or another, you know, and someone like Oliver Sacks has talked about this, in some extreme cases, and it has to do with the brain, right? So whether it was through an accident or some sort of congenital, you know, essence in the brain where the auditory cortex is not

functioning the way that it does typically, the sound of music, sound of certain kinds of instruments or certain pitch levels actually can sound like pots and pans banging on the floor, as Sachs puts it, or as one of his patients put it. But in other cases, it's a little bit more subtle. If you've ever hung out with somebody and they're trying to sing along with a song and they're like, oh, my God, you're like nowhere near the pitch. Well, that's actually a form of amusia, being tone deaf. Most of us have the inherent ability to follow a melody and we may not have a beautiful voice, but we can find the pitch. Those that can't is actually a little bit of a, I don't want to use the word defect, but it is an abnormality compared to most. Similarly, those that can't necessarily really keep time. I've got some

friends that love music, but you ask them to kind of keep the beat and it's like, oh my God, what's going on? So when you can't embrace music in these sort of full capacities, it may have a tendency to lessen its impact, not necessarily. But anyway, it is about 4% of the population that broadly speaking, has the condition known as amusia. Well, one of the things that I appreciate about music and that I enjoy about music is its ability to take me back or take me somewhere, to remember a time when, because that music was popular then, or I first heard it then. Or even like, you know, if I listen to say, uh, Frank's an old Frank Sinatra, one of his many, you know, lonely late night,

wee small hours kind of songs. It makes me think of, you know, like a rainy night in New York city kind of thing. And I like that it does that for me. And I assume it does that for other people. Well, it connects to the notion of how music operates with memory, which is, I think, such a fascinating part of the broader topic of musical neuroscience. So if we didn't have memory that could capture music, you know, we probably would be very disinterested in it. The reason why we love music, especially some music, is because it's ingrained in our memory, not just to sound, but in association with other stimuli and other sort of emotions. The things that we remember that embed, you know,

strong traits in our memory that can be retrieved from the cerebellum deep in our brain are generally those things that have a strong emotional element to them. So it was music that you, when you first heard it or when you heard it at some time, you had a very positive experience. And when you're hearing Frank Sinatra, it could actually elicit those memories with your parents or grandparents or some other more innocent time when you didn't have so many responsibilities. Of course, music can also have a relationship with place and time. So maybe you were in New York City, you know, visiting somebody and you heard some Frank Sinatra, or you just associate Frank with New York. And so all these different associations in our own personal experiences are

also why music is powerful. And that's why, you know, when you hear in the wee small hours of the morning, you know, you have so many different ways of referencing it as a standard, as a Frank Sinatra song, as a ballad, and as maybe a little bit of a memory of you and your parents. I remember when I was young and listening to rock and roll, and my father would say, you know, he hated rock and roll. He just thought it was horrible. And I said, you know, when I get older, I'm never going to have that attitude towards any music, that I will be very open-minded when new music shows up. Of course. I find, however, that a lot of new music I abhor. I think it's horrible.

And I may not be as vocal as my father was, but from what I understand, that's a fairly common occurrence every generation or so, that new music does not get the wide acceptance of the older generations ever, or certainly for a while. So there's a couple reasons for that. It comes down to what we've talked about, that the music that your, say, your kids or younger people are listening to when they're in their teens, that's the music that's helping them. It's the

music of now, of today. And almost the fact that you're not into it helps them to own it. So this is not my music, music that my dad likes. This is not the Beatles. So there's part of that kind of, you know, cultural and developmental aspect. But there's another concept that's known as enculturation. And it's kind of a fancy sociological term. And it means basically how we, you know, get ourselves used to different aspects of culture. So when it comes to music, in those early years of development, you know, even the first two years of life, we're hearing music. We're understanding the scales that are used, the harmonies, if there are harmonies, the kinds of instruments, the kinds of rhythms and meters that are used, and that becomes the normal, right? And so if something's outside the normal, our inherent tendency, just as humans, is to not like it. We don't like what's unfamiliar,

at least at first, or it takes a little bit of extra effort. And musicologists talk about enculturation as, you know, a distinction between, say, Western music and getting used to Western music as opposed to, say, Chinese or Indian or some other culture. But I actually believe that enculturation even goes deeper into culture, within a culture. So hip-hop, for example, as a musical language or country music, if you're not weaned on that, if you didn't grow up listening to that, you're actually going to be less sensitive to the kinds of subtleties, the slight nuances in whether it be in rhythm or even in lyric content, hip-hop is so much about rhythm.

