Welcome to Psychology and Pop Culture. In this series, I discuss psychology matters in relation to aspects in pop culture. To me, this is as a preparation for the Master’s I am going to follow next academic year, but I hope this can teach you something too. I have already studied a few core topics in psychology; those will be left out. What will be discussed is related to development, memory, emotions and perceptions. Today’s post is about sensation and perception in Happier than Ever, a song on Billie Eilish’s new album. Enjoy!
Case: Happier than Ever
Billie Eilish’s new album is definitely a special auditory experience. She and her brother are always experimenting with different sounds, and I think the song Happier than Ever, is the most interesting to discuss in this post. The first part gives the listener relaxing vibes; Billie uses her voice in the familiar, soft way, with an acoustic guitar playing in the background. In the middle the song transitions to rock, with drums and electric guitars, and she sings louder.
From stimulation, to sensation, to perception
Sensation is defined as “the process by which a stimulated receptor (such as the eyes or ears) creates a pattern of neural messages that represent the stimulus in the brain, giving rise to our initial experience of the stimulus.” (Zimbardo et al., 2009, pp. 288).
From stimulation to sensation
The first step from stimulation to sensation is transduction. Information about the stimulus is transformed by sensory receptors. The sense organ detects the stimulus with neurons – receptors – which convert the stimulus into nerve signals, so the brain can understand the information. This is mostly about frequency and amplitude of the stimulus. These signals are sent to specialized sensory processing areas in the brain, which then in turn obtains the necessary information from it, like colour and brightness, pitch, loudness and timbre, smell, taste, sensation, position of the body and pain. Sometimes sensory domains work together. People with synaesthesia for example, can hear colour or taste sounds. Close sensory areas in the area communicate and create this effect. Another example is gate-control theory; pain can be forgotten by competing sensations.
This process goes so quick, that we don’t realize that what we sense isn’t actually reality; it’s what our brain made of reality. That’s why sometimes can’t detect everything; we have a threshold. This threshold differs from person to person, and depends on our mental and physical condition. It also depends on what is called Weber’s law. The size of the difference we notice is connected to the intensity of the stimulus. How well you receive a stimulus, also depends on other stimuli. If there’s a lot going on in the background, you might not detect a signal. We might not also notice one if we adapt to the stimulation.
Take Happier than Ever. The first time I listened to the song, I was working. I wasn’t wearing headphones, and there were people talking in the hallway. I couldn’t turn up the volume. The first part of the song I only heard Billie’s voice, very softly. I wasn’t able to detect the guitar in the background. A few days later I listened to it again, now with headphones on. The volume had to be turned up a bit more than usual, scaring me to death when the second part of the song came. All of a sudden I had to turn the volume down by a lot. This time the song was more enjoyable, because I detected more sounds.
From sensation and perception
We go from stimulation, to sensing it, to perceiving it. When we are stimulated, we don’t consciously notice it yet. When we sense something, we know it’s there. When we perceive a sensation, we give it a meaning and organize it. A sensation is processed top-down or bottom-up. Both impact the way we perceive. Top-down is when the perceiver’s past experience, knowledge, expectations and culture can influence the interpretation. Perceptual constancy is part of this process. When you see an object in a different context – a different angle or light – the brain corrects for distortion. Change blindness is also a very strange phenomenon. Changes that are expected are noticed more easily than characteristics we never focused on. Bottom-up processing is when the stimulus has striking characteristics and impacts our perception.
Hearing Billie Eilish all of a sudden in the context of a rock song – the second part – might be weird. She stops her usual whispering, but due to the context, we still hear that it’s Billie’s voice; the brain corrects for this change. Perhaps if we walk into a store and the second part is already playing in the background, it might be more difficult to recognize.
Perceptual misinterpretation happens often, which creates illusions. Missing information, incorrectly combined features or unclear context can all lead to this experience. How this works is usually studied with ambiguous figures. These are patterns that can be interpreted in various ways, due to either top-down or bottom-up processing. It’s difficult to know when you’re hearing an illusion when you’re unaware, so this video gives a different example:
You expect to hear what you read, so you actually hear what you read. Without any of these sentences you might have trouble understanding what the crowd is saying.
The final two principles in this post are Gestalt theory and Learning-based inference. The first explains that the brain connects individual features to create a pattern or a perceptual whole. This is to organize all the information to make it comprehensible. A figure – the pattern – grabs our attention, while the ground is the background of the figure. When a figure is objectively incomplete, the mind tends to complete it anyways – closure. The laws of perceptual grouping are laws that explain that the brain groups elements based on similarity, proximity, continuity and common fate (moving together). When you hear the second part of Billie’s song, all the instruments and background singing combine to give it a rock sound. You don’t focus on just the guitar, drums, voice, or individual notes, but everything.
The latter – learning-based inference – emphasizes how people use prior learning to interpret new sensory information. These are interpretations though; we need context, expectations and a perceptual set to make it accurate. If you’ve played the guitar since you were a child, you will hear the guitar clearer than the voice for example. I also needed to see the video belonging to the song, to hear Billie scream in the end. I hadn’t noticed it before.
Our bodies transform stimuli into neural signals, so the brain can understand them. How accurate we sense something, depends on our varying threshold, which is impacted by background stimulation, expectancy, and our own personal condition. How we perceive the sensation is an interpretation; sometimes confusing features lead to illusions. The brain has to connect all information with context and our individual experiences, to create an accurate perception.
References
Zimbardo, P.G., Johnson, R.L. & McCann, V. (2009). Psychology – Core Concepts, 6/e. Pearson Education, Inc.
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