Remembering Prof. David Huron

The ever-smiling David Huron, an intellectual giant that walked amongst humans pretending to be an alien.

I received sad news about Prof. David Huron's passing yesterday. My one-on-one meetings with David at The Ohio State University were among the happiest and most intellectually stimulating of my life. Let me backtrack a bit. 

When I was in my final year of physics studies at IIT Kanpur, I had grown a bit disillusioned with how we were taught science and engineering and had gradually lost interest in pursuing research in physics. At around the same time, I had developed a serious interest in cognitive science through taking courses with another important mentor in my life, Achla Raina. Due to my serious interest in music as an amateur pianist, I considered doing a PhD in music cognition. Since I didn't know where to start, I decided to cold-email a bunch of eminent music cognition researchers. David was one of them, and he responded with the advice to opt for a more traditional psychology PhD because of the dearth of jobs in music cognition. As fortune would have it, I got into OSU, and alongside my main research on human memory, I started attending David's lab meetings and journal clubs. I also took a course on evolutionary psychology with him. Since I wanted to work on a research project with him, he invited me to go talk to him once a week.

 These individual meetings were electrifying. While my main PhD mentors taught me various technicalities of doing research and computational analyses, which were also extremely important for my growth as a researcher, David was different. He would casually drop in nuggets of wisdom during our chats. For example, he told me very early about the importance of "productive leisure." He said that he would prefer to not hear from me that I worked 9 am to 9 pm like some grad students. Being at a desk for 12 hours, he said, was not the same as being intellectually productive. He shared with me how his most insightful ideas occurred to him on long walks. He read extensively and walked to think. While he walked, he said that he would observe people. He would imagine that he was an alien walking amongst humans and that he didn't understand the language. He would try to figure out human behavior from such an "alien perspective." 

David talked extensively about oxytocin and prolactin. He wondered why sad music was not always an unpleasant experience. Why would one find sad music pleasurable? I was one of them. I preferred darker and sadder music to cheerful music. Even though I was just a naive grad student, I think he used every opportunity to sharpen his ideas through dialogue, often by explaining them to novices like me. You can find his initial ideas on prolactin here but he was a scientist of the higher order and put his theory to rigorous tests and concluded that he was wrong about prolactin-driven dopamine release as an explanation for why sad music is pleasurable for some. Read his very strong statement against his own theory here. 

At other times, David would growl, hiss, laugh like a madman, wail, and sob, all to demonstrate the various features of emotional displays to me, accompanied by some very unique takes on why these displays came to be. He had developed some ideas based on ethology: the study of animal behavior. His framework was specifically derived from the ethological theory of signals in animal communication. Together, we decided to develop some testable hypotheses to test his ethological framework to understand human emotional display, as evolutionary theories are usually verbal and tend not to be falsifiable. David is the first person I know to advocate preregistration (way before it was cool), but informally within the lab. He was of the opinion that we needed to write a paper before we collected data because writing forces us to be precise with our ideas. So we met every week. He would either type and look at me for approval, or he would let me narrate (especially the sections on survey design and proposed analyses). Over a few semesters of doing this, we wrote what is now known as a preregistration, but OSF or other registries didn't exist back then or perhaps had just been introduced (around 2013). So these drafts remained in our email inboxes. 

After 2013, my main PhD work took over, and I couldn't really continue to work on the ethology project, though I collected some preliminary data for it. David didn't mind. He would occasionally send over a student, and I would show them how to design and run surveys on Qualtrics, but that was the extent of our collaboration at that point. I would email him once every few years to share different milestones (PhD defense, postdoc, faculty position), and he would respond with a congratulatory note, but these email responses usually also came with PDFs of book drafts he was working on. He had retained his childlike excitement about music cognition even after retirement. 

Now, I had always wanted to complete our collaborative work on testing David's ethological framework for human emotional displays. So when I got a faculty position and found students who were interested and skilled enough to take on this somewhat complex project with several moving parts, I emailed David again in 2023 and told him how much I had enjoyed my interactions with him, how his mentorship had impacted me in a positive way, and that I wanted to complete our project. He responded: 

Very nice to hear from you. I too have fond memories of our conversations -- now over a decade ago. I'm delighted that you have secured a faculty position and are continuing with your career. 

With regard to an ethological approach to the study of emotions, you might be interested in my latest book (PDF attached) entitled "The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion." It will be published in the early autumn this year by MIT Press. There is a follow-up book I hope to complete over the next year that applies the theory to the enjoyment of sad music. That book is tentatively entitled "The Science of Sorrowful Sounds: Music, Grief, Melancholy, and Nostalgia.

In the same email, however, he shared with me that he had an incurable neuropathy disease but that he still wrote as he could. I knew time was running out, but it still took us a few years to develop our ideas to a point where both my students and I were satisfied.  So unfortunately, we never got to let David know the progress we made on it. We have now preregistered 2 out of 5 studies that make up this complex project and have started data collection for them. The remaining 3 are contingent on the first two and will be preregistered too, but after the first two studies are completed. 

While I had hoped to send him the completed work to ask for his permission to include him as a co-author, that will unfortunately not be possible now. I have our email records that I intend to use to ask the journal as well as David's closest collaborators if it would be appropriate for us to include him as a posthumous co-author on this, as he was actively involved not only in generating the ideas but also in drafting the earliest version of the manuscript.

Thank you, David, for your incredible mentorship, even though I spent only a few years with you and your research group. You left an indelible mark on my intellectual makeup. Your scholarly work will continue to inspire generations of music cognition researchers. Yours was a life well lived, marked by the positive impact you had on so many younger researchers and students. Thank you!