Larry Sherman

speaker

178 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Larry Sherman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · How Slowing Down Makes Life Better & Why Every Brain Needs Music · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

And in fact, what's funny is we talk about always wanting to be happy.

But in reality, we seek out sad songs.

And this has to do, there's all sorts of ideas about why this is true.

But it turns out that one of the ideas that we look for sad songs is,

We want to have that catharsis.

We want to have that experience of sadness or loss without actually going through the actual loss or sadness.

And that actually gives us a sense of reward because we're actually going through this process, especially if it's an empathetic type of thing.

So if we're hearing a song about someone who's lost their lover, we feel for that person and we feel that empathy for them.

And empathy actually drives reward signaling in our brains.

And so there's this idea that we

in going through the sadness that's being expressed by this person in this song, we're actually expressing empathy and rewarding ourselves for expressing empathy, and that wants us to do it again.

So sad songs, we seek them out all the time, and they can make us feel sad.

They can actually make us, like you say, drive us to tears.

And of course, the opposite is also true.

We can be in a really bad mood and walk into a room and hear upbeat music, and it'll really change our mood.

I've heard so many stories about people who were suffering from

you know, sort of low level of depression and music really changed things for them.

It has a lot to do with what you're exposed to, especially during that adolescence period I mentioned.

So if you have a peer group that's listening to hip hop, for example, you're going to probably listen to hip hop because they think it's cool and you think they're cool and you want to be with them.

And so you'll develop this preference for hip hop.

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