This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

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This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 · rating details · 13,514 ratings · 861 reviews

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...more

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published August 3rd 2006 by Dutton Adult

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Sep 17, 2007 Matthew rated it 3 of 5 stars

There's a lot of amazing stuff in this book to contemplate, but the author tries too hard to make it relevant for readers who listen to the Eagles and Mariah Carey (musicians he specifically sites), and he gets caught up in the most mundane details of his personal interactions with his colleagues at meetings and dinners and such, and who ordered what, and how everybody was dressed, and where everybody got their degrees.

My girlfriend got me interested in it because I found her passionate explanat...more

23 likes · like · see review

Jun 18, 2011 Orsolya rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: own, music, favorites, the-brain

We tend to make music for as much granted as we do breathing. Music is EVERYWHERE. The same way that you encounter hundreds of advertisements in a day: you also encounter music in various forms.This is Your Brain on Music (yes, based on the popular egg-drug PSA, explores how music is processed within your brain and why we react the way we do.

This journey within the musical brain begins with a brief description of music in terms of notes, patterns, tempo, etc. One can skip this section if alread...more

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Dec 05, 2009 Patricia rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Any musician who has the patience to really pay attention to what the author is saying.

It wasn't until I was half-way through this book that things started to get really interesting. As a musician, the first half was like retaking Music 101, but I felt this was a book I need to read, so I plowed on. I am looking for answers to the questions: "Why, when I near any musical interval, my brain automatically zips through all the tunes I know which start with that interval, and I start humming one of them?" and "Why the hell have I had '76 Trombones' on my mind for the last 6 weeks?" Is...more

15 likes · like · see review

Oct 28, 2010 Ken rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is one of those books that I think is a valuable read but not necessarily an enjoyable one..at least for the general reader. If you bring a background in neuroscience then this is a treasure chest of information. My personal interest lies in music specifically and I saw this as an opportunity to better understand how our brains engage with music. Coupled with Oliver Sacks collection "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" we begin to unlock the mysterious properties of music to help us com...more

8 likes · like · see review

Dec 22, 2008 Mike Bularz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: own, notes, at-barnes

From the reviews I've seen here, the material seems to have passed over most people's heads (by being too rough, or the phrase you'll come across a few times, "I didn't feel like I walked away exclaiming 'eureka!'"... or the book angered more expert readers by its simplicity, but it wasn't meant to talk of new discoveries as much as it was meant for a general public.

The book takes a while for an average person, and I'd say you have to have some knowledge of chorded instruments and such where yo...more

11 likes · like · see review

Dec 22, 2007 Seth rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people love science and music.

Levitin goes too far out of his way to make the book appeal to the layman. His tone isn't condescending, but he came across as an academic out of his element. Much of the research he cites is very fascinating. When it's all said and done though, I didn't walk away feeling like I had a much better grasp of what my brain is actually like on music. Levitin spends most of the book citing other research and did not assert his own opinions until the very end. I found his own views fascinating, but eve...more

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Feb 23, 2008 Pamela W rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Scientists?

I really despise myself for giving what should be an awesome book only 2 stars. I know I am mentally feeble, but was this ever dry!!! Interesting topic - neuroscience & music - but the author did go on at times (too much music theory, god I hated studying that and I'm a musician) and took the scientific aspects to a degree where I often found myself stopping to ponder "what the hell is he talking about?" It read like it could be someone's dissertation. The second half is slightly more intere...more

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Jul 03, 2010 Jackie "the Librarian" rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, music

A book is the wrong medium for this information. As I read this book, I kept wishing I was watching a PBS show version of it instead, where I could HEAR the music Mr. Levitin was referencing, and see visuals of the brain showing what parts are being affected by music, and how they all link up.

Instead of having to tell us in excruciating detail what an octave is, he could demonstrate on an instrument, and we could hear it for ourselves. When discussing half steps and whole steps, we could both h...more A book is the wrong medium for this information. As I read this book, I kept wishing I was watching a PBS show version of it instead, where I could HEAR the music Mr. Levitin was referencing, and see visuals of the brain showing what parts are being affected by music, and how they all link up.

Instead of having to tell us in excruciating detail what an octave is, he could demonstrate on an instrument, and we could hear it for ourselves. When discussing half steps and whole steps, we could both hear them, and see how a piano's white and black keys work with the structure of the scale.

