Learn about why music really is universal to humans; what studying “split-brain” patients taught scientists about the brain; and when in human history society decided that women should shave their bodies. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following story from Curiosity.com about how studying “split-brain” patients taught scientists strange things about the brain: https://curiosity.com/topics/studying-split-brain-patients-taught-scientists-strange-things-about-the-brain-curiosity Additional sources: Universal features of music around the world | ScienceDaily — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191122113300.htm Universality and diversity in human song | Science — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/eaax0868 The world in a song | Science — https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6468/944 Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture | Journal of American Culture — https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/brundage13/files/2013/09/Caucasian-Female-Body-Hair-and-American-Culture.pdf The History of Female Hair Removal | Women’s Museum of California — https://womensmuseum.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/the-history-of-female-hair-removal/ Why women are growing out their body hair and what razor companies are doing about it | USA Today — https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2019/09/07/women-body-hair-why-more-women-shaving-less-beauty-trend/2195286001/ A Nick In Time: How Shaving Evolved Over 100,000 Years Of History | Gizmodo — https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/03/a-nick-in-time-how-shaving-evolved-over-100000-years-of-history/ Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why music really is universal to humans; what studying “split-brain” patients taught scientists about the brain; and when in human history society decided that women should shave their bodies.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following story from Curiosity.com about how studying “split-brain” patients taught scientists strange things about the brain: https://curiosity.com/topics/studying-split-brain-patients-taught-scientists-strange-things-about-the-brain-curiosity
Additional sources:
Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-women-started-shaving-universal-features-of-music-and-split-brain-studies
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why music really is universal to humans; and, what studying “split-brain” patients taught scientists about the brain. We’ll also answer a listener question about the history of women shaving.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Music is universal to humans - Kelsey (Cody)
They say that music is the “universal language.” But...is it really? I mean, music from all around the world sounds so different. Is it really possible that there’s some universal thread that connects them all? According to a recent Harvard University analysis of music from world cultures, the answer is yes. In fact, music around the world is more alike than different.
This isn’t the first time scientists have tried to find commonalities among the music of the world. In 1900, German psychology professor Carl Stumpf used a phonograph to record Thai musicians. And that began a comparative musicology project that blossomed into more than 13,000 phonograph cylinders — at least, before it came to a tragic end during World War II. The research field languished for decades afterward, and scientists in the 1970s even frowned upon it, figuring that world music was so diverse that there was no point comparing them. Only recently have researchers like this Harvard team jumped back into the fray — and what they’ve found is pretty remarkable.
This new research supports the idea that music all around the globe shares important commonalities, despite lots of differences. First of all, music exists in every society, both with and without words. All societies dance. All societies’ music strikes an aesthetic balance between monotony and chaos.
We also use similar kinds of music for similar purposes. For example, dance music around the world is usually fast and rhythmic. The songs we use for lullabies are soft and slow — all around the world. And healing songs tend to use fewer notes, and space those notes more closely together, than love songs.
There’s also the fact that music in all cultures has “tonality.” In other words, they build melodies from a small subset of notes from a base, or “tonic” pitch — like 12 half-steps of the octave in western music, or the 22 shruti of the Indian tonal system.
In the end, the team concluded that music is more varied within societies than it is between them. These and other findings suggest that there is something universal about music. And those universal properties probably reflect deeper truths about human cognition — that there’s a "human musicality" that we all share.
Studying 'Split-Brain' Patients Taught Scientists Strange Things About the Brain — https://curiosity.com/topics/studying-split-brain-patients-taught-scientists-strange-things-about-the-brain-curiosity (Ashley)
Some of the most amazing discoveries in neuroscience have come out of unusual brain conditions. And this story from the 1960s is no exception. I’m talking about a series of experiments run by a neurobiologist named Michael Gazzaniga, on “split-brain” patients — that is, people with two brain hemispheres that aren’t connected. Those experiments taught us important things about how the brain delegates tasks.
These patients had undergone a surgery called a corpus callosotomy, which separates the two halves of the cerebrum as a last-resort treatment for epilepsy.
Researchers found that when the two hemispheres were cut off from one another, they could each act on their own, as if they contained two separate spheres of consciousness.
For example, one of the experiments involved flashing lights in each eye independently and asking the patient whether they saw anything. Each hemisphere of the brain controls the opposite side of the body, so when a patient's right eye saw the light, the patient was able to say yes, because the left hemisphere controls speech.
But when the left eye saw the light, the right hemisphere took over and they couldn’t speak. But because the right hemisphere does have control over motor movements, they could raise their left hand to show they saw the light. The split-brain condition wasn’t debilitating for any of the patients, but it’s worth mentioning that there were some side effects. One patient actually reported experiencing antagonism between his hands, with one hand picking up a newspaper and the other putting it back down.
In the end, these experiments showed that certain regions do the heavy lifting on certain tasks, but the brain also distributes tasks across the hemispheres in a precise way. Gazzaniga's split-brain experiments were a huge step in our understanding of how the developed adult brain delegates its functions — and if it wasn’t for the dozen or so split-brain patients willing to participate in his studies, that may have stayed a mystery for decades.
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Listener question - history of hairless women (Ashley)
ASHLEY: We got a listener question from Arjun, who asks: "At what point of time in human history did we decide that women must be hairless?" Great question, Arjun!
Women and men have practiced some form of hair removal even before the first razors came on the scene around 5,000 years ago. Even in prehistoric times, people would use flakes of obsidian or seashells to remove hair from their faces and heads to prevent lice and frostbite. The intense heat in Ancient Egypt led both men and women of the upper classes to use pumice stones, copper razors, and even hair-removal creams and sugar waxes to take off all of their head and body hair. But some cultures around this time still had special standards for women: women in the Middle East traditionally removed their body hair the night before their wedding, for example, and upper-class women in ancient Rome would remove all of their body hair as well. I mean, have you ever seen a Roman statue of a woman with underarm hair? No you have not.
Aside from a sort of bizarre period when Elizabethan women would remove their eyebrows and recede their hairlines, women in the western world didn’t really care about hair removal until the 20th century. Why the change of heart? Why else: advertising. 1915 marked what scholars call “The Great Underarm Campaign,” when the number of hair removal ads in the popular fashion magazine Harpers Bazar multiplied, and the majority of them focused on the underarm. These ads generally stressed that the new styles of sleeveless gowns required bare underarms. Interestingly, legs didn’t really become a focus until around World War II, when rationing made stockings hard to come by and hairy legs suddenly became more noticeable.
But there’s another reason for women’s hair removal that scholars point to: gender roles. After all, men are generally hairier than women, and culturally, the opposite of masculine is feminine. It’s no coincidence that this hair-removal craze happened right around the time that many other gender rules were being broken: women were getting the vote and wearing less constricting clothing. Some say hair removal was a reaction to this breakdown in the gender binary. But whatever the reason, by the 1960s, 98 percent of women removed at least some body hair. But that might be changing. Celebrities, fashion ads, and even hair-removal brands have started putting women’s body hair back in the spotlight to stress that women can choose their own grooming habits. The tide may be turning. Thanks for your question, Arjun!
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week,
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Ashley Hamer, Cameron Duke, and Kelsey Donk, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!