Stephan Shakespeare: Barn owl sings the Blues

We like to think of ourselves as analytical creatures, capable of taking complex data and making sense of it. I think that’s a fair claim, although very often it’s an inversion of what we mean. We do indeed constantly analyse, comparing small bits of new data to the mass of previously categorized data in our memories, and that is what perception is. When we proudly speak of our analytical abilities, we generally mean something different from plain moment-by-moment perception: we mean producing some grander design. This, I think, is usually an illusion.

Whether or not we consider ourselves ‘musical’, we all have an incredibly advanced ability to process sounds in terms of pitch, rhythm, timbre, and so forth. Even if we can’t sing in tune, we can recognise the distinctive profile of overtones that distinguish the sound of a violin from a piano. (Any note produced by an instrument has a basic pitch and many overtones, that is, additional higher-frequency pitches, of which some louder and some softer, creating a pattern that is the particular sound of a particular instrument).

In fact our recognition of those overtone profiles is so automated once we get beyond early childhood that if we are played only the overtones without the fundamental note, we create the fundamental in our own mind – we hear the fundamental note as if it had been actually played.

Sound recognition is one of the few areas where we can map firing neurons precisely to an outside stimulus, in this case particular notes. In fact, they fire at the same rate as the frequency of the note. We can see what note is being ‘heard’ by the particular part of the brain that is firing. This allows an astonishing trick (I highly recommend “This is your brain on music” by Dr Daniel J Levitin, for a proper explication). Electrodes were placed in part of a barn owl’s brain, and it was played the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ using tones which excluded the fundamentals (that is, the basic part of the note). In other words, only the overtones were played. Now, by the process previously described, known as ‘restoring the fundamentals’, the owl’s brain produced the missing parts of the tone. And as this meant the neurons firing at the exact rate of the frequencies of the missing notes, it meant that by amplifying what was picked up by the electrodes, the missing fundamentals could now be heard as a playback from the owl’s brain.

The owl’s brain had become a kind of instrument: by playing the owl a distorted version of the Blue Danube Waltz, one could produce the melody in restored fundamentals.

So what? For me this is a beautiful illustration of the way our minds are mainly engaged with analysing inputs according to previous experiences, and with such an inward focus that we create our own new version of what we ‘ought’ to have seen or heard or felt, whether or not it actually happened to us. Perception is mainly matching stimuli to previously categorised experiences. If perception is reality (and certainly it is in music), and if perception is mainly the stimulation of memory, then reality is mainly memory. I say ‘mainly’ because obviously we do innovate to change or extend our previous categorizations, which is what we call learning – but this is not the main thing we do when we ‘think’. Most of the time we are surfing our past.

It’s vital that pollsters have some model of the mind that takes this into account as a context for opinion research. If we imagine we can merely ‘measure opinion’ and deliver a verdict on the mind of the nation, as one can measure the circumferences of one thousand randomly chosen apples in an orchard and produce a good estimation of the average for the whole orchard, we will fool ourselves and our clients. Ask someone a question (and it will make a difference whether this is done with a clipboard in the street, by a surprise phone call, or by an email to a previous contact) and you may get a reply, but since we can’t know that the respondent perceived the question as we meant it, nor that we perceive the answer as the respondent meant it, we are automatically in some difficulty.

For years, opinion pollsters were telling us that everyone wanted to pay more tax. Politicians have rarely been stupid enough to believe it. When was the last time someone won an election promising overtly to raise taxes? But that is what the opinion polls once upon a time seemed to recommend. When YouGov first produced data that questioned whether people really were keen to give the government more of their earnings, we were slammed for our methodology.

When we are analysing data, we have a strong tendency akin to ‘restoring the fundamentals’ – that is, to hear what we think ought to underlie the overtones, whether those ‘fundamentals’ are really there or not. The vibrations on the outside, and the firing of the neurons on the inside, are both real, and the domino-effect doesn’t stop with the first set of firings. So it’s very difficult to distinguish between what is true, and the messages that our fabulously powerful memories transmit. After all, we can get a barn owl to play us the Blue Danube Waltz just by sending him the overtones.

Comments

[Kevin Davis]

Blimey!

I started reading this article wondering what the hell Stephen had put on his cornflakes this morning!

I do not disagree with your analysis, as you have clearly done more polling than I have eve done, but is it not the case that the length of time you spend with each of the 1,200 odd people is so short that this type of analysis might well distort the result you are seeking to gain?

[Off Message]

Brilliant Stephan. I really enjoyed the piece: a good thought-provoking start to the week.

[Tony Makara]

Interesting article. As someone who is very interested in music it always amuses me to hear people in the media talking about how some group in the charts has released a great piece of music, when actually all the 'Music' you will find in the top 40 isn't music at all but is 'Rhythm' and owes its appeal to repetition, just like advertising. The human brain is very fond of rhythm as anyone who has been hypnotized by the sound of car windscreen wipers will know.

On the subject of polling, it really is impossible to take a perfect poll. Ask person if they are vegetarian, if they are popular with children, like opera, like animals, are interested in art and poetry and are devoted to their mother, and if they were to answer 'yes' to all these then they have the same personality traits of Adolph Hitler. So its a tricky science to get the questions right. I will certainly be voting Conservative at the next election, yet there are points of Conservative policy that I don't agree with, like making single mums work, and if I was interviewed on the issue of working mothers I'd be down as being anti-Conservative. Nontheless we are all intrigued by these polls and enjoy them tremendously.