‘This is Your Brain on Music’ is a fascinating book about connections – exploring how emotional links are made through memories and interactions while listening to or performing music.
Daniel Levitin starts from the basics, asking the question ‘What is music?’ – examining what it is about music that makes us obsess about it. He writes: “the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive reptilian regions of the cerebelar vermis, and the amygdala – the heart of emotional processing in the cortex”. A phrase like this, taken out of context, sounds a bit dry but he manages to weave such information into a text rich in anecdotal asides and down to earth examples. Continue reading
