New study: Musical talent linked to "Open" personality

[jancivil]

In the search for better understanding, correct me I am wrong

See particularly the section 'Music and Language' in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive ... e_of_music

Syntactical information mechanisms in both music and language have been shown to be processed similarly in the brain. Jentschke, Koelsch, Sallat and Friederici (2008) conducted a study investigating the processing of music in children with specific language impairments (SLI).[47] Children with typical language development (TLD) showed ERP patterns different from those of children with SLI, which reflected their challenges in processing music-syntactic regularities. Strong correlations between the ERAN (Early Right Anterior Negativity—a specific ERP measure) amplitude and linguistic and musical abilities provide additional evidence for the relationship of syntactical processing in music and language.[47]

However, production of melody and production of speech may be subserved by different neural networks. Stewart, Walsh, Frith and Rothwell (2001) studied the differences between speech production and song production using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).[48] Stewart et al. found that TMS applied to the left frontal lobe disturbs speech but not melody supporting the idea that they are subserved by different areas of the brain. The authors suggest that a reason for the difference is that speech generation can be localized well but the underlying mechanisms of melodic production cannot. Alternatively, it was also suggested that speech production may be less robust than melodic production and thus more susceptible to interference.[48]

Language processing is a function more of the left side of the brain than the right side, particularly Broca's Area and Wernicke's area, though the roles played by the two sides of the brain in processing different aspects of language are still unclear. Music is also processed by both the left and the right sides of the brain.[46][49] Recent evidence further suggest shared processing between language and music at the conceptual level.[50] It has also been found that, among music conservatory students, the prevalence of absolute pitch is much higher for speakers of tone language, even controlling for ethnic background, showing that language influences how musical tones are perceived.[51][52]

References

[PurpleCatfishBettie]

maybe the best musicians are open... to 'spirit possession' or somesuch. they tap into something that's otherwise floating in the 'ether', and through a sort of metaphysics, channel it into 'the real world'... like jim morrison, van halen, jimi hendrix, jimmy page, vinnie vincent, ace frehley, waylon jennings, sugarfoot, etc...

[Michael L]

Really good examples Xiangqi. Without openness moment-by-moment there is no sustained innovation & exciting variations on a theme. Sure, there may be other personality traits but Openness must be prominent. Grace Slick said in a YouTube interview that Jim Morrison's greatest risk was that he was so open to new experiences that he would go overboard, and he did.

[annode]

harryupbabble wrote:

I guess it doesn't sound so mathy, but really... it is?

Noticing that question mark at the end of your statement...is that uptalk?
I've never seen uptalk in text. Did you do that deliberately, or are you only an expert of music maths, and not grammar and punctuation?

Gotta say, i`m really sorry I made that joke on Karen Horney and corporate psychopaths. The bubble-headed self indulgent verbal masturbation that came later has my head spinning. Take a pencil and paper and 'get a room'.

[johnrule]

Actually, I think this study got something fundamentally wrong...openness is a character trait and not a personality trait. I am open to debate on that of course

[dea-man]

Actually, I think this study got something fundamentally wrong...openness is a character trait and not a personality trait. I am open to debate on that of course

I agree.

Open-mindedness can be devolped with practice.

[Jace-BeOS]

maybe the best musicians are open... to 'spirit possession' or somesuch. they tap into something that's otherwise floating in the 'ether', and through a sort of metaphysics, channel it into 'the real world'... like jim morrison, van halen, jimi hendrix, jimmy page, vinnie vincent, ace frehley, waylon jennings, sugarfoot, etc...

No.

[Jace-BeOS]

Actually, I think this study got something fundamentally wrong...openness is a character trait and not a personality trait. I am open to debate on that of course

I agree.

Open-mindedness can be devolped with practice.

Good points!

The more you learn, the more you realize there is to know. The more you realize there is to know, the more willing you are to accept that you don't know everything (or even most of it).

From my own experience, i see it as true. I know my own attitudes have changed a lot over the years, about some things I felt pretty certain about, and I'm seemingly opposite to some earlier attitudes. I've expanded my tastes (not as much as I should, but there's an issue of habit and confort zone to deal with there).

Blah blah blah

[Jace-BeOS]

@ Jace-BeOS
Now that i`ve read your reply post;
- Sorry to hear you became someones meal at the office. I hope you will be able to leave it behind you one day. Betrayal can suck up a lot of ones energy.