Beyond all that, I'm a little disappointed in the focus of the book. Mr. Levitin says at one point that he is more interested in the mind, than in the brain. And yet, instead of telling us how all these brain interactions manifest in our minds, he focuses on details about the cerebellum and the amygdala. We learn what parts of the brain act together when listening to music, but not much what that MEANS to us mentally. I guess I wanted more psychology, less biology.

That doesn't make the subject any less fascinating. I think my favorite chapter was the one on what makes a musician. It's not just innate talent. No, it takes hours and hours and hours of practice, 10,000 in fact to master an instrument (this may sound familiar to those of you who read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers). It may also take helpful physiology, like long fingers to reach keys on a piano easily. But humans are INNATELY musical, and how our brains and bodies react to music is astonishing.

Other interesting things I learned:
- humans have always made music, and that it likely predates language
- music can comfort and inspire us, and has the power to change our mood through the chemistry in our brains
- music activates both the oldest and newest parts of the brain
- we all have expertise in music, because we all listen to it
- the importance of timbre, the quality of sound that distinguishes a note played on a guitar from the same note played on a trumpet, and the quality that lets us recognize each other's voices

And I liked this quote: "Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations."

And I kept thinking of this other quote: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," (no, I can't tell you who said that, maybe Elvis Costello, maybe Laurie Anderson, maybe Steve Martin...)(less)

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Feb 07, 2009 Bill rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: keepers

Someone left this behind in the cubby of the plane seat on a flight I took in December. As I'd finished my magazines, I picked it up, and then couldn't put it down. What was most fascinating about the book was the ease at which concepts I'd struggled with years ago were made crisp, clear, and, well, obvious, as they should have been back then. Introductory concepts of music were never made as clear to me than from this. I don't think I could have found a fuller survey of the subject, tying it to...more

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Jan 18, 2009 Rosie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

So far it's off to a sort of dry start. I'm led to believe that it will get better when he starts getting into the subject matter a bit more, but the first chapter is basically a quick and dirty introduction to music theory, most of which I am already quite familiar with. I'll force myself to get into the second chapter and see how it goes from there.

After finishing, I can say this book has a lot of information in it. Levitin explores the Cerebellum's role in processing music, which was fascinat...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Bruce rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: unmusical cognitive scientists

In Daniel Levitin's own words, "This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience…. I'll discuss some of the latest studies I and other researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure…. [H]ow can we account for wide differences in musical preference -- why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna?" (p. 11) After reading these 270 pages, I'm sure I can't tell you. I'm pretty disappointed, but then I had real...more In Daniel Levitin's own words, "This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience…. I'll discuss some of the latest studies I and other researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure…. [H]ow can we account for wide differences in musical preference -- why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna?" (p. 11) After reading these 270 pages, I'm sure I can't tell you. I'm pretty disappointed, but then I had really high expectations for this book which it failed to meet (I should know by now never to read the back-cover hype, let alone the 4 pages of promotional blurbs that preceded the table of contents).

But before confessing my own failings here, let me lay a little blame at the author's feet. Right off the bat, he states, "It's a shame that many people are intimidated by the jargon musicians, music theorists, and cognitive scientists throw around. There is specialized vocabulary in every field of inquiry (try to make sense of a full blood-analysis report from your doctor). But in the case of music, music experts and scientists could do a better job of making their work accessible. That is something I tried to accomplish in this book." (p. 10) Levitin also talks about harboring a preference for identifying how the brain interprets moving air molecules as music and the behavioral/emotional significance/origins of this auditory processing over simply mapping where in the brain music triggers neurons.

To that, I say, ha, ha, and double-ha. We take you live to a typical passage (p. 191), which begins as follows: "We found exactly what we had hoped. Listening to music caused a cascade of brain regions to become activated in a particular order: first, auditory cortex for initial processing of the components of the sound. Then the frontal regions, such as BA44 and BA47, that we had previously identified as being involved in processing musical structure and expectations. Finally, a network of regions -- the mesolimbic system -- involved in arousal, pleasure, and the transmission of opiods and the production fo dopamine, culminating in activation in the nucleus accumbens. And the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout, presumably supporting the processing of rhythm and meter."

