Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music and the O2 Facet

Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music asks why a species that could have gotten by on speech alone spends so much of its life making and craving music. A neuroscientist who was a session musician first, Levitin treats the pull toward music as a real feature of the mind, not a frill. Part of his answer is that music does something words cannot. In an interview he explains: "Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it." In the Big Five, how strongly that pull runs in you is one facet.

The pull to music is Artistic Interests

The facet is Artistic Interests (O2), under Openness, the sensitivity to beauty and the readiness to be moved by art and music. A high scorer gets chills from a chord change and feels a room shift when the right song comes on; a low scorer can take music or leave it and rarely gets swept up. Levitin's science puts a mechanism under that difference: the chills are real, a dopamine response the brain fires at a piece's emotional peaks. High O2 is a nervous system tuned to catch those peaks, which is why for some people a playlist is furniture and for others it is a lifeline.

Levitin's other move is to treat music as social glue, not solo entertainment. We do not just consume it, we make it at each other, and he thinks that is the point. As he puts it, "That's why we sing to each other, play music for each other, and listen in return. Music communicates emotion more directly." That reframes O2 as more than private taste. A high-O2 person is often the one who sends the song and cares which music plays at the wedding, because for them a shared aesthetic experience is a way of saying something that plain words flatten. The facet is aesthetic and, quietly, relational.

We break the facet down on its own in Artistic Interests (O2), and the wider imaginative side of Openness in Imagination (O1). If your O2 runs high, Levitin explains why a song can wreck you in the parking lot and why silence at dinner feels wrong. If it runs low, the book is a decent tour of what the music people are actually getting, and why they will never quite manage to explain it to you.

Read the book: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations