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

by Daniel J. Levitin

sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules.

As we age, these neural circuits are somewhat less pliable, and so it becomes more difficult to incorporate, at a deep neural level, new musical systems, or even new linguistic systems.

So far, we’ve been able to figure out that the brain stem and the dorsal cochlear nucleus—structures that are so primitive that all vertebrates have them—can distinguish between consonance and dissonance; this distinction happens before the higher level, human brain region—the cortex—gets involved.

Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of

those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

But as soon as we hear a song that we haven’t heard since a particular time in our lives, the floodgates of memory open and we’re immersed in memories. The song has acted as a unique cue, a key unlocking all the experiences associated with the memory for the song,

Groove is that quality that moves the song forward, the musical equivalent to a book that you can’t put down. When a song has a good groove, it invites us into a sonic world that we don’t want to leave.

We let them into our living rooms and bedrooms when no one else is around. We let them into our ears, directly, through earbuds and headphones, when we’re not communicating with anybody else in the world.

“Music is auditory cheesecake,” he said dismissively. “It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.”

Humans evolved a neural mechanism that caused our reward centers to fire when eating sugars and fats because in the small quantities they were available, they were beneficial to our well-being.

Most activities that are important for survival of the species, such as eating and sex, are also pleasurable; our brains evolved mechanisms to reward and encourage these behaviors. But we can learn to short-circuit the original activities and tap directly into these reward systems. We can eat foods that have no nutritive value and we can have sex without procreating; we can take heroin, which exploits the normal pleasure receptors in the brain; none of these is adaptive, but the pleasure centers in our limbic system don’t know the difference. Humans, then, discovered that cheesecake just happens to push pleasure buttons for fat and sugar, Pinker explained, and music is simply a pleasure-seeking behavior that exploits one or more existing pleasure channels that evolved to reinforce an adaptive behavior, presumably linguistic communication.

Rhythm stirs our bodies. Tonality and melody stir our brains.