Thanks. It's ... It was a complex and deep injury. There are details spewed all over this forum from various years of posts, but yeah, it sucked up a lot of energy. As for "One day"... I think I would need a sense of agency and a real home first. I'm sure I could do better, since I've improved a lot in the last few years (mostly because of getting OFF psych drugs). It was definitely a learning experience. It made me read a lot about various human behavioral issues, at the very least.

On that note, there's a book written by a bipolar psychiatrist called "Touched with Fire" (or by fire) that, like this thread's topic-starter subject, drew connections between personality and "artistic temperament". Her argument or hypothesis was that artistic temperament is bound to intense personality and very often connected to damage and disorder. It's probably a bit fallacious, but made a popular book. I didn't finish even half of it because I lost interest reading about everything wrong with people, since the info (right or wrong) changes almost nothing about dealing with people

[harryupbabble]

harryupbabble wrote:

I guess it doesn't sound so mathy, but really... it is?

Noticing that question mark at the end of your statement...is that uptalk?
I've never seen uptalk in text. Did you do that deliberately, or are you only an expert of music maths, and not grammar and punctuation?

Gotta say, i`m really sorry I made that joke on Karen Horney and corporate psychopaths. The bubble-headed self indulgent verbal masturbation that came later has my head spinning. Take a pencil and paper and 'get a room'.

The question mark is to indicate that I myself am not sure if music is mathy or languagy. Sure, at the moment, I admit that I do favor (60-40) the idea that music is mathy because well it sure looks mathy to me. The additional doubt for me is which part of the brain handles music and if listening to music is different from creating music, brain-hemisphere-wise. I'm not an expert at math nor language nor music. The only thing that I know I'm good at, without studying, is speed scrabble. I use a lot of words like "may", "perhaps", etc. in my posts because I'm not really sure about the accuracy of most of the information that I get from the internet or from anywhere. True, my grammar is probably weak but English is not my mother tongue, and I am right-handed and probably weak at language but lately I try to strengthen that weakness as much as I can via typing posts here at KVR and elsewhere. Still, I think that my post are not so hard to understand. I'm just making do and improvising and if that appears to be bastardization of the grammar rules, well I give myself a pat on the back for somehow coping. So far, you are the first to comment on the not-so-expertiveness of my grammar and punctuation. But, I do admit to creating words that are probably not in the dictionary. Words like "meme" and "selfie" didn't use to be there either. Does it bother you a lot? If so, you must really be bothered by YouTube, grammar and punctuation can get worse over there. Anyways, even if I am not sure about a lot of things, I tend to favor certain ideas over others until such ideas are proven to be false. And I myself am not bothered by people who write long posts because sometimes they make sense. It's not that different from surfing the web and reading "research" stuff. Plus, if people that write long posts bother you a lot then I think KVR provides an option to make their posts invisible to you. Besides, I read somewhere that masturbation, verbal or physical, is good for the masturbater, not necessarily good for the witness, true. Note that this reply was written in between games of speed scrabble and under insomniacal conditions and it may be worst than my usual replies and will probably look so silly to me after a good night's sleep and so silly to anyone else now. And I didn't have time to use paragraph breaks either. Sorry. Hasty, hasty. C'est la vie.

[Jace-BeOS]

Finding out that the brain hemisphere myth was bunk was a lot like finding out the tongue taste bud zones was a myth. I felt betrayed by my public schooling. What did they actually present that wasn't BS?

So yeah, healthy skepticism is healthy.

Yeah, it's like studies on milk and eggs. One year (or even decade) they say it's bad, the next year they say it's not really bad but may in fact be good for you.

Still, the internet is permeated with "facts" about the left-hemisphere of the brain being responsible for imagination and that it is the solver of logic and math and science problems... and that the right-hemisphere being mostly responsible for expressive thoughts manifested in the arts and in language based endeavors.

So, depending on whether the new way is an improvement on and more accurate than the old way, it might be still debatable to say that music is more about math than art or language. I guess a lot of musicians could be seen as dramatic and full of feelings and very expressive but it's usually the singer being that (one example is Kate Bush). No? I look at guitarist Robert Fripp and a lot of bassists and they just seem to be standing there remembering what to play and seemingly having this "computative look" with their guitar and bass patterns and sounding like it too.

But if the new way, using brain scan machines and newer, more accurate technology, is debunking the old conclusions, then yes maybe the old conclusions has to be discarded.

But it's interesting to know that in the case of studies on sociopaths, particularly the McDonald Triad idea, it seems a lot of law agencies and not just crime investigation TV shows still believe (and if they do not now then they did for a long time) and rely on it. Although it might be true that Mr. McDonald's study was actually done on "violent" subjects and not necessarily on sociopaths, law agencies like the FBI may still be relying on Mr. McDonald's findings because who is to say that those "violent" subjects that his study was done on are not actually sociopaths? They could have been.

