The Mind and Brain in Popular, and Not-So-Popular, Music (Blitz)

Because I’m sure some readers of this blog like to keep reflecting about neuroscience and psychology even when they’re too tired to keep reading books, articles, and blog posts, I thought I’d offer a list of some relaxing (and in some cases, not so relaxing) music that touches on this theme, so that those who are interested can tide themselves over until the caffeine kicks in.  Since most of the songs in the list are from my own music library, it has a strong eighties college radio bias.  But I’d be happy to take any recommendations you’re willing to offer from other eras – and musical styles – in the comments section.

 

 

REFERENCES TO BRAIN ANATOMY

Robyn Hitchcock – The Abandoned Brain (“The wind blows hard on the abandoned brain, but there’s nobody thinking at all.  The hypothalamus is open to the rain and the leaves sweep into the hall”).

Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker (USS) – Drop Around the Clock (“We’re dopamine fiends.  Studies show geniuses pick green.  So chlorophyll me upstream . . .Dirty Shirley.  Knockin’ on the membranes of reptile brains like Mr. Furley . . . We drop like Merck Corp. stocks.  Thalamus gets outlined with chalk.”).

(There’s also this musical animation on brain anatomy from Pinky and the Brain).

 

NEUROSURGERY

Baby Astronauts – Brain Surgeon (“You could be anything I want. With a twist.  With a change of thoughts.  I’m removing little parts of your brain, that you don’t need.”).

Pink Floyd – Brain Damage (“You raise the blade, you make the change.  You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane. You lock the door.  And throw away the key.  There's someone in my head but it's not me.”). 

King Crimson – Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man (“Neurosurgeons scream for more”).

Emerson, Lake and Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery [This is an album and song title].

Therapy? – Auto Surgery (“I can feel your fingers, feel your fingers, in my head.  Going through the wreckage, through the wreckage of my thoughts.”).

 

 

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM AND THE NATURE OF THE SELF

Death Cab for Cutie – Soul Meets Body (“I want to be where soul meets body.”).

The Chills – Bee Bah Bee Bah Bee Boe (“You’d think self-discovery.  Is really rather easy.  I mean I’m standing right here.  But the real real me.  Was never very clear.”).

The Pixies – Where is my Mind? (“Where is my mind?  Where is my mind?”).

The Who – Who Are You? (“Who are you?   Who, who, who, who?”).

Andrew Bird – A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left (“We had survived to turn on The History Channel.  And ask our esteemed panel: Why are we alive? And here’s how they replied: You’re what happens when two substances collide.  And by all accounts you really should have died . . . It’s a nervous tic motion of the head to the left.”).

Sonic Youth – Stereo Sanctity (“Your spirit is time-reversed to your body.  Stereographic mix-up, field on field.  It starts growing up the day your body dies.  Only apparently real to irreal.”).

 

 

THERAPY AND ENHANCEMENT

Peter Gabriel – Digging in the Dirt (“Something in me.  Dark and sticky.  All the time it’s getting strong . . . Digging in the dirt.  To find the places I got hurt.”).

Morphine – Cure for Pain (“Someday, there’ll be a cure for pain.  That’s the day I’ll throw my drugs away.”).

 

 

MEMORY-DAMPENING (AND RETRIEVAL)

(In true Elliott Smith fashion, the last sentence of the first example below is simultaneously about banishing painful memories and preserving them).

Elliott Smith  -- Between the Bars (“I’ll make you OK and drive them away, the images stuck in your head.  The people you’ve been before that you don’t want around anymore.  They push and shove and won’t bend to your will.  I’ll keep them still.”).

Elliott Smith – Sweet Adeline (“Cut this picture into you and me.  Burn it backwards.  Kill this history.  Make it over.  Make it Stay Away.  Or hate’ll say the ending that love started to say.”).

The Buzzcocks – Who’ll Help Me Forget (“But there is a question.  That’s still unanswered yet.  Who’ll help me forget?”).

Jethro Tull – First Snow on Brooklyn (“Some things are best forgotten.  Some are  better half-remembered.”).

Fall Out Boy – Thnks for th Mmrs (“This crystal ball.  It’s always cloudy except for.  When you look into the past . . . Thanks for the memories. Thanks for the memories.  Even though they weren’t so great.”). 

Midnight Oil – Short Memory (“Short memory, must have a short memory”).

Andrew Lloyd Weber, T.S. Eliot – Memory (“I remember the time I knew what happiness was.  Let the memory live again.”)

Jethro Tull, Living in the Past (“Oh, we won’t give in.  Let’s go living in the past.”)

 

 

SKEPTICISM ABOUT COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT, PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC INTERVENTION

Rolling Stones – Mother’s Little Helper (“Mother needs something today to calm her down.  And though she’s not really ill.  There’s a little yellow pill.  She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper.”).

Lagwagon – No Little Pill (“Think about it.  Think about it.  The world defines you.  Think about it.  Think about it all.  You should be depressed.  And no little pill will make any difference.”).

Thomas Dolby – Hyperactive (“At the tender age of three, I was hooked to a machine.  Just to keep my mouth from spouting junk.”). 

Lou Reed – Kill Your Sons (“All your two-bit psychiatrists are giving you electroshock.”). 

Sting  - Straight to My Heart (“Well in a hundred years from now.  They will attempt to tell us how.  A scientific means to bliss.  Will supercede the human kiss. A subatomic chain.  Will maybe galvanize your brain.  A biochemical trance.  Will eliminate romance”).

The Who - 905 (“In suspended animation.  My childhood passed me by.  If I speak without emotion.  Then you know the reason why.  Knowledge of the universe was fed into my mind.  As my adolescent body.  Left its puberty behind.”).

