Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music and musical cognition, and dispense a few myths about music along the way.
" />
Scientific Studies of People's Relationship to Music
Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music and musical cognition, and dispense a few myths about music along the way.
" />
Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music and musical cognition, and dispense a few myths about music along the way.
Scientific Studies of People's Relationship to Music
<p><a href="http://s.mehr.cz/">Samuel Mehr</a> joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music and musical cognition, and dispense a few myths about music along the way.</p> <p>Some of Sam's work discussed in this episode include <a href= "https://drive.google.com/a/datascience.com/file/d/0B37emGJjrWcfR2dYZDVtRVlXOUk/view"> Music in the Home: New Evidence for an Intergenerational Link</a>,<a href= "https://drive.google.com/a/datascience.com/file/d/0B37emGJjrWcfS3F5NTZBNGhUTFU/view">Two randomized trials provide no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment</a>, and <a href= "http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00988/full"> Miscommunication of science: music cognition research in the popular press</a>. Additional topics we discussed are also covered in a Harvard Gazette article featuring Sam titled <a href= "http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/12/muting-the-mozart-effect/"> Muting the Mozart effect</a>.</p> <p>You can follow Sam on twitter via <a href= "https://twitter.com/samuelmehr">@samuelmehr</a>.</p>
Guest
Samuel Mehr: Samuel Mehr joined the Department of Psychology in 2010, where over the years he has been a temp, a research assistant, a graduate student, briefly a postdoc, and from 2017-2022 a Faculty Research Associate funded by the NIH Director's Early Independence Award and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. Mehr’s research draws on ideas and tools from cognitive and developmental psychology, data science, and evolutionary anthropology, to ask what music is, how music works, and why music exists. He directs The Music Lab, an international research group focusing on the psychology of music. In 2022 the lab moved from Harvard to the University of Auckland (New Zealand), with a sister site at the Yale Child Study Center (New Haven). Please visit https://themusiclab.org for information about how to get involved.