• "So have you ever noticed that music was better in the past? Culture writers love to remind you of this fact by comparing the modern drivel that is pop music these days to the great song writers like for example The Beatles. But culture writers have been singing the same song for quite some time now...
• The Beatles in their day were absolutely panned by the cultural elite...
• A generation earlier, jazz music--the music that was popular with the youth of that era--received an even more punishing appraisal...
• You'd be hard pressed to find anybody who shared these opinions now. We don't typically think of The Beatles and jazz music as having a particularly degenerative effect on today's youth. Why might that be? That these forms of music somehow get better over the past century? Or is there something else at play?
• It turns out that your taste in music as an adult is not fully governed by objective qualities in the music itself, rather it's heavily governed by your biographic information: who you are, where you were born, and most interestingly, when in your life you first heard the music you now like.
• Neuroscience has confirmed what data analysis has found: the music that we like in our youth, we like for life.
  • 'Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes... pubertal growth hormones make everything we're experiencing, including music, seem very important, we're just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we're developing our own tastes and musical tastes become a badge of identity.' (Daniel Levitin, "This is Your Brain on Music)
• ...All music is for 13-year old morons. That's when music is the best... There are patterns of dopamine released in our brains that are a reward to listening to music. The same way our brain chemically rewards us for eating, for exercising, and for taking psychoactive drugs.
• An emotional response to music can be accompanied by the same chemicals the brain releases as a response to cocaine. As a young adult experiencing music for the first time, you're experiencing the same chemical reactions in the brain as when you take party drugs.
• Does that mean our taste in music as adults is completely fixed? Well, not really. I discover new music all the time that I find quite exhilarating. But it is different.
• Also, the music that we connect to in our teenage years doesn't actually need to be popular at the time. Psychologists call this the 'reminiscence bump,' our tendency to recall when cultural tastes are encoded in our memory usually within adolescence and usually testing everything in a positive light.
  • '...we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to 'tag' the memories as something important.' (Levitin)
• In other words, it's easier to remember the first time you had a powerful and emotional experience with music than say the 30th time. Your taste follows the first time your brain had a hit of dopamine.
• These cases run deep. Very deep. Deeper than our conscious brain can even go. Elderly patients with dementia and alzheimer's who are typically unresponsive will suddenly come alive when they hear the music of their youth, singing and humming along to the music... Jazz music, the music that these patients listened to in their youth, quickens them. When they were in their adolescence, jazz music ultimately gave them their sense of self and sense of identity, their sense of humanity. The very same jazz music that Lady's Home Journal of 1922 blamed for "its evil influence on the youth of today" is the music that is bringing back certain people from darkness.
• So the next time you read a think piece about how kids these days listen to terrible music and how it's corrupting the youth, try contextualizing that language with the language that other writers have written about other styles of music in the past.
• You might not like pop music, I might not like pop music, but if the music is getting people in touch with their sense of self and their sense of humanity, that is, I think, a net good thing."

- Adam Neely