If you’ve ever tried to sway a younger sibling away from the perils of the “pop trash they play on the radio” and towards mirroring your own more refined preferences (obviously), you know just how difficult it can sometimes be to influence musical tastes. Not anymore.
Turns out that the solution to finally ridding your impulses for guilty listening pleasures, or maybe being able to finally enjoy the finer appreciations of prog rock and jazz, may finally be here, and all it takes a few little jolts of electricity to the brain.
Researchers have apparently stumbled across the part of the human grey matter that defines, or at least affects, our musical preferences.
As io9 reports, a new scientific journal published in Frontier in Behavioural Neuroscience, details a case study in which neuroscientists looking into treating the obsessive-compulsive disorder of an elderly patient “who developed a sudden and distinct musical preference for Johnny Cash following deep brain stimulation.”
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The 60-year-old man – referred to only as ‘Mr. B’ – gained a diehard appreciation for The Man In Black, obsessively buying up his discography and listening on repeat, due to an electrical implant surgically implanted to stimulate the pleasure centres of his brain. As the study details:
Mr. B., had never been a huge music lover. His musical taste was broad, covering Dutch-language songs, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, with a preference for the last named. While music did not occupy an important position in his live, his taste in music had always been very fixed and his preferences stayed the same throughout decades. On average, a half year after DBS surgery, Mr. B. stated that he was turning into a Johnny Cash fan.
He had been listening to the radio, when he coincidentally heard ‘Ring of Fire’ of the Country and Western singer and experienced that he was deeply affected by the song. Mr. B. started to listen to more songs of Johnny Cash and noticed that he was deeply moved by the raw and low-pitched voice of the singer. Moreover, he experienced that he preferred the performance of the songs in the Seventies and Eighties, due to the fullness of the voice of the older Johnny Cash in that period.
… From this moment on, Mr. B. kept listening simply and solely to Johnny Cash and bought all his CD’s and DVD’s. When listening to his favorite songs he walks back and forth through the room and feels like he finds himself in a movie in which he plays the hero’s part.
More fascinating than Mr. B’s artificially generated but definitely authentic love for Cash is that once “the stimulators run down or accidentally go out” on his brain implant, the 60-year-old’s Cash fandom began to subside, returning back to the Stones and Beatles “as it was for the past 40 years.”
Meaning that when the battery ran out of juice, so did Mr. B’s obsession – until the electrical implants were recharged, then he’d be back up wandering around belting out ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’.
The researchers are almost as much at a loss as to why it was Johnny Cash (and not say, Willie Nelson or Waylon Jennings as io9 speculate) that so piked Mr. B’s OCD habits. Does this mean that if the pleasure centres were stimulated a few neurons to the left, he’d suddenly become the world’s biggest Metallica fan? Or obsessed with U2 a few shocks to the right?
One thing’s for certain, if you’ve never dug Johnny Cash, at least there’s now a way to ‘fix’ you.
