Product Description

A fascinating exploration of the relationship between music and the mind—and the role of melodies in shaping our lives

Whether you load your iPod with Bach or Bono, music has a significant role in your life—even if you never realized it. Why does music evoke such powerful moods? The answers are at last be- coming clear, thanks to revolutionary neuroscience and the emerging field of evolutionary psychology. Both a cutting-edge study and a tribute to the beauty of music itself, This Is Your Brain on Music unravels a host of mysteries that affect everything from pop culture to our understanding of human nature, including:
• Are our musical preferences shaped in utero?
• Is there a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music?
• What do PET scans and MRIs reveal about the brain’s response to music?
• Is musical pleasure different from other kinds of pleasure?

This Is Your Brain on Music explores cultures in which singing is considered an essential human function, patients who have a rare disorder that prevents them from making sense of music, and scientists studying why two people may not have the same definition of pitch. At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession. BACKCOVER: “I know Dan to have a deep musical knowledge and strong intellect combined with a warm spirit and a big heart. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music . . . He is a fine writer and has the ability to make difficult concepts very clear.”
—STEVIE WONDER

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56022 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it. Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he's reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music. Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin's snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Levitin's fascination with the mystery of music and the study of why it affects us so deeply is at the heart of this book. In a real sense, the author is a rock 'n' roll doctor, and in that guise dissects our relationship with music. He points out that bone flutes are among the oldest of human artifacts to have been found and takes readers on a tour of our bio-history. In this textbook for those who don't like textbooks, he discusses neurobiology, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, empirical philosophy, Gestalt psychology, memory theory, categorization theory, neurochemistry, and exemplar theory in relation to music theory and history in a manner that will draw in teens. A wonderful introduction to the science of one of the arts that make us human.–Will Marston, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
Everyone knows that music can calm a savage beast, rouse a marching platoon or move lovers to tears. But no one knows exactly how. Daniel Levitin, a professional musician, record producer and now neuroscientist at McGill University, explains the latest thinking into why tunes touch us so deeply. He also speculates about whether specific pathways have evolved in our brain for making and listening to music. Using brain imaging, Levitin has documented neural activation in people as they listen to music, revealing a novel cascade of excitation that begins in the auditory system and spreads to regions related to planning, expectation and language as well as arousal, pleasure, mood and rhythmic movement. "Music listening, performance and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identifi ed and involve nearly every neural subsystem," he notes. Music's effects on neurons are so distributed that in some cases stroke victims who can no longer decipher letters can still read music, and some impaired individuals who cannot button a sweater can nevertheless play the piano. Levitin describes new insights into these conditions as well as disorders that cause certain individuals to lack empathy, emotional perception and musicality. He and others suspect a cluster of genes may influence both outgoingness and music ability. He also posits that music promotes cognitive development. Not surprisingly, music reaches deep into the brain's most primitive structures—including our ancient "reptilian brain" tied to motivation, reward and emotion. Music elevates dopamine levels in the brain's mood and pleasure centers in ways similar to those triggered by narcotics and antidepressants. Levitin also explains how the neural underpinnings of auditory stimulation and mate selection reach far back in life's evolutionary scheme. Levitin has no agenda per se, although the book is a rebuttal of sorts to scientists who say music has served no purpose other than to pleasurably stimulate auditory nerve endings. He simply explains an emerging view about the coevolution of music and the brain. To tell his tale, Levitin engagingly weaves together strands of his own life as a professional musician (who dropped out of college to form a band) with those of his transformation into a neuroscientist. To revel in Ra vel's Boléro or Charlie Parker's Koko, he reminds us, is to stimulate the brain in a "choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems"—a ballet of brain regions "ex quisitely orchestrated."

Richard Lipkin

Customer Reviews

Engaging...
I absolutely love this book. It discusses all the parts of music that I have ever wondered about (being a musician myself.) I enjoyed this book so much because it's easy to read but also extremely engaging. David Levitin is so brilliant and intuitive. It's like having someone type out my exact thoughts and put them in a book.

Plenty of detail
The most striking feature of this book for me is that it blurs the line between music as an aesthetic experience & the study of the brain as a scientific exercise.

So while it does a great job of defining the various parameters we appreciate music by ( notes, pitch, timbre, meter etc), it also delves into the way memory is organized in the brain, how musical appreciation is connected to our emotions, what makes a great anything (10, 000 hours of practice, apparently) etc.

The chapter on memory is tiresome & is far too academic for general readership. The initial chapters on musical parameters is very helpful to somebody with no training on music. The connections to emotions, & the music we like are very interesting reads.

Overall, a more than moderately good book without being exceptional because of the insufficient sieving out of unnecessary detail.

Triviality masquerading as science
Think about earworms, you know, those tunes that you can't stop playing back in your head.

Now we'll play a little game. We'll take some ordinary English sentences but dress them up in smartypants neuroscience language. So instead of saying "in your head" you say "in your brain". And instead of saying "idea" you say "neural pathways representing a concept". You can probably make up your own rules for converting English to Neurospeak. "I have a headache" might become "a neural excitiation in my brain is causing the my pain sensors to represent pain in my cerebral area" or "I remember that book" might become "signals from my optic nerve are analysed and compared with prior stored representations of books until a match is found" and so on. Anyone can play, it's easy.

Dan Levitin knows how to play. Here's what he has to say on earworms: "Our best explanation is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in `playback mode'". Cute eh? But here's the weird thing. He doesn't realise this is just a game you can play with language. He thinks these are actually scientific explanations. In fact he spends 300 pages writing trivial things about music in Neurospeak, presenting it as science. It's like Moliere's joke about explaining how opium works by saying it has "soporific virtue".

It's not completely content-free however. For example he has a quote from Newton pointing out that you can't see the colour of light waves, rather that light waves are what you use to see things in colour. Bizarrely Newton made no such claim because he believed light was made of particles, not waves. The point still stands, but how did a completely fictional quote like that get through? Is it acceptable to make up quotes from scientists to make your point?

At one point Levitin tells us all about the mistake of Cartesianism - the idea that the things we sense in the world are just encoded in a new representation that some inner self can view, as if the external world is presented on an inner screen in our brains. That, of course, leads to an infinite regress. Who watches the inner screen? This is all well and good, but throughout the book Levitin describes a model of the brain that is 100% Cartesian. For example, he says that when we hear a sound, the end of the journey is a mental image of that sound. He seems to have missed the point that the philosphers he quotes, Wittgenstein and Dennett, devoted much of their lives to demolishing such a silly picture.

I did find the discussion of the roots of Joni Mitchell's chords quite interesting however, not that I like Joni Mitchell. But that saves the book from one star.

Oh, and Levitin does know a lot of famous people, if you're impressed by that sort of thing.