The Science of a Human Obsession
Thursday, April 17th, 2008 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kThis is Your Brain on Music
The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J Levitin
ISBN 0-525-94969-0
Dutton, 2006
Eight out of ten stars.
A delightful, page-turning introduction to the neurological basis of musical performance and appreciation. I love "scientist-for-a-day" books, which explore a topic in enough depth to surprise and educate me, and are aimed at the curious lay reader who lacks calculus, chemistry, or other deep scientific fundamentals. I have the flattering illusion that I actually understand the material as I read it, and retain some high points. Natalie Angier, Stephen Jay Gould, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Steven Pinker, and V.S. Ramachandran are other exemplars of this genre.
Levitin combines decades in two careers: musician/sound engineer and experimental neuropsychologist. His musical background helps him evoke strong musical examples from the reader's own soundtrack, whether it's classical or jazz or pop. The staying power of the seven-measure "Yesterday" demonstrates the ubiquity of the four or eight-measure scheme in 20th century popular music. He cares about why love songs make us feel so strongly, and points out the brain-level connections between the perceptions of rhythm, pitch, harmony and emotions, memory-encoding, movement.
He introduced me to empirical philosophy, where researchers are testing whether there's a pitch to the sound when a tree falls in an uninhabited forest. (No.) More intriguing is Eleanor Rosch's proposition that Aristotle's neat binary world is incomplete; depending on context something can be more or less associated with a category. She challenges how psychological experiments extract one property from its essential context for testing. This kidnapping undercuts the meaning of the results. Most thrillingly, Rosch parses out which stimuli are privileged in our cognitive and perceptual systems, providing some "hard" evidence to distinguish cultural bias. (An example: our visual system is biased toward perceiving red. Cross-cultural experiments, even including people who have only two words for color, demonstrate a common human perception of the reddest "red.")
Much of this work is a guided tour through the recent literature; over half the bibliography postdates 1990. Either he's making a particular effort to report the work of female scientists (nice) or there has been a dramatic increase in the work of female scientists (even better). No data is provided on other human dimensions of his sources--race, class, typicality. He writes the "see saw pronoun," alternating "she" and "he" in each chapter. That I notice this right away is probably an artifact of my age; I wonder how long it may take for gender-neutral writing to affect us as readers?
Unfortunately, no awareness of gender issues informs the final chapter on music's evolutionary value. Perhaps his experiences producing rock'n'roll in the 70s & 80s underpin his assumptions that musicmakers = hunters = men, seeking to trumpet their value as fathers/providers via elaborate music & dancing. He posits the women as passive consumers of their men's output. It's particularly weird since Levitin makes a point that the categories of "expert performer" and "educated but inexpert audience" are of very recent vintage, and that all our brains and bodies are fabulously skilled at hearing, understanding, and making music.
Disability Angle: As with most brain science, much of the theory is inferred from the experience of people with disabilities ("lesion based cases"). Scientists look at "broken" brains to teach them how "normal" brains work. Unlike most writers, Levitin doesn't dismiss our experiences as unimportant merely because our brains are atypical--he's willing to acknowledge the musical talents of people with Wlliams Syndrome. However, he doesn't seem to consider whether his research data may include our creative responses to lack or loss or difference.
The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J Levitin
ISBN 0-525-94969-0
Dutton, 2006
Eight out of ten stars.
A delightful, page-turning introduction to the neurological basis of musical performance and appreciation. I love "scientist-for-a-day" books, which explore a topic in enough depth to surprise and educate me, and are aimed at the curious lay reader who lacks calculus, chemistry, or other deep scientific fundamentals. I have the flattering illusion that I actually understand the material as I read it, and retain some high points. Natalie Angier, Stephen Jay Gould, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Steven Pinker, and V.S. Ramachandran are other exemplars of this genre.
Levitin combines decades in two careers: musician/sound engineer and experimental neuropsychologist. His musical background helps him evoke strong musical examples from the reader's own soundtrack, whether it's classical or jazz or pop. The staying power of the seven-measure "Yesterday" demonstrates the ubiquity of the four or eight-measure scheme in 20th century popular music. He cares about why love songs make us feel so strongly, and points out the brain-level connections between the perceptions of rhythm, pitch, harmony and emotions, memory-encoding, movement.
He introduced me to empirical philosophy, where researchers are testing whether there's a pitch to the sound when a tree falls in an uninhabited forest. (No.) More intriguing is Eleanor Rosch's proposition that Aristotle's neat binary world is incomplete; depending on context something can be more or less associated with a category. She challenges how psychological experiments extract one property from its essential context for testing. This kidnapping undercuts the meaning of the results. Most thrillingly, Rosch parses out which stimuli are privileged in our cognitive and perceptual systems, providing some "hard" evidence to distinguish cultural bias. (An example: our visual system is biased toward perceiving red. Cross-cultural experiments, even including people who have only two words for color, demonstrate a common human perception of the reddest "red.")
Much of this work is a guided tour through the recent literature; over half the bibliography postdates 1990. Either he's making a particular effort to report the work of female scientists (nice) or there has been a dramatic increase in the work of female scientists (even better). No data is provided on other human dimensions of his sources--race, class, typicality. He writes the "see saw pronoun," alternating "she" and "he" in each chapter. That I notice this right away is probably an artifact of my age; I wonder how long it may take for gender-neutral writing to affect us as readers?
Unfortunately, no awareness of gender issues informs the final chapter on music's evolutionary value. Perhaps his experiences producing rock'n'roll in the 70s & 80s underpin his assumptions that musicmakers = hunters = men, seeking to trumpet their value as fathers/providers via elaborate music & dancing. He posits the women as passive consumers of their men's output. It's particularly weird since Levitin makes a point that the categories of "expert performer" and "educated but inexpert audience" are of very recent vintage, and that all our brains and bodies are fabulously skilled at hearing, understanding, and making music.
Disability Angle: As with most brain science, much of the theory is inferred from the experience of people with disabilities ("lesion based cases"). Scientists look at "broken" brains to teach them how "normal" brains work. Unlike most writers, Levitin doesn't dismiss our experiences as unimportant merely because our brains are atypical--he's willing to acknowledge the musical talents of people with Wlliams Syndrome. However, he doesn't seem to consider whether his research data may include our creative responses to lack or loss or difference.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-17 07:59 pm (UTC)Me too--though I haven't read many; I'll have to check out some of the authors you mentioned.
Somewhat science-related--thanks for the suggestion, a while ago, that I look into memory tips & tricks! I got this book out from the library & while I didn't do any of the stuff as diligently as I probably should have... er, I may in the future??? If nothing else, it got me more aware of things I can do to work my mental muscles, as it were... so thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-17 09:45 pm (UTC)While I've enjoyed all the authors I mention, #1 is Fausto-Sterling's amazing Sexing the Body. Her careful documentation of the slippery sand underlying almost every "common-sense" biological explanation of gender difference blew my mind wide open. FREX: testosterone is no more a male hormone than estrogen is a female one.
(Word can't convey how excited I was when I got my med mix right enough that I could actually play a strategy game on the computer again! Previously I was too fuzzy to make decisions or too sharp to cope with frustration -- so I treasure the joys of "fun" cognition!)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-26 05:58 pm (UTC)And yay for being able to play strategy games again!!