This is Your Brain on Music

Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem.

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

The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world’s languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves bodily movement.

memory is not particularly accurate

and those audiences who are attending to the music of contemporary art composers are dwindling, giving those composers and the musicians who play their pieces fewer opportunities to share their works, resulting in a vicious cycle in which audiences become less and less capable of appreciating the newest classical “art” music (because, as we have seen throughout the book, music is based on repetition

Contemporary “classical” music is practiced mostly in universities; it is regrettably listened to by almost no one compared to popular music; much of it deconstructs harmony, melody, and rhythm, rendering them all but unrecognizable; in its least accessible form it is a purely intellectual exercise, and save for the rare avant-garde ballet company, no one dances to it either

Classical music as most of us think of it—say, from 1575 to 1950, from Monteverdi to Bach to Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and so on—has diverged into two streams. Some of the best music in that tradition is now being written for films by composers such as John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, but—lamentably—it is only infrequently the object of directed listening, as in a concert hall. The second stream (often written by contemporary composers in music conservatories and universities) is twentieth-century (now twenty-first-century) art music, much of it challenging and difficult for the average listener because it pushes the boundaries of tonality, or in many cases is atonal.

But considering ancient music’s character does account for why so many of us are literally moved by rhythm; by almost all accounts the music of our distant ancestors was heavily rhythmic.

As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychedelic splendor (without the aid of drugs)

For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note to the beginning, end, or middle to generate a new musical phrase.

easonable application of the rule leads to overextensions such as buyed, swimmed, and eated. In fact, intelligent children are more likely to make these mistakes and to make them sooner during the course of their development, because they have a more sophisticated rule-generating system.

The results showed that when they were at their peak fertility, women preferred the creative but poor artist to the not creative but rich man as a short-term mate,

First, anyone who could sing and dance was advertising to potential mates his stamina and overall good health, physical and mental. Second, anyone who had become expert or accomplished in music and dance was advertising that he had enough food and sturdy enough shelter that he could afford to waste valuable time on developing a purely unnecessary skill.

. Pinker argued that language is an adaptation and music is its spandrel.

One of the reasons that we’re willing to make ourselves vulnerable to our favorite musicians is that they often make themselves vulnerable to us (or they convey vulnerability through their art—the distinction between whether they are actually vulnerable or merely representing it artistically is not important for now).

It is unusual to let oneself become so vulnerable with a total stranger

The one positive experience begets others.

It is important in science, of course, to define our terms. What is “too simple” or “too complex”? An operational definition is that we find a piece too simple when we find it trivially predictable, similar to something we have experienced before, and without the slightest challenge

Music, or any art form for that matter, has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity in order for us to like it. Simplicity and complexity relate to familiarity, and familiarity is just another word for a schema.

The schema frames our perception, our cognitive processing, and ultimately our experience.