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

by Daniel J. Levitin

Still sitting with me, long after the lunch plates were cleared, Crick mentioned “the binding problem,” one of the most difficult problems in cognitive neuroscience. Most objects have a number of different features that are processed by separate neural subsystems—in the case of visual objects, these might be color, shape, motion, contrast, size, and so on. Somehow the brain has to “bind together” these different, distinct components of perception into a coherent whole. I have described how cognitive scientists believe that perception is a constructive process, but what are the neurons actually doing to bring it all together? We know this is a problem from the study of patients with lesions or particular neuropathic diseases such as Balint’s syndrome, in which people can recognize only one or two features of an object but cannot hold them together. Some patients can tell you where an object is in their visual field but not its color, or vice versa. Other patients can hear timbre and rhythm but not melody or vice versa. Isabelle Peretz discovered a patient who has absolute pitch but is tone deaf! He can name notes perfectly, but he cannot sing to save his life.