Studies have shown that some musical pieces may preferentially activate reward centers in the brain. Less is known, however, about the structural aspects of music that are associated with this activation. Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected ev...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effect of "Seguro Popular" (SP) on the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure in the medium term. MATERIAL AND METHODS We used the 'Encuesta de Evaluación del SP' --SP Survey Evaluation-- (2005-2008). We analyzed the SP effect on the rural cohort during two years of follow-up (2006 and 2008) and in the urban coho...

The intentionally ambiguous expression “Popular Music Browser” reflects the two main goals of this project, which started in 1998, at Sony CSL laboratory. First, we are interested in human-centered issues related to browsing “Popular Music”. Popular here means that the music accessed to is widely distributed, and known to many listeners. Second, we consider “popular browsing” of music, i.e. mak...

different research and theoretical approaches have been adopted in the study of the space of music production. the space of production and consumption of culture in iran as a country in transition is diverse and heterogeneous. such a diversity and heterogeneity in itself causes problems for this space. the problem of this space, which in this research work has been defined as a small social spa...

To test the hypothesis that pleasure from artistic music is intellectual while that from popular music is physiological, this study investigated the different functional mechanisms between aesthetic appreciation of artistic and popular music using fMRI. 18 male non-musicians were scanned while they performed an aesthetic rating task for excerpts of artistic music, popular music and musical note...