Music, oxytocin, starchildren

I recently learned why musicians get laid effortlessly: music causes the release of oxytocin. This effectively lowers a girl’s slut defenses in the presence of a musician, because he has previously produced the same pair-bond feeling in her as a longtime boyfriend or husband. Plus status for increased sexiness, but the pickup process has already effectively progressed beyond the comfort stage.

This also explains the sense of egoism that seems so inseparable from music performance- it is the intuitive understanding (whether conscious or unconscious) that you hold the audience’s heartstrings. You are the nexus of many pair-bond affections, effectively giving control of the audience with love rather than fear. (After all, men also have oxytocin, they are merely less influenced by pair-bonding in the main.)

Music performance can also be a cause for humility, because it’s really hard to sound good, and at public recitals we often learn (to our horror) that we aren’t as good as we thought we were. (In the case of some gifted individuals, this is not true. Hence a deeply embedded egoism, left as an exercise for the reader’s imagination.) But after a certain trial-by-fire period, you as the performer learn that you’re good enough that the common audience cannot recognize most of the mistakes you’re making.

The oxytocin connection explains most of people’s behaviors around “their” music, and around music in general. Food for thought on your next nature walk. Now I want to talk about starchildren.

The computational circuits within the temporal lobe are nearly inseparable from their basic function of auditory processing. It is essentially a specialized waveform analysis computer, just as the occiput is a specialized visual storage center. H/T podrag (I don’t think he’ll mind if I quote this):

Melons are socially skilled through experimentation and adaptation. With Starchildren it’s more about literally multi-dimensional wave form equations to map social interaction which is why they can do well in small groups: too many social variables and they stop being able to calculate on the spot. Thals are hormonal and socially digital almost, Starchildren are true social scientists: apriori complex simultaneous waveform equation solvers; whereas Melons are able to handle many variables because they are social ‘engineers’ rather than ‘scientists’. They map and plot and extrapolate and optimise based upon what they see going in and out… This type of calculation can handle large groups and good for sport, particularly team sports, especially in attacking roles where again there are many variables, but has drawbacks: local maxima i.e. getting stuck in and perpetuating ‘samsara’.

Not only is waveform analysis highly predictive for a low number of inputs (and low noise), it seems that starchildren are also the masters of oxytocin. Within their small group, they can foster a general feeling of mutual benevolence. Melons, on the other hand, are engineers at heart. A lifetime of social experimentation (with the intention of gaining social dominance) has taught them behaviors that work almost all of the time (confidence, loudness, assumed superiority)- but not in a small group containing a starchild. After a dominance display, a starchild needs only to point it out and say “this violates the general group spirit of mutual benevolence” (which he created over time) and the group will back him up because he’s obviously right (after all, they feel the oxytocin themselves). This is a very efficient way of counteracting a melon in a small group! I think thals could actually emulate this in some cases.

This vibrational awareness of sorts also means a starchild on the offensive can deliver some extremely powerful social put-downs, because they are custom-made for the individual and the social scene. Sensitive about the middling status of your alma mater? He’ll hit that with a laser-guided bunker buster. In contrast, a melon (in a pinch) will attack common weaknesses that might not work on uncommon individuals (Ex: “Your job is low-status.”) or in certain social situations, but the funny thing is that this will always work in a large group setting. Sure, you may not care that your alma mater was a mere state university, but the crowd is laughing so hard people are rolling out of their seats. Therefore, you lose.

Last thought on socionics: I think that the conservative swing of the pendulum is going to be very beneficial for starchildren, a lot of whom will probably end up in the Catholic clergy. I don’t think they are generally the child-buggering type either; the association between goblin-like heads and pedophilia seems to be mostly a cultural smear campaign by melons (don’t get me wrong, something is rotten at the Vatican, but it’s not SCs at the moment).

Now, returning to music for a moment, it’s not surprising that starchildren tend to be highly skilled in this area. Sir Anthony Hopkins- starchild exemplar renowned both for his extraordinary skills in memorization and natural-sounding recitation (a starchild, reciting trivia from memory, will never seem like the act of remembering was anything but extremely easy)- is also a classical composer of considerable skill. Holy shit, was that even a sentence. Max Planck, genius of vibration physics, was a gifted performer (piano, organ, cello, voice) and composed some songs and operas as well.

I don’t think the temporal alone can endow a person with musical intelligence. There is a small amount of science to it (parietal), art (occiput), mechanical skill in performance (occiput and cerebellum), and pretty much everything requires the frontal lobe and a good dose of white matter. Right now, I’d guess that the most important areas are the temporal, the occipital, and the cerebrospinal, in decreasing order.