I guess if you see your neighbor's kid torturing and killing animals it might be still a good idea to let the authorities know about it even if you are not sure that the kid is also a bed-wetter and a firebug. Murder and torture are still crimes right? Just because it's done on animals doesn't mean it should count less.

Anyways, using the search words "brain hemispheres", below are some links (from over a million of them actually) still supporting the "old" way about the functions of the left and right brain hemispheres.

https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/split.html
http://www.thethinkingbusiness.com/brai ... emispheres
http://www.livescience.com/32935-whats- ... brain.html

Sorry for quoting back all of that when I'm going to comment on only one tiny point, but editing text here on a phone sucks.

The comment: yes, there's an incorrect and unfortunate perceived connection between psychiatric disorders and violence. Most notably psychosis. A psychotic isn't inherently violent. They're inherently disconnected from reality.

As for psychopaths, I bet there's more presumption of a connection to violence than what actually exists, but it gets people's attention and makes scary stories about "real monsters".

Psychiatric disorders and neurological conditions are historically treated very badly by most societies. On one hand, that makes sense as a small and at risk tribe that needs every single member of a 50-member clan to function properly for survival (but not as an advanced and complex society of billions that claims to be sophisticated, technically advanced, educated, and intellectual). "Crazy" people are presumed dangerous, and neurological damage/disorders are disbelieved (because if it's just a neurological thing, that makes it a little harder to demonize the patient). Wild behavior is scary, but that's also over-presented by media and fiction.

Then the whole scenario gets even more socially unacceptable to people when you realize: psychiatric drugs can (and do) make some/many(?) people MUCH WORSE. There's a connection between mass shootings and SSRI/SSNRI class drugs. It's debated about which is the cause and which is the effect (are they doing it because of the drug or are they on the drug because they're "nuts"?)... but there isn't debate that this class of drug can make some people impulsive (or lose impulse control entirely). It's a fact. It's the mechanism of the drug and the mechanism of the neurotransmitter(s) that the drug impacts (or as close as is so far known; no, "they" don't really know how this stuff works and the drugs have been based on wild hypotheses that haven't proven to be correct).

These drugs were forced by law (after various suicides and lawsuits) to carry a "black box" warning about suicidality risks (because many suicidal acts are impulsive responses to immediate suffering, rather than coolly thought decisions over a longer period of time, though those exist too).

Personal anecdote: While on an SSNRI, I was VERY artistically engaged and I did almost anything that came to mind. Unfortunately, in my state of suffering, mostly bad shit came to mind. But there you go, another example of "openness" and creativity: without impulse control, more [bad] art gets made because the artist's demon of self-censorship has no say in the matter.

Being human is hard and getting harder every generation, it seems. It doesn't help that the science is held back by the marketing and that the money for research is focused on supporting the claims that the manufacturer of the drugs wishes the studies to support.

Then there are these studies about music and personality that further reinforce people's beliefs that "you're either born with it or you're not". I was born with crappy eyes, not special musical aptitude or openness. In fact, I was VERY narrow and closed for a long time in childhood, but I started being interested in music... because I liked synthesizers. Because I found ways to exercise the interest, I developed it. If only people would believe that is all it takes and if only their parents, teachers, family, etc would support them more. Looking at interviews with creative people living off their work, I find many people crediting their supportive (often musical) family.

As noted above by others: openness isn't an inherent attribute of a person. It can be learned. So too can artistic skills.

And, since I'm so verbose...

Besides, I read somewhere that masturbation, verbal or physical, is good for the masturbater, not necessarily good for the witness, true.

That's really funny

Your English is excellent. Your biggest need is to break blocks of text into paragraphs more

[jancivil]

harryupbabble wrote:

I guess it doesn't sound so mathy, but really... it is?

Noticing that question mark at the end of your statement...is that uptalk?
I've never seen uptalk in text. Did you do that deliberately, or are you only an expert of music maths, and not grammar and punctuation?

The question mark is to indicate that I myself am not sure if music is mathy or languagy.

True, my grammar is probably weak but English is not my mother tongue, and I am right-handed and probably weak at language but lately I try to strengthen that weakness as much as I can via typing posts here at KVR and elsewhere. Still, I think that my post are not so hard to understand. I'm just making do and improvising and if that appears to be bastardization of the grammar rules, well I give myself a pat on the back for somehow coping. So far, you are the first to comment on the not-so-expertiveness of my grammar and punctuation. But, I do admit to creating words that are probably not in the dictionary. Words like "meme" and "selfie" didn't use to be there either. Does it bother you a lot?