If you got that, this book is for you (but not me, alas). Levitin devotes the first 1/5 of this book to defining musical terms (tuning, timbre, scale) he will not really use later. It's interesting, but cognitively irrelevant. There is some fun anecdotal stuff buried in here (did you know that if you chop off the 'attack' of a piano from a recording and just play the body of the pitch, it sounds indistinguishable from a flute? did you know that music appreciation and sociability are closely correlated?), but the questions posed in the introduction are never answered. Is music a by-product of speech, etc. or a seminal human intuition? Ummm… not sure. How and when are music preferences established? Ummm… mostly from exposure during one's teens, but possibly also from that in the womb, early childhood, and later in life. Why? Don't know. Repetition, perhaps?

I give this book 2 stars for the extensive annotated bibliography at the end and (ironically, considering the author's stated subject matter preferences) the trivially-interesting pictographic brain mappings of music function in the appendix. What a bummer.
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Mar 24, 2008 Sam rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: music

Seemingly for musicians or composers this book is more fitting a read for scientists and doctors. Not much content is musicianship related. Middle third is a bore.

What I learned:
- There is no sound in space
(there are no molecules to vibrate)
- Virtuosity comes from hours of practice
(talent and absolute pitch play a small role)
- Learning to play an instrument after 20 is hard
(the brain is done developing)
- Percussion is a primitive musical trait
(affirming my suspician drummers are apes)
- People...more

8 likes · like · see review

Feb 18, 2008 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

People often ask me about how I can be a musician and into sign language. It occurs for them like there is a dichotomy at play. I've never experienced my work in either area to be at odds with the other.

This week I'm reading the coolest book I've read in a while: This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin. He was once a musician and sound engineer, but now is a neuroscientist (another set of odd-bedfellow occupations). A Publishers Weekly review says "This is likely the only book whose jac...more

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Dec 27, 2007 J rated it 5 of 5 stars

Have you ever wondered how you can listen to an orchestra and pick out the melody, or pick out the violins from the whole ensemble, or pick out the first violin from the violin section, or separate the orchestra from the car alarm outside? If you ever wondered about music and why it is so appealing to us, you'll find this book interesting.

Beginning with the basics of how musicians and scientists define music, it moves on to discuss how our brain and mind have evolved to understand music, the im...more

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Jul 03, 2008 Mattie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Really cool book on the the brain's relationship with and to music. Although written for a general audience, Levitan doesn't significantly dumb down or shy away from the neuroscience at the very heart of the book. At the same time, Levitan let's a very wry, witty sense of humor season his writing. Finally, he's got both the musical and scientific chops to understand the subject matter from both sides. This means there's enough science and detail to impart some pretty technical information, but i...more

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Jul 21, 2007 Kim rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone interested in music, but especially musicians

Shelves: non-fiction

This is full a lot of technical information about the brain, but I've learned some interesting facts. 1)Humans have never existed without music. 2)It has only been in the past 500 or so years that we have differentiated between music-makers and music listeners. 3) Scientists are still unclear why we evolved an ability to make, understand or appreciate music. They theorize it may be tied into mating rituals since those who make music and dance well seem to attract more mates--even today. There is...more

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Jan 31, 2008 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars

I found myself reading this book very, very quickly. Why? Well, the sections explaining the language and technical aspects of music all consisted of information I already knew, so I zipped through them. The sections explaining the science of the brain while playing or listening to music were so over my head that I subconsciously decided to speed-read rather than really engage with the complexity of the material. And this is neuroscience for dummies! All that said, the work and studies done by Le...more

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Jan 30, 2009 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: classical-music, psychology, neuroscience

Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession is a fascinating study about what happens in the brain when we listen to music. Levitin, a neuroscientist and former session musician and producer, has crafted an excellent study that both scientists and lay readers whose grasp of science is somewhat limited will find informative.
Perhaps best of all, Levitin’s book doesn’t ruin the enjoyment of listening to music.

Levitin primarily takes a thematic approach in exami...more
Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession is a fascinating study about what happens in the brain when we listen to music. Levitin, a neuroscientist and former session musician and producer, has crafted an excellent study that both scientists and lay readers whose grasp of science is somewhat limited will find informative.
Perhaps best of all, Levitin’s book doesn’t ruin the enjoyment of listening to music.

