This is Your Brain on Music

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What can music teach us about the brain? What can the brain teach us about music? And what can both teach us about ourselves? In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin (The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind) explores the connection between music - its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and 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 worldWhy we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. DreThat practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertiseHow those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our headTaking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.

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Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award The Independent best books of the year The Guardian best books of the year This is the first book to offer a comprehensive explanation of how humans experience music and to unravel the mystery of our perennial love affair with it. Using musical examples from Bach to the Beatles, Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience. Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand it, and its role in human life.

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Pages: 336, Edition: 01, Paperback, Penguin Group