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This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession | 
| Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Plume
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $4.23
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Avg. Customer Rating:  95 reviews
Sales Rank: 671
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1 Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0452288525
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.11
EAN: 9780452288522
ASIN: 0452288525
Publication Date: August 28, 2007
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between musicits performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy itand the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:
How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world
Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre
That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise
How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our heads
And, taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin argues that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. This Is Your Brain on Music is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 90 more reviews...
 Engaging... May 5, 2008
I absolutely love this book. It discusses all the parts of music that I have ever wondered about (being a musician myself.) I enjoyed this book so much because it's easy to read but also extremely engaging. David Levitin is so brilliant and intuitive. It's like having someone type out my exact thoughts and put them in a book.
 Plenty of detail April 23, 2008
The most striking feature of this book for me is that it blurs the line between music as an aesthetic experience & the study of the brain as a scientific exercise.
So while it does a great job of defining the various parameters we appreciate music by ( notes, pitch, timbre, meter etc), it also delves into the way memory is organized in the brain, how musical appreciation is connected to our emotions, what makes a great anything (10, 000 hours of practice, apparently) etc.
The chapter on memory is tiresome & is far too academic for general readership. The initial chapters on musical parameters is very helpful to somebody with no training on music. The connections to emotions, & the music we like are very interesting reads.
Overall, a more than moderately good book without being exceptional because of the insufficient sieving out of unnecessary detail.
 Triviality masquerading as science April 5, 2008
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Think about earworms, you know, those tunes that you can't stop playing back in your head.
Now we'll play a little game. We'll take some ordinary English sentences but dress them up in smartypants neuroscience language. So instead of saying "in your head" you say "in your brain". And instead of saying "idea" you say "neural pathways representing a concept". You can probably make up your own rules for converting English to Neurospeak. "I have a headache" might become "a neural excitiation in my brain is causing the my pain sensors to represent pain in my cerebral area" or "I remember that book" might become "signals from my optic nerve are analysed and compared with prior stored representations of books until a match is found" and so on. Anyone can play, it's easy.
Dan Levitin knows how to play. Here's what he has to say on earworms: "Our best explanation is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in `playback mode'". Cute eh? But here's the weird thing. He doesn't realise this is just a game you can play with language. He thinks these are actually scientific explanations. In fact he spends 300 pages writing trivial things about music in Neurospeak, presenting it as science. It's like Moliere's joke about explaining how opium works by saying it has "soporific virtue".
It's not completely content-free however. For example he has a quote from Newton pointing out that you can't see the colour of light waves, rather that light waves are what you use to see things in colour. Bizarrely Newton made no such claim because he believed light was made of particles, not waves. The point still stands, but how did a completely fictional quote like that get through? Is it acceptable to make up quotes from scientists to make your point?
At one point Levitin tells us all about the mistake of Cartesianism - the idea that the things we sense in the world are just encoded in a new representation that some inner self can view, as if the external world is presented on an inner screen in our brains. That, of course, leads to an infinite regress. Who watches the inner screen? This is all well and good, but throughout the book Levitin describes a model of the brain that is 100% Cartesian. For example, he says that when we hear a sound, the end of the journey is a mental image of that sound. He seems to have missed the point that the philosphers he quotes, Wittgenstein and Dennett, devoted much of their lives to demolishing such a silly picture.
I did find the discussion of the roots of Joni Mitchell's chords quite interesting however, not that I like Joni Mitchell. But that saves the book from one star.
Oh, and Levitin does know a lot of famous people, if you're impressed by that sort of thing.
"A Little Knowledger is a Dangerous Thing" March 18, 2008
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
Daniel J. Levitin is a hack. He is a living embodyment of the term used in the title of this review. There is no science here, only opinion and second hand knowledge that anyone with any amount of musical education already knows. He should read Debussey's essay "The Dilettante in Music"
and go re-invent himself. There is more to being an expert on any subject than being interviewed on CBC.
Gordon Boothe
you will learn a lot if you pay attention February 16, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I'm very surprised by how many negative reviews this book is getting. I just finished it, and I love it.
Are you considering reading it? Then, do!
I think the problem many people have is essentially that the book isn't written only for them. In other words, let's say you don't give a fig about jazz--say you couldn't tell the Bird from Benny Goodman. That's no problem: every time he uses an example from jazz to illustrate a point, he uses a famous rock example as well. If you don't get the jazz one, you'll probably get the Rolling Stones reference. I would think everyone could live with that.
Or, let's say you are not at all interested in knowing why Joni Mitchell prefers a certain bass player. You only want to read about the neurology. Or vice-versa: all that neurology stuff is boring; you want to know more about what Neil Young thinks about music.
Unfortunately, there's a little of everything in here. Good solid multi-disciplinary science (neurology, genetics, evolutionary biology); a nice thorough introduction to music theory (explaining terms like pitch, octave, scale, dissonance, beat, timbre); anecdotes from his personal musical experience (what Joni Mitchell told him about her favorite bass player, why he didn't get to take guitar lessons when he was a kid).
UN - fortunately?
Well, I loved this book. I learned a lot about music (in general, as well as specific genres), a little about neurology and evolution, a little about various musicians. I couldn't have been more pleased.
The only reason I can find that anyone didn't enjoy the book is that they didn't want to read about all that other stuff (whatever was not the thing they did want to read about). If you can overlook that, of if you look forward to all of it, I guarantee this book will prove an entertaining, enlightening experience.
The one caveat I have is that, if you really do not know anything about music, pay good attention in the opening chapters when he introduces concepts like chord and scale. Or, be prepared to go back and reference those chapters. I do not see how a detailed book about music could avoid this situation (he cannot talk about music without talking about rythyms, melodies and harmonies). But he does a very good job of introducing and explaining them.
So, enjoy!
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