Crazy musicians

The American Journal of Psychiatry features an article about Syd Barrett, via Mind Hacks. And here is a review of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn by one of my students.

Rosin's expensive, man!

Dave Munger took a different take on the Bell-busker incident, looking at the social phenomenon of paying buskers. He polled his readers on how often they would give at least $1 to a talented street performer. His results show a fairly generous public, even after factoring for a self-selecting population:

I think you can make a good case that these people are so ambivalent about street performers that they probably fall in the "never give money" camp. If you add these responses into the data and recalculate, Bell's theoretical earnings from 1079 passersby drops to $104.28, or an hourly rate of $138.70 -- not bad, but Bell may want to switch to domestic caviar, and he'll almost certainly have to pawn his $3.5 million Stradivarius.

Know me, know my music

Over at ScienceBlogs, Chris writes about two social psychologists who have studied the links between musical preference and personality type. Chris describes it very well, so I won't go into the details. I will quibble with the researchers' claims that music has not been studied by social psychologists. "Despite its prevalence in everyday life, however, the sound of music has remained mute within social and personality psychology."
Two major books dispute this claim:

I used both of these in my Psychology of Music class, which detail research similar to Rentfrow's and Gosling's.

There is an online test of this research that you can partake in. Here is My Music Personality, and here is Chris's top 10 list. I found this post via Dave Munger.