An Excerpt from "Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin

This is an excerpt from the introduction to the wonderful book "Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin. I highly recommend it!!

"Many people who love music profess to know nothing about it. I've found that many of my colleagues who study difficult, intricate topics such as neurochemistry or psychopharmacology feel unprepared to deal with research in the neuroscience of music. And who can blame them? Music theorists have an arcane, rarified set of terms and rules that are as obscure as some of the most esoteric domains of mathematics. To the nonmusician, the blobs of ink on a page that we call music notation might just as well be the notations of mathematical set theory. Talk of keys, cadences, modulation, and transposition can be baffling.

Yet every one of my colleagues who feel intimidated by such jargon can tell me the music that he or she likes. My friend Norman White is a world authority on the hippocampus in rats, and how they remember different places they've visited. He is a huge jazz fan, and can talk expertly about his favorite artists. He can instantly tell the difference between Duke Ellington and Count Basie by the sound of the music, and can even tell early from late Louis Armstrong. Norm doesn't have any knowledge about music in the technical sense - he can tell me that he likes a certain song, but he can't tell me what the names of the chords are. He is, however, an expert in knowing what he likes. This is not at all unusual, of course. Many of us have a practical knowledge of things we like, and can communicate our preferences without possessing the technical knowledge of the true expert. I know that I prefer the chocolate cake at one restaurant I often go to over the chocolate cake at my neighborhood coffee shop. But only a chef would be able to analyze the cake - to decompose the taste experience into its elements - by describing the differences in the kind of flour, or the shortening, or the type of chocolate used."

Your Brain on Music

Ever wonder why a particular song can automatically put you in a great mood, while another can move you to tears? Why certain songs get stuck in our heads? And how these reactions are created by the composer?
Some explanations can be found in "This Is Your Brain On Music--The Science Of A Human Obsession." It's by Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D. a former record producer, sound engineer, and A&R agent for Columbia Records. He now runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal. Levitin says through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing and perception -- and production of sequences. "They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation," says Levitin."What we're learning about the part in the frontal lobe called BA47 is the most exciting. Music suggests that it's a region that helps us predict what comes next in a sequence."Levitin says we've learned a lot about music perception from people with brain disorders or injuries."We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing. We see equivalents in the visual domain: People lose color perception or shape perception."Levitin says he thinks of the brain as a computational device. "It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt."Levitin has also looked at this from an evolutionary perspective, to answer the question: Why did humans develop music in the first place? "There are a number of different theories. One theory is that music is an evolutionary accident, piggybacking on language: We exploited language to create music just for our own pleasure. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music was selected by evolution because it signals certain kinds of intellectual, physical and sexual fitness to a potential mate."So how does that play out in rock 'n' roll?"(Research has shown that) if women could choose who they'd like to be impregnated by, they'd choose a rock star. There's something about the rock star's genes that is signaling creativity, flexibility of thinking, flexibility of mind and body, an ability to express and process emotions -- not to mention that (musical talent) signals that if you can waste your time on something that has no immediate impact on food-gathering and shelter, you've got your food-gathering and shelter taken care of."What are we learning about the link between music and emotion in the brain? "Music activates the same parts of the brain and causes the same neurochemical cocktail as a lot of other pleasurable activities like orgasms or eating chocolate -- or if you're a gambler winning a bet or using drugs if you're a drug user. Serotonin and dopamine are both involved," says Levitin.Could music be an antidepressant? "It is already -- most people in Western society use music to regulate moods, whether it's playing something peppy in the morning or something soothing at the end of a hard day, or something that will motivate them to exercise. Joni Mitchell told me that someone once said before there was Prozac, there was her."

Born with a 'music module'?

This is an excerpt from a fascinating interview:


JEFFREY BROWN: Music, of course, comes in many forms and appears to have been part of every age and every known culture. There's a continuing debate among scientists as to music's exact role in human evolution.
But Levitin believes that the brain itself has evolved to make sense of music and that we're each born wired for music, just as we are for language.
DANIEL LEVITIN: If you're born listening to Chinese opera, your brain is going to become wired to the rules of that musical form. If you're born listening to Pakistani music, Indian music, Indian ragas, your brain will become wired to those. Our brain is plastic, and malleable, and able to wire itself up to whatever language we hear, to learn those rules.
Similarly, I would argue that we all are born with a music module. We're born with the wiring to accommodate any music that we hear, and we learn those rules effortlessly just by listening.
JEFFREY BROWN: Levitin says there's an area of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex, specifically dedicated to comparing what we hear with our expectations of learned patterns of music. That's the reason we can be surprised, pained or delighted when those expectations are tampered with, something great musicians know to exploit.
DANIEL LEVITIN: When you listen to Stevie Wonder drumming on "Superstition," for example, he's playing in time, and you're forming predictions about what's going to happen next. The additional nuance that he brings to it is that he changes the beats ever so slightly, throughout the whole song, "Superstition," never the same.
So he's going a little bit different. He varies the pressure on the high-hat cymbal, so it's a little bit louder, a little bit softer. The beauty of it is that the cerebellum is trying to figure out, "OK, where is the next beat going to come? What's it going to be?" And he's surprising the cerebellum at every turn, so that your brain...
JEFFREY BROWN: We don't talk to too many scientists who are doing Stevie Wonder drum solos for us, I've got to tell you that.