Levitin primarily takes a thematic approach in examining how the brain functions when listening to music. Although the first chapter, which explains the basics of music like pitch, timbre, meter, may be sow-going for the musically-challenged, the remaining chapters are enlightening. With topics including how the brain remembers and recalls music, why music can impact our moods, and why musical preferences can vary from person to person, Levitin explains the processes occurring in the brain without overwhelming the reader with overly-technical and academically-dry details.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the final one, which makes a case for the evolutionary origins of music, arguing against scientists who believe music was a happy accident or an unplanned byproduct of language development. Levitin shows how music may have played a role in human survival and evolution, including aiding in cognitive development, serving as a key factor in promoting early human interactions, and giving musical males an extra advantage in the grand reproductive race.

Written for non-experts who might not know the difference between a hippocampus and a hippopotamus, This Is Your Brain On Music successfully manages to explain how we listen to music without reducing music to a series of neurons and brain waves. Levitin writes in an intelligent but not overbearing or condescending tone; his passion for music is apparent throughout the book. An excellent integration of science and music, Levitin’s book examines the brain’s role in listening to and processing music without downplaying any of the emotions we experience when listening to music. I enjoyed the book, particularly the science of the brain and its relation to music.(less)

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Apr 02, 2013 Kelli rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read the title of this book when reading a wiki article about the guy who wrote, "Don't Worry, Be Happy". It was amazing that our library actually had this book in the building - I think that's only happened one other time in the four years we've lived here. I'm glad I read it although I must confess, it took me an absurdly long time to get through it. I want to record some of what I painstakingly read although I lost the notes I took for 4 of the 8 chapters. Whoops! He wrote the information i...more

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Feb 08, 2013 Loring Wirbel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Two friends called this book the perfect companion to David Byrne's "How Music Works," and I heartily agree. Where Byrne covers issues of cultural cues and personal responses to music in a broad sense, Levitin dives deep into the neural processing that goes on in music interpretation, and the emotional cerebellar responses that come along for the ride.

As a former recording engineer that went back to school to become a cognitive neuroscientist, Levitin gives us just the right balance of persona...more Two friends called this book the perfect companion to David Byrne's "How Music Works," and I heartily agree. Where Byrne covers issues of cultural cues and personal responses to music in a broad sense, Levitin dives deep into the neural processing that goes on in music interpretation, and the emotional cerebellar responses that come along for the ride.

As a former recording engineer that went back to school to become a cognitive neuroscientist, Levitin gives us just the right balance of personal experience and biological detail. You won't find any of the heavy math of Stephen Grossberg's "Neural Networks and Natural Intelligence" or Pentti Kanerva's "Sparse Distributed Memory," but you will find a commoner's explanation, fairly accurate, of how neural networks store artistic memories and attach emotional responses to those memories.

We also get a lot of wonderful anecdotes of how Arnold Schonberg set free the boundaries in classical music, how Steely Dan re-invented pop composition, how Joni Mitchell confused and liberated bass players by refusing to use conventional chord systems. We even get Levitin's fascinating story of how he met James Watson and Francis Crick at separate times, under wildly different circumstances. At times, Levitin drifts a little bit into celebrity name-dropping, but with so many unique stories to tell, he can be forgiven a little star-bragging.

Those not familiar with theories of how music and language are processed in the human brain may find the entire book an astonishing revelation from beginning to end. Even in the early chapters, I was taken aback by findings such as how a deaf person processes ASL in a manner more similar to a hearing person processing music, than to the processing of language. The chapter on music talent and the development of expertise, in particular, has something for everyone.

The final two chapters should bedazzle all readers, no matter how familiar they are with the topic. In his analysis of why we like the music we do, Levitin first takes us to rhythms heard in the womb or in the very early weeks of newborn life, and carries us through the high point of music association with emotions during adolescence. He also has a dual-edged explanation for why people sometimes run away from music they are unfamilar with, sometimes viscerally groaning "That's not music!" In the first instance, new forms of music must be placed within a schema or framework, and the brain's ability to adopt new schemas hits its high point about the time empathic genes and mirror neurons are developed, at about 20 years old. Some people can keep this flexibility through their lives, but many begin losing neural plasticity in their mid-20s. In the second instance, people need schemas as a sense of safety and security. If they are not adventurous, they may respond to "weird" music with a sense of fear and disgust. This should not surprise us, Levitin says. In the same sense that we cannot remove fight/flight mechanisms from our nature, we cannot totally remove our innate desire for safety, familiarity, and security, though we can choose to consciously override that tendency to a certain extent.