And the kind of subtle nuances of this type of 16th note syncopation, you may not be able to say what it is, but you're hearing it and you're understanding it. So if that's the music you were raised on in those early years, from 9 through 18, you hear a lot of hip hop, you're actually going to be more able to find, you know, resonance and clarity and discernment on that music than somebody who, yeah, I've heard hip hop, but you're not raised on it. And so it will, it will still have that element of almost being another culture. So you have to kind of almost, you know, take the, it's like learning a new language, take the time of getting

to know, okay, what's the difference between, you know, Eminem and, you know, and Snoop Dogg, or whatever it is, actually, those two aren't that far apart. But, you know, different subtleties within a particular genre. So that's part of it. And still, one of the things that I find so interesting is when I was really young, I did not and was not familiar with any of the music that my parents listened to when they were young. Music from, say say the 40s no nobody was listening to music of the 40s in the 60s they just weren't i mean you know maybe at clubs for older people but right but i have a 10 year old now who knows pink floyd queen this is

40 year old music that they still like today. You know, our culture, our generation has so embraced classic rock, right? So I was raised on, you know, on groups like, you know, Queen and classic rock, you know, and obviously raised on the Beatles. So, you know, but I had a good friend who was really into Kiss and I was into Queen. This is middle school age and it almost almost kind of was such a distinction, a small difference between the styles, but it became a big difference to us, and it kind of broke up our friendship. But our generation today, classic rock is everywhere. So it's so much part of the mainstream.

You hear it in restaurants and elevators and football games. You know, it's just in commercials. It's just so ingrained that your 10-year-old has been hearing that music since he was one. And so, it's kind of his music, too. That's part of it. I would also argue that the musical world that is around today, the pop music of today is actually more, just in terms of language, is more similar to that classic rock, say, than music of the rock in the 60s was to jazz in the 40s. You know, obviously a lot of similarities, but an entirely different approach to rhythm. You know, one was swing-based and one was generally not swing-based, sort of straight eighth notes, and, you know, heavier use of drums. Obviously, the difference between acoustic instruments like, you know,

saxophones and trumpets in the big band era and electric guitars and electric organs and electric bass in the rock era. So there was an even greater difference. One could argue that classic rock was such a flowering time and it's such great music that that's why it's still around. But great is really a subjective notion. It's really in the ear of the beholder. So I'd rather look to other answers than say, you know, it's based on the quality of the music. Right. Well, I've always thought that, because when you go back and listen to some of that big band swing music of the 40s, it's really good, but it seems to have died out,

whereas rock and roll seems to have evolved. Yeah, well, there are inherent aspects to a musical language. This is getting maybe a little bit more technical, but jazz as a genre, as a species, as we called it, a Pandora, you know, has certain, you know, inherent elements. Improvisation is a huge factor. So the individual, you know, personality and technique of the soloist. You know, a jazz standard, as it's called, right? The way that it goes is the musicians will play the melody once through, and then there'll be, you know, 20 choruses of solo just based on the harmony.

And then you come back to the head, as it's called. You know, pop music and rock music is very different. You know, it should be mentioned, obviously, that a lot of the swing music was instrumental, right? You had the big bands, you know, In the Mood and, you know, Tuxedo Junction and all those, whereas, you know, pop and rock music is obviously vocal and deals with themes, love and protest and whatever it may be that people can really sink their teeth into from a narrative standpoint. You do hear people, though, talk about how great rock and roll is, as if it's better than other forms of music. It certainly has lasted a long time and continues to evolve in different directions, but is it your sense that rock and roll is just so far superior than all other kinds of music? Or why did it and why has it lasted so long? you know, through the 60s, as you mentioned, one of the reasons why rock and roll became so powerful is it became this vehicle of social, you know, change and, you know, protests and all the, all this sort of social revolution of the 60s, music became an element and, you know, people like groups like the Beatles and obviously so many, you know, great, great musicians,

you know, Led Zeppelin and all these other, Pink Floyd, began to really explore the potential of rock and roll. It really showed itself a tremendous vehicle for maturity and development. Some people might say, well, rock has lost its ability to really fully evolve. But I think that that's selling it short. I think rock still has many, many, many generations to pass through. But you see that other genres like hip-hop have taken, in some ways, taken its place. So it's always an interesting game to watch. Well, it's certainly a topic that everybody is interested in to some

degree, because as we said at the beginning, everybody likes music and has their favorite music. And it's really interesting to understand where it comes from and why we like it so much. Nolan Gasser has been my guest. He is a composer and musicologist. He was the chief architect of the Music Genome Project that powers Pandora, and he's author of the book Why You Like It? The Science and Culture of Musical Taste. There's a link to that book

in the show notes. Thanks, Nolan. All right. Thanks very much, Michael. So what is the difference between the words flammable and inflammable? They both mean burnable, but inflammable has been around since at least 1605, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Flammable first appeared in the 1920s, courtesy of the National Fire Protection Association. They decided that the I-N at the beginning of inflammable was confusing, that people might think it meant not burnable. So they created the words flammable and non-flammable to help avoid confusion and to distinguish between what will burn and what won't burn. But which is more correct? Well, history is on your side if you use inflammable to describe something that is burnable. But common sense dictates that if someone is about to light a cigarette next to a gas

pump, you might want to go with flammable just so you're crystal clear. And that is something you should know. I know you know people who would enjoy this podcast, so please tell them about it. Send them a link or just tell them to look up Something You Should Know at Apple Podcasts or wherever they listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. Thanks for listening today to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing

secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce.

That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.