"This Is Your Brain on Music"
Salon has an interesting review about This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. It examines how our ears hear and the various parts of our brain process sound, why certain music becomes pleasurable to us by evoking strong emotions and memories, why we’re more open to hearing new music as teenagers, the catchy phenomenon of ‘earworms’, the possible roles of music in hour evolutionary history and more:
We all have music like this, music that burns into the soul when we’re young and remains essential for the rest of time […] there’s a tape or record or CD that once knocked you out with a force that, cheesy as it is to remember, felt like true love. Put on one of those songs now and, if it’s been a long time, the effect is like an old movie; the scenes play back for you in entire exhilarating reels. What’s happening when music captures you in this way deserves some scrutiny. You may feel like the songs are grabbing your heart, but what’s actually going on is in your head. There, says Daniel J. Levitin in his new book “This Is Your Brain on Music,” an “exquisite orchestration of brain regions” are engaged in a “precision choreography of neurochemical uptake and release.” Why human beings make and enjoy music is, in Levitin’s telling, a delicious story of evolution, anatomy, perception and computation — a story that’s all the more thrilling when you consider its result, the joy of living in a world filled with music. Link
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