dan: My doctoral thesis was concerned with the origins of the distinction between consonants and dissonance. I looked at auditory short-term memory and as we talked about earlier all it did was deepen the mystery so unusual things cause our brains to hang on to them a little bit longer in some cases because we need to figure out what was that. If that happens too often it becomes aversive that music just becomes too novel too cognitively taxing but if it can happen once or twice in the course of a a nice pop song you're intrigued and interested enough, he says. Dan: Susan manages to be very rigorous and accurate with the science but in a way that doesn't make it seem