In his last chapter on the evolutionary utility of music, Levitin gets to tweak the nose of cognitive researcher Steven Pinker ever so slightly. (I am a fan of many of Pinker's ideas, but I consider Pinker someone like Malcolm Gladwell - a writer who could use a come-uppance now and then.) Pinker thought of music as "auditory cheesecake," or an "evolutionary spandrel," something largely useless, for pleasure purposes only, that rode the coattails of language as it evolved. Levitin heartily disagrees, and says that music co-evolved with dance as a means of sexual selection-expression and of tying emotion intimately to neural processes. I not only agree with Levitin, I think he unwittingly identified the Pinker problem when he quoted autistic researcher Temple Grandin, who said "I think music is pretty, but I just don't get it." Perhaps those who do not passionately "get" music are partially autistic, though still capable of deep expression on a pure language level. I have friends who are equally talented writers, but differ in their ability to emotionally attach to music. Grandin and Pinker deserve our empathy, because they don't quite understand what Levitin understands very well - music is the core, language comes along for the ride.(less)

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Dec 23, 2012 Jaya rated it 2 of 5 stars

Review from Amazon.com:

I could not finish this book. It fell way short of my expectations.

I am highly interested in neuroscience, and I do consider myself obsessed with music, and so I was very excited to be able to read this book in order to gain some insight into why music does what it does. I didn't get any of that. In all honesty I just barely made it past the third chapter before I decided to quite, so I can't say if the rest of the book gets any better.

The chapters I did read were filled w...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Othon Leon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: psychology

A very interesting explanation on what makes music sooo attractive to the vast majority of us... the first two chapters are in my opinion, heavy to read (I had to go back several times to try and get the idea); actually, in this regard I found the first statements of the author a little bit contradictory, since as he somehow explains, science (technical facts) should be explained "easily"... well, it wasn't in my opinion for the most of the beginning. After that, the book gets much lighter, much...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Linda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sometime in your life someone has asked you, "Would you rather be blind or deaf?" Most people answer that they would rather be deaf. Not me. While I can "see" images in my mind - after all, what is meditation except for the concentration on a single idea or image? - I can never hear a Beethoven symphony or White Stripes recreated in my mind. So I really wanted to read this book.

But it's only so-so. The first two chapters the writer spends explaning such terms as tone, timbre, key, meter, which h...more

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Aug 17, 2012 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: neuroscience, non-fiction, music, evolution

“A” for effort and ambition and “C” for execution. He tries to be all things to all people, bouncing too much from folksy to scholarly and from self-referential to didactic perspectives. Levitin has a substantial music background, both in performance and production, and a very productive track record in cognitive neuroscience. Thus, his personal ambition to account for the neural basis of music, music listening pleasure, and musical creativity is compelling to him, and that motivation is infecti...more “A” for effort and ambition and “C” for execution. He tries to be all things to all people, bouncing too much from folksy to scholarly and from self-referential to didactic perspectives. Levitin has a substantial music background, both in performance and production, and a very productive track record in cognitive neuroscience. Thus, his personal ambition to account for the neural basis of music, music listening pleasure, and musical creativity is compelling to him, and that motivation is infectious enough to justify a reader eagerly grabbing the book up based on its title and blurb. Enquiring minds want to know. After hungrily penetrating 50 pages of so of the book, many readers are likely to feel duped. Progress on the target areas is accelerating, but it’s not that enlightening to the average reader. Yet, as Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for.”

As a musical ignoramus, I appreciated the Music 101—I think I can finally grasp what a “key” and a “major chord” are. And I was enlightened by his perspectives on how expectation and violation of chord progressions has a lot to do with enjoyment of music. As a former neuroscientist, I appreciated the review of progress in the field. As one would expect, music engages both primitive emotional circuits and higher analytic systems involved in memory, temporal information processing and prediction. The overlap with language systems is interesting, and speculation on cerebellar involvement beyond motor performance was fascinating. That people with Wilson’s syndrome are good at music and empathy while those with Autism Spectrum Disorders are not provides some important food for thought. But the brain stuff I don’t believe helps anyone appreciate why music is so special to our human culture or is so pleasurable.

