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

by Daniel J. Levitin

Most astonishing was that the left-hemisphere regions that we found were active in tracking musical structure were the very same ones that are active when deaf people are communicating by sign language. This suggested that what we had identified in the brain wasn’t a region that simply processed whether a chord sequence was sensible, or whether a spoken sentence was sensible. We were now looking at a region that responded to sight—to the visual organization of words conveyed through American Sign Language. We found evidence for the existence of a brain region that processes structure in general, when that structure is conveyed over time. Although the inputs to this region must have come from different neural populations, and the outputs of it had to go through distinctive networks, there it was—a region that kept popping up in any task that involved organizing information over time.