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What Do Great Musicians Have in Common? DNA
Scientific American: At age 13, jazz great Thelonious Monk ran into trouble at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The reason: he was too good. The famously precocious pianist was, as they say, a “natural,” and by that
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Neural Nostalgia
Slate: As I plod through my 20s, I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon: The music I loved as a teenager means more to me than ever—but with each passing year, the new songs on the radio
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Bouncing to the Beatles Breeds Benevolent Babies
Pacific Standard: As part of our ongoing inquiry into the evolutionary origins of music, we’ve noted a line of research that links altruistic behavior with synchronized sounds. A study from England found eight- to 11-year-olds who made
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Pump Up The Bass, Feel Like A Boss
NPR: Jump-up songs make us feel capable and powerful. Athletes know that intuitively — batters swagger out to raucous walk-up songs, stars like Serena Williams and Lebron James warm up with headphones on (except when
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Is Musical Talent Rooted in Genes?
LiveScience: Practice doesn’t always make perfect when it comes to becoming the next Mozart, a new study suggests. Researchers compared pairs of identical twins, and found that no matter how hard one twin had practiced up
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Perfect, It Turns Out, Is What Practice Doesn’t Make
The Huffington Post: We’ve long been eager to believe that mastery of a skill is primarily the result of how much effort one has put in. Extensive practice “is probably the most reasonable explanation we