For this, he goes out of his field to summarize arguments against the notion that music is sort of an accident of evolution of cognitive skills with clear adaptive value. He quotes Pinker: “Music is auditory cheesecake…It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.” In Gould’s architectural analogy, music is like “spandrels”, those elegant spaces between arches which were not invented for their own sake. Levitin assembles evidence for music prevalence in all current and past human cultures, its importance for social cohesion and courtship, and lands on the evolutionary psychology perspective that its adaptive value relates to sexual selection (i.e. musical skills conveyed reproductive advantages through mate selection).

For the discussion on heritability of music skills, I felt he was fairly even handed, leaving open that even Mozart’s genius may have benefited mostly from practice and environment in the nature/nuture perspective. Musical skill fits in with the larger ongoing question of genetic contributions to artistic creativity. A nice emphasis in this book is Levitin’s consideration of how even the average person qualifies as an expert and skilled listener and how our current division between performers and listeners represents a violation of the ancient traditions of all members of society participating in both.
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Jul 31, 2012 Marco rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Loved it! The book was highly enjoyable for me and I'm not a professional musician (or a neuroscientist), but I've always been aware of what music can do to me, from meditation to headbanging and beyond. I've read some people got disappointed of finding 'too much music theory' or 'too much neuroscience'; well honestly I don't think the book has to much of either of them, it's not written for neuroscientists or for professional musicians (even when I think both groups could enjoy it), and lets fa...more

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Feb 14, 2012 Jon Edward rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biology-bio-evolution

In short, I enjoyed this book enough while I was reading it; I was glad when it was over; I hardly can remember anything about it now.

It's a bit like watching a popular education channel (Discovery, Nat. Geo., History, etc) late at night: it serves the purpose of passing the time, but probably isn't going to blow your mind.

If you are interested in music cognition, it's probably worth checking out. If you really don't know anything about music theory (I mean, like you were out sick for a whole sc...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Zandrina McGowan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is one I read to place in my final thesis. I wasn't expecting anything from it and the plan was to skim it in hopes of finding some really good quotes.
BUT, I hadn't planned on being so caught up and enjoying the book as much as I did. I started reading the first chapter to get the hang of his writing style and I was hooked within the first few pages. I basically read it from cover to cover and I am really glad that I did!
The book has taught me sooooo much new and interesting things whe...more

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Nov 24, 2011 Tara rated it 3 of 5 stars

So much content! Unfortunately I found it a little haphazard. I guess that's the balance between being a neuropsychologist/musician/writer.
Depending on your level of music appreciation, you may get more/less out of this book. I enjoyed it, but lack a solid education in music and particularly in American bands from the 70s/80s. However, I do have a background in psychology, so I could relate with the dialogue on another level. I gained a better understanding, but didn't come away with too many ne...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Roberto Macias rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An awesome idea with a deep theoretical basis. All arguments are clearly well founded. However, and please note this is my opinion, it is extremely oversimplified. The physics of sound might not be known by everyone, but Levitin shouldn't forget them later to explain why the brain hears the fundamental frequency of any given note, namely resonance. Funnily enough he does mention resonance in a previous chapter, but he forgets about it altogether, and this clearly detracts from some of his explan...more

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Jul 30, 2011 BHodges added it · review of another edition

Easy to read, but not for lack of depth. Levitin combines his knowledge and love for music with his education and research in cognitive psychology in this fascinating look at our brains and the music we love. The introductory chapters lay the basic groundwork about music itself; rhythm, pitch, meter, scales, etc. It's smooth sailing for those who are less familiar with these technicalities, and his witty prose can also keep the more advanced reader engaged. Levitin makes substantiated arguments...more

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About Daniel J. Levitin

Daniel J. Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University, where he holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he worked as a session musician, sound engineer and record producer. He has written extensively both in scientific journals and music trade magazines such as Grammy and Billboard.

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Books by Daniel J. Levitin

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

Foundations of Cognitive Psychology: Core Readings

From Demo Tape to Record Deal: Handy Guide

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Quotes from This Is Your Brain on ...

“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.” — 8 people liked it

“A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact. with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.” — 5 people liked it

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This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

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