From: litewave99@gmail.com   
      
   So, according to Glenn Schellenberg's research into Billboard's Top 40, in the   
   past few decades Americans have become more interested in minor-key/sad music,   
   which seems to activate the right hemisphere more.   
      
   Does this mean that the balance in American brains has been shifting to the   
   right hemisphere too? I am not sure.    
      
   On the one hand, people tend to listen to the kind of music that matches their   
   mood. This might indicate that American brains have indeed been shifting to   
   the right hemisphere and that's why they have come to appreciate   
   right-hemisphere music more. This    
   would contradict McGilchrist's claim that society, at least in the West and in   
   the past few decades, has been moving toward the left hemisphere. It might   
   actually fit the claim by Richard Tarnas, who wrote in his 1991 book "The   
   Passion of the Western    
   Mind" that the West had recently started to experience an emergence of   
   "femininity", by which he means things like ecological sensitivity, the   
   collapse of political and cultural barriers, reconnection with the body,   
   emotions, intuition and the    
   unconscious, and rising interest in esotericism, Eastern mysticism, shamanism   
   etc. - basically, right hemisphere concerns (although he doesn't mention brain   
   hemispheres).   
      
   On the other hand, what if American brains have been moving more to the left   
   hemisphere and they have been using the right hemisphere music as a way to   
   mitigate this imbalance? In the NPR article about Schellenberg, he says that   
   children like happy music    
   - fast and major-key. That's the kind of music that is supposed to stimulate   
   the left hemisphere, but children can hardly be characterized as left-brain   
   creatures. So maybe children are attracted to left-hemisphere music to   
   complement their general right-   
   hemisphere bias. Similarly, Americans might now be more attracted to   
   right-hemisphere music to complement their increased general left-hemisphere   
   bias.     
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)