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

by Daniel J. Levitin

Young children start to show a preference for the music of their culture by age two, around the same time they begin to develop specialized speech processing. At first, children tend to like simple songs, where simple means music that has clearly defined themes (as opposed to, say, four-part counterpoint) and chord progressions that resolve in direct and easily predictable ways. As they mature, children start to tire of easily predictable music and search for music that holds more challenge. According to Mike Posner, the frontal lobes and the anterior cingulate—a structure just behind the frontal lobes that directs attention—are not fully formed in children, leading to an inability to pay attention to several things at once; children show difficulty attending to one stimulus when distracters are present. This accounts for why children under the age of eight or so have so much difficulty singing “rounds” like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Their attentional system—specifically the network that connects the cingulate gyrus (the larger structure within which the anterior cingulate sits) and the orbitofrontal regions of the brain—cannot adequately filter out unwanted or distracting stimuli. Children who have not yet reached the developmental stage of being able to exclude irrelevant auditory information face a world of great sonic complexity with all sounds coming in as a sensory barrage. They may try to follow the part of the song that their group is supposed to be singing, only ...