“My ego’s not really the enemy,” Bono confides on the new U2 album. “It’s like a small child crossing an eight-lane highway/On a voyage of discovery.” Eight lanes? Keep counting, boyo. All over this record, he paves whole new interstates of ego, with exit ramps darting in and out of every verse, and that’s exactly how it should be. The days are gone when U2 were trying to keep it simple—at this point, the lads have realized that over-the-top romantic grandiosity is the style that suits them, so they come on like the cosmic guitar supplicants they were born to be. No Line on the Horizon is U2’s third killer in a row—by now, it’s bizarre to remember that just 10 years ago, everybody thought they were headed toward the dinosaur band tar pits. But ever since they went from midlife crisis to midlife rejuvenation, with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, they’ve been on a roll.

Michael Jackson may have been more prescient than he realized when he wrote the lyrics to the global "feel-good" song, We Are the World.

New research recognizes that people from vastly different cultures and heritages respond to the same happy, sad and scared emotions in unfamiliar music.

This suggests the universality of emotions in music and may help explain why Western music has been adopted so ubiquitously worldwide, said the authors, from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

"We know that our auditory system responds in distinctive ways to consonant and dissonant sounds, even when we're not actively listening to them," said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, physiology and otolaryngology at Northwestern University in Chicago. "It's fascinating how our sensory systems have evolved to respond effectively to sounds that signal what's important, such as emotional meaning."

The power of music: THE MUSIC INSTINCT: SCIENCE AND SONG provides a ground-breaking exploration into how and why the human organism and the whole ebb and flow of the cosmos is moved by the undeniable effect of music. This follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians to the crossroads of science and culture in search of answers to music s deep mysteries. Featuring: Bobby McFerrin & Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music.  YoYo Ma also appears in the series.