Neurology

A while back I reviewed Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, a fascinating book about neurology and music.

David Byrne visited Levitin's lab in Montreal (Levitin is a professor at McGill) in fall of 2006, and recently they met in New York to discuss things further.

The book is a fascinating read if you're so inclined, and the discussion doesn't rely too heavily on preexisting knowledge of the book if you want to just read that.

I found it particularly fascinating that David Byrne believes he had Asperger's syndrome (a developmental disorder in the Autistic spectrum) that he essentially healed and outgrew through music. Andrew Hill described himself as semi-autistic, which would probably be Asperger's as well, a high-functioning form of autism.

I've just finished reading Daniel J. Levitin's book This Is Your Brain On Music, a fascinating foray into the world of music cognition and neurological studies. Levitin has written a book that tackles these subjects in a manner that might appeal to an average reader, rather than burying his thoughts in copious academic language and rhetoric. The result is a book that is highly accessible, but in my opinion lacks depth in some areas that could have been developed further without sacrificing the accessibility. He succeeds in providing an excellent overview of the current state of understanding and research, and he has a knack for providing examples that give the reader practical explanations and applications for his ideas.

The book is organized very well, moving from the basic question of why he would want to combine and mix the fields of science and music to the basics of music for the non-musician reader (a chapter I read but in hindsight could have skipped entirely), moving on to various issues concerning the neurological processing of music.

Some of the ideas that I found most intriguing were those related to the ways music utilizes so much of the neurological structures, engaging the different areas in a way that from my observations points to a unifying effect of music on the brain. His discussions of the possible evolutionary role of music in social bonding and mating advantages were particularly interesting, as he attempted to refute the idea that music was merely "auditory cheesecake" that stimulated our pleasure centers and provided little in the way of evolutionary advantages.

I thought the section on the ways various disorders such as Williams Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorders affect musical enjoyment and processing. Basically, he shows that people with Williams Syndrome have a particular inclination towards music, both as listeners and performers, and they are often quite accomplished as performers. People with autism however report being unmoved emotionally by music, although they are often interested structurally - symptoms that make sense in the scope of autistic people that have trouble reading the emotions of others. The neurological slant comes when Levitin points out that the neocerebellum is larger than normal in people with Williams Syndrome and smaller in than normal in people who have Autism, and that the cerebellum as a whole plays an important role in music cognition.

Levitin has an interesting background, as he was a producer and engineer for many years before entering the world of academia - perhaps this explains his inclination to write a book that is accessible to the general public rather than the niche academic bubble of music cognition specialists. I certainly enjoyed his name dropping and anecdotal stories and quotes from musicians like Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Neil Young. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I appreciate his detailed bibliography with personal notes on the books so that I can explore the subject further.