I wouldn't worry about that kind of opinion. You aren't writing formally, it isn't actually a grammar issue, you expressed that you were not fully assured of the point, maybe, in one swift move. It's efficient and it works. (He's not that much an authority on the language anyway.) He's made a whole thread about the pointless use of 'basically' (where he was basically wrong), and one to go into how the female tendency of this 'uptalk' is traveling too fast for his tastes. Now someone is a bubblehead after his lame joke failed to convey. Snarky = superior is the order of the day it appears.

[jancivil]

Then there are these studies about music and personality that further reinforce people's beliefs that "you're either born with it or you're not". I was born with crappy eyes, not special musical aptitude or openness. In fact, I was VERY narrow and closed for a long time in childhood, but I started being interested in music... because I liked synthesizers. Because I found ways to exercise the interest, I developed it. If only people would believe that is all it takes and if only their parents, teachers, family, etc would support them more. Looking at interviews with creative people living off their work, I find many people crediting their supportive (often musical) family.

As noted above by others: openness isn't an inherent attribute of a person. It can be learned. So too can artistic skills.

I made the distinction between being open with people and open to music and sound. I was sick as a child, I had to take drugs to stay breathing and I was irritable and not well disposed to being around people. I was nonetheless disposed to think the best of people, and naive/overtrusting for a long time. Both of these aspects evolved to some extent. But I do not grant that 'openness' is a broad aspect of personality that translates directly to 'musical talent'. I think that it's specific. I think that gauging 'personality' in this facile manner is fraught with problems.

Additionally, I think that raw talent is somewhat overrated, certainly by those who have not studied it closely. I think that talent itself can be more or less developed as a skill set from even a modest gift. I don't think that someone with natural absolute pitch is necessarily going to be more worthy musically. Conversely, I'm sure that an ear, a great ear for relative pitch can be developed out of a poor start. I think there are people with an aptitude and people that are not suited at all, but I wouldn't discourage people too glibly.

[Jace-BeOS]

There was an article shared here recently about myths of music. One item to result was about "inborn talent". There is this myth that Mozart was some magical genius that just spewed music. That myth had been smashed by facts: Mozart had to do the work like anyone else. and: the myth had possibly originated in a piece of writing that was essentially a lie to flower-up and inflate the whole "musical genius" concept. Maybe to make the man into legend for the sake of (?? readership?).

My point being, I agree: raw talent is overrated, and I think the focus on the idea of it is a way for an entire society to excuse itself (those who feel unskilled) from feeling bad about lacking a skill (which they could theoretically acquire, given the time, motivation, patience, and access).

The constant search for meaningfulness in these kinds of studies might be part of that myth. As in, we study the mythical nature of a thing because people made it mythical, not because it is inherently magical. Sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (?).

[stillshaded]

I dunno..

I think musical talent is inborn to a large degree. As to mozart not really being a genius... Really? come on. The sheer amount of music he wrote in his short life is staggering. Well I won't go into that so much.

Having personally know some musical "geniuses" I will say that it is not fair. Indeed, you just have to accept that. While it is certainly true that almost anyone can develop a very large degree of musical skill over a life time, people who are very "talented" (very loaded word there), have a very significant head start. I teach private lessons, so I guess I'm somewhat qualified to make assessments in this matter.

Yes there are lazy talented people who waste their talent, and there are hard working people who didn't start with much aptitude. But there are also a lot of hard working talented people out there. Really, it just becomes an issue of time. If you have an average amount of aptitude, and some one else has a very large amount, and you are both working at music for 6 hours a day, that person is going to outpace you very quickly. You just have to get over it.


Now.. there is the issues of creativity and "soul". These qualities allow you to make "good" music without a lot of ability. So, I do think it's true that anyone can make good music, but not every one can be mozart. That's just silly.

Finally, I don't find it to be totally outlandish that there may be personality traits that are seemingly unrelated to musicality that are in fact related. This happens in nature all the time. People with red hair have a certain skin complexion. Before you go labeling me a eugenicist, take not that I'm saying traits within the mind may correlate with each other, not that skin complexion correlates with your mind.

Look at cats for instance, a large percent of white cats have different color eyes and are deaf. It's an undeniable fact that phenoms sometimes come in packages. Not sure if this study proves it for certain, but they could be on to something.