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August 25, 2006

Make Your Brain Happy

Daniel Levitin, a former rock and roll music producer, has spent the past 16 years working in academia and studying music and the brain and is now seen as one of the foremost experts in the field. His new book, "This Is Your Brain on Music," looks at how brains process and react to a variety of music and why music makes us feel good. And it sounds absolutely fascinating.

For example, did you know that people with musical talent do not have something different in their brains from other people? Rather, a combination of a lot of different traits seems to predispose people to better understand music. Levitin points to traits like patience, eye-hand coordination, the ability to predict what comes next in a sequence, rhythm, pitch, etc. Levin says:

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

And have you ever wondered why rock stars, no matter how ugly or rude they are, always seem to get the hottest girlfriends? Levin describes the various theories:

One theory is that music is an evolutionary accident, piggybacking on language: We exploited language to create music just for our own pleasure. A competing view, one that Darwin held, is that music was selected by evolution because it signals certain kinds of intellectual, physical and sexual fitness to a potential mate….

(Research has shown that) if women could choose who they'd like to be impregnated by, they'd choose a rock star. There's something about the rock star's genes that is signaling creativity, flexibility of thinking, flexibility of mind and body, an ability to express and process emotions -- not to mention that (musical talent) signals that if you can waste your time on something that has no immediate impact on food-gathering and shelter, you’ve got your food-gathering and shelter taken care of.

And perhaps most interesting, though not surprising to those who love music, is the fact that music has a physical effect on the brain that makes it happy:

Music activates the same parts of the brain and causes the same neurochemical cocktail as a lot of other pleasurable activities like orgasms or eating chocolate -- or if you're a gambler winning a bet or using drugs if you're a drug user. Serotonin and dopamine are both involved.

People have long suspected that music can have a powerful effect on the mind. Levitin's research would appear to not only confirm that suspicion, but also explain why. Another book to add to my future reading list …

Posted by Becky at August 25, 2006 10:11 AM