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

by Daniel J. Levitin

For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey “truth for now”—to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new “truth,” because that is the way science advances.

No known human culture now or anytime in the recorded past lacked music.

Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated.

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.

Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.

Your brain on music is a way to understand the deepest mysteries of human nature.

A fundamental principle of cognitive neuroscience is that the brain provides the biological basis for any behaviors or thoughts that we experience, and so at some level there must be neural differentiation wherever there is behavioral differentiation.

Music, then, can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds.

The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography of neurochemical release and uptake between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. When we love a piece of music, it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times in our lives.

even those of us who lack explicit training in music theory and performance have musical brains, and are expert listeners.

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found.

The archaeological record shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era.

virtually every member of our own society is capable of listening to and hence of understanding music.

Although some people with ASD play music, and some of them have reached a high level of technical proficiency, they do not report being emotionally moved by music. Rather, the preliminary and largely anecdotal evidence is that they are attracted to the structure of music.

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.