The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.9

Music: Synchronizing the Group

This episode defines entrainment, the ability not just to move to a beat but to anticipate it, and you learn it appears in infants and every society with no training required. It reports Aniruddh Patel's theory that this depends on vocal learning, falsified when researchers trained a sea lion, a non-vocal learner, to hold the beat across tempos. A 2019 study found listeners can identify across cultures whether a recording is a dance song, lullaby, or healing song, even as another found the octave, treated as music's one universal, is not recognized as equivalent pitch among Bolivia's Tsimané. It also notes some people show normal pleasure in everything except music, revealing musical reward runs on its own dedicated brain pathway.