new book

Original post date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008


new book

Okay, I am on to a new book. I finished My Friend Leonard and it was fantastic. These books are of course interspursed between my Physics homework, and for those of you who didn't know, ummm...I am taking Physics II for reasons to be discussed soon enough. On with the other book I have been reading and put off to the side to finish M.F.L.

It is freakin cool - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED I will tell you why right now...but first the title and such...

This Is Your Brain On Music - the science of a human obsession...by Daniel J. Levitin.

Okay - This book is the one that makes you mad that music is one of the first things they take out of school. This guy Daniel, was a musician, turned producer (he worked with some great people...some you would know - Heart, Journey, Santana, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin) my point - he is not a nobody. He got so interested in why people are good at performing and why people enjoy music so much he went back to school and became a neuroscientist. He took two things that he was good at, and was interested in and made a career out of them. (let me think who that reminds me of....hmmm...an artist that likes really technical things...hmmm...I will let you stew on that one for a little while).

Anyways here are a few of my favorite passages from the book so far, I am only about 1/3 through it but it is awesome so far.

"Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs. Given this voracious consumption, I would say that most Americans qualify as expert music listeners. We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and tap our feet in time with music - an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it." page 7

How cool is that! okay next one.

"After sounds enter the ear, they pass by the basilar membrane, where certain hair cells fire, depending on the frequency of the sounds. The membrane acts like a motion-detector lamp you might have in your garden; activity in a certain part of the membrane causes it to send an electrical signal on up to the auditory cortex. The auditroy cortex also has a tonotopic map, with low to high tones stretched out across the coritical surface. In this sense, the brain also contains a 'map' of different pitches, and different areas of the brain respond to different pitches. Pitch is so important that the brain represents it directly; unlike almost any other musical attribute, we could place electrodes in the brain and be able to determine what pitches were being played to a person just by looking at the brain activity. And although music is based on pitch relations rather than absolute pitch values, it is, paradoxically, these absolute pitch values that the brain is paying attention to throughout its different stages of processing.
This direct mapping of pitch is so important, it bears repeating. If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440Hz - for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!" page 29

Now tell me that is not even cooler, and it is not an overly technical read, which makes it even more fun to read because I am not stumbling over all of these big technical terms. Okay this next passage is long and please realize I am physically typing this stuff out not just copying a pasting it. So if there are any typos, it is me not the book. This one illustrates how much of your brain is involved in any music activity...it is truly fascinating.

"Listening to music starts with subcortical (below-the-cortex) structures--the cochlear nuclei, the brain stem, the cerebelum--and then moves up to the auditory cortices on both sides of the brain. Trying to follow along with music that you know--or at least music in a style you're familiar with, such as baroque or blues--recruits additional regions of the brain, including the hippocampus--our memory center--and subsections of the frontal lobe, particularly a region called inferior frontal cortex, which is in the lowest parts of the frontal lobe, i.e., closer to your chin than to the top of your head. Tapping along with music, either actually or just in your mind, involves the cerebellums's timing circuits. Performing music--regardless of what instrument you play, or whether you sing, or conduct--invlolves the frontal lobes again for the planning of your behavior, as well as the motor cortex in the posterior part of the frontal lobe just underneath the top of your head, and the sensory cortex, which provides the tactile feedback that you have pressed the right key on your instrument, or moved the baton where you thought you did. Reading music involves the visual cortex, in the back of your head in the occipital lobe. Listening to or recalling lyrics involves language centers, including Broca's and Wernicke's area, as well as other language centers in the temporal and frontal lobes.
At a deeper level, the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitiv, reptilian regions of the cerebellar vermis, and the amygdala--the heart of emotional processing in the cortex. The idea of regional specificity is evident in the summary but a complementary principle applies as well, that of distribution of function. The brain is a massivley parallel device, with operations distributed widely throughout. There is no single language center, nor is there a single music center. Rather, there are regions that peform component operations, and other regions that coordinate the bringing together of htis information. Finally, we have discovered only recently that the brain has a capacity for reorganization that vastly exceeds what we thought before. This ability is called neuroplasticity, and in some cases, it suggests that regional specificity may be temporary, as the processing centers for important mental functions actually move to other regions after trauma or brain damage.

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everday experience (unless you are a cosmologist). The average human brain consists fo one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out--let's say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money. Even if you gave away hundred-dollar bills once a second, it would take you thirty-two years to pass them all out. This is a lot of neurons, but the real power and complexity of the brain (and of thought) come from their connections.
Each neuron is connected to other neurons--usually one thousand to ten thousand others. Just four neurons can be connected in sixty-three ways, or not at all, total of sixty-four possibilities. As the number of neurons increases, the number of possible connections grows exponentionally....For 2 neurons there are 2 possiblilities for how they can be connected...For 4 neurons ther eare 64 possibilities...For 6 neurons there are 32,708 possibilities." pages 86-88

Okay I know that was a lot, but isn't that cool. When you listen to music or play music you use so much of your brain it is crazy. And then the possibilities of processing available in your brain is so far beyond my reach of thought it is astounding .

I am glad you stuck with me on this one. I can't promise I won't do it again with this book but can you really blame me? I would type the whole book to you but then there is that whole plagerizing thing and I think you should at least check the book out from the library at least, if not buy it for yourself.

Like I said at the beginning, if your school or childs school tries to take away music put up a big fight. I think they are starting to realize the importance of the arts in schools now but I know when I was in middle school and high school it was an issue.

I hope you enjoyed my ability to type, I enjoyed the practice.

Read this book - I know at least five of my friends who would truly enjoy it and then there are the others who would think it was cool. I mean honestly how many of you listen to music? All of you...seriously this is amazing stuff.

Okay I am done trying to convince you if you don't want to read it tell me to shut up.

I hope you can tap your foot to a song better than a computer can!