The Loud Family – Backward Century (“My brain will be fed nice thoughts and I won’t care.  What goes on outside my ten foot bio-cube”).

 

 

HUMILITY ABOUT SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Robyn Hitchcock – Cathedral (“Do you wonder like I do.  What goes in on inside of you.  In the cathedral of the mind, all the worshippers are blind . . . Every moment wanders past and fades away.  Then comes back another day.  Do I go or do I stay inside your mind?”).

Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker (USS) – Stranger to Myself (“With mace I go.  Where I know.  Thoughts I hide.  Reside. . . . .Sometimes I feel like a stranger to myself.”)

The Velvet Underground – What Goes On (“What goes on in your mind?”).

Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Michael LeGrande – Windmills of Your Mind (“Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own.  Down a hollow to a cavern.  Where the sun has never shone.  Like a door that keeps revolving.  In a half-forgotten dream.  . . Whirling silently in space.  Like the circles that you find.  In the windmills of your mind.”).

 

 

THE BRAIN AND SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker (USS) – Neurochemical Warfare Gas Masquerade  (“Neurochemical Warfare Gas Masquerade. Psychological warfare a-backwards maze.  Like an objective source that's too right to change”).

Husker Du – Terms of Psychic Warfare (“You occupied my space and you occupied your mind.  By jumping off the roof to the first conclusion you can find . . . It's sad but the means they just don't justify the ends.  To be forever haunted by the ghosts of all your friends.”).

Wire – Two People in a Room (“Two people in a room.  Facial movements betray.  A private display.  Of nervous disorder.”).

The Rolling Stones – Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown (“On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind.  But after awhile I realized you were disarranging mine  . . . Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown.”).

The Chills – Party in My Heart  (“I held a party in my brain.  Nobody else came.  I nearly threw my life away hoping that they’d drop by.”).

 

 

CONFORMITY, AUTONOMY AND PSYCHOLOGY

The Clean – Slug Song (“Don’t ever change.  Or rearrange your mind.”).

Peter Gabriel – We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37) (“We Do What We’re Told”).

Andrew Bird – Measuring Cups (“Get out your measuring cups.  And we’ll play a new game.  Come to the front of the class and we’ll measure your brain.  We’ll give you a complex and we’ll give it a name.”).

 

 

FEAR OF SUBLIMINAL ADVERTISING

Roger Miller (The Mission of Burma member, not the country singer) – Groping Hands (“The government controlled him a little, and the companies a little more, the rules of social conduct and the products at the store.”).

The Saints – Know Your Product (“Cheap advertising, you're lying.  Never gonna get me what I want.  I said, smooth talking, brain washing.  Ain't never gonna get me what I need”).

Duran Duran – Too Much Information (“The pressure’s on the screen.  To sell you things that you don’t need.  It’s too much information.”).

 

 

A FEW MORE MISCELLANEOUS LYRICS

Elliott Smith – Needle in the Hay (“Walk.  Walk. Walk.  Four more blocks.  Plus the one in my brain.”).

Olivia Tremor Control – A Peculiar Noise Called Train Director (“In the blink of eye, you get several meanings . . . a waterfall fell on an optical atlas.  What was remains the same.  It took up residence with a peculiar noise called “train director”).

Robyn Hitchcock – Uncorrected Personality Traits (“Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child may prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult”).

Robyn Hitchcock – Sounds Great When You’re Dead (“never in your consciousness but always in your head”).

The Flaming Lips – Guy Who Got a Headache and Accidentally Saved the World (“Thinking that his head surely would explode.  His thoughts go deeper than ever. Something never dreamed in all the science books. The biggest light switch gets turned on. And he's on the way to a real first in all the universe. He saves the day and the world knows, the sonic boom explodes. Hesitant to tell the real reason, the Nobel Prize is given. It's hard to celebrate with a headache.”).

Shriekback (“In a jungle of the senses.  Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper.  But you know that pleasure is not that simple.  Very little fruit is forbidden.”).

Ed Kuepper – Car Headlight (“I’m well past it.  My brain’s plastered like a cane toad. ... The old days don’t give answers.”).

The Scarecrow – If I Only Had a Brain (“And my head I’d be scratchin’  While my thoughts were busy hatchin’.  If I only had a brain”) (music by E.H. Harburg. Lyrics by Harold Arlen).

 

 

Comments

[Martha J. Farah]

Thank you, Marc! I look forward to listening to some of these. Bring your iPod to Philly with you and you can be the official DJ of the Neuroscience Boot Camp!

More songs for your neuroethics playlist can be found in the albums of the NYC-based rock band, the Amygdaloids -- see http://www.amygdaloids.net/index.html

Martha

[Marc Blitz]

Thanks Martha! I'll be happy to act as official DJ, and to share that job with anybody who would prefer not to have the program monopolized by my musical tastes. I've learned after many years of making music mixes for others, that even songs I'm convinced are undeniably the best songs ever written sometimes mysteriously don't sound as good to other people as they do to me. I'm hoping some of the neuroscience research we review at the Boot Camp can help me better understand why that is.

Thanks also for letting me know about The Amygdaloids. My 6 year old daughter wants to be both a neurobiologist and an artist (recording and otherwise) when she grows up, so that band can serve as a terrific role model for her.

[Aleksandra]

Thank you for this post! Just quick thoughts:

Green Day "Basket Case" (Melodramatic fools. Neurotic to the bone... I went to a shrink To analyze my dreams...Am I just paranoid? Or I'm just stoned)

and not so "pop" but AMAZING: Michael Nyman's opera version of The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat.