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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 A Letdown Nov 10, 2009
The title of this book is intriguing. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this book. I had such high hopes. The premise that music affects our brain like a drug is interesting, and I couldn't wait to see how the author would support such a claim. The author vacillates between interesting, insightful, and perceptive, and pedantic, tedious, and dull. It's frightening how equally at home he seems in either mode. I never thought it possible for music to be so boring a subject. My eyes glazed over several times. He leaves many questions unanswered or half-answered, and oftentimes, he seems to halt in the middle of the explanation without wrapping up his thoughts and presenting the conclusion. What I walked away from this book with were a handful of interesting antidotes, factoids, and trivia. This book could have been so much more. This author also likes to name-drop, which gets annoying.
Also, what would make the book much better, without considerably overhauling the entire thing, is a companion CD. The author frequently references certain pieces of music to make his point. If the reader is unfamiliar with the piece, he must either go scrounging around the internet for a sample of the music or make a guess as to the author's point.
 Why music rocks your brain. Nov 08, 2009
For those of you trying to understand brain injuries there is a fascinating book which I think is a must read, especially if you happen to have a situation with any hearing issues or auditory centers processing problems. Even if you just love music it is a great read. I think the concepts would help explain any brain injury case to a jury.
The book explains the complexity of the neural connections and the systems involved in our perception and understanding of musical sounds which really are nothing but air molecules vibrating on our ear drum which is trasmitted as a signal by the auditory nerves. The incredible brain takes it from there and makes sense of the rhythms, the notes, the tones, etc. There is no sound in the forest when a tree falls unless someone is there to hear it. Almost every part of the brain is involved in auditory processing and the book explains this very well and in a way that could be used to explain this marvelous system to jury.
The author asks a lot of interesting questions; why do we like some songs and not others?, why do we sometimes get a song in our head that we can't stop humming?, why do songs affect our emotions so easily? He makes a clear distinction between the mind (thoughts, feelings, emotions, sense of me) from the organic brain itself (axons, neurons, lobes, fluid, blood vessels, arteries) and explains how neuroscientists use imaging studies to map these different areas.
So while we make great efforts in court to prove that the brain is damaged by trauma, it is really the mind of the victim that is affected in its functioning. Pain fibers, music fibers, thought fibers are all interconnected. So a pain sensing neuron may be directly connected to a neuron that processes emotions. So, damage to either is damage to the entire link. This can help explain why pain can change the emotions of a person and cause anxiety and depression organically.
The author is Daniel J. Levitin who is both a rock and roller and a cognitive neuroscientist. He even uses the phrase "reptilian" brain in explaining how music affects our primitive selves. He explains why in some cultures musical sounds mean different things to a person than they may mean to a person from another culture.
He gives a very good description of how the brain processes information from the bottom (brain stem - reptilian) to the top (frontal lobe) and from the top down in a continuing processes that making sense of and adds the meaning to our sensory inputs, and sometimes makes mistakes while doing so.
I am only half way through this read, hope I get to bed by midnight. Jim
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Interesting subject Oct 29, 2009
In the US, if someone writes something about the understanding of music, he gets it published with much hype from the publisher and from the reviewers. In other countries that I know, it is the exact opposite: if you have something to say, you are confronted with a powerful Establishment, and you will very probably be rejected. Now about this book:
There are three books in one: 1. Experimental findings in brain localisations in the perception of music. 2. Various remarks on musical aesthetics. 3. Personal anecdotes. Those three are unrelated and could be made into three separate books: for the first, after some sorting and classifying of the information; for the second, after pruning the errors which other reviewers have detailed and which will not be listed again here (some are big, like the confusion between octaves and harmonics noted by several reviewers), the redundancies, the all-too-obvious (such as this: mothers take a soft voice when singing to their baby); for the third, also after some sorting of the personal info.
The rest of my remarks concern, not only this book, but I suppose the whole neuroscience. Here the author talks glibly of neurons "firing" but never takes the trouble to tell us what he means by that. What happens in a neuron that "fires"? Is it something like a flip-flop microcircuit that switches from a 0 state to a 1 state? What is the information content of a neuron? Also, we read of the great number of neurons in the brain, and of the even greater of connections between neurons; but, I suppose, only neighbouring neurons can get connected; are these connections fixed, or mobile? There is the word "synapse" which the author doesn't use: what is a synapse? what happens in a synapse? Also, we are told that there is a concentration of blood in a region of the brain when that region is active; but what produces that? are there tiny muscles that dilate or contract blood vessels in the brain? If so, what activates them? I don't know the answer to all these questions; if the author knows, he should tell us; if he doesn't, he should endeavour to get some research started on the subject.
I tought better Oct 28, 2009
The book was used..a lot actually..the cover was a little bit broken and it looks like somebody did throw water on the book..also it has some black spots on the pages..but at least I could read what's written on it..
 Difficult to place... is this academia or anecdotal memoirs? Oct 21, 2009
Difficult to place... is this academia or anecdotal memoirs?
First of all I think it needs to be said, that this is not a bad text per se. Sure it has faults - lots of them, but I really feel that the positives outweigh the negatives and that the hoards of supposed 'professional musician/scientist' (I think not) who appear to have read this text and given it a one star rating are perhaps motivated by false-pride and jealousy - never a good combination on which to build sound judgement!
The real problem with this text is that, to quote from the 1950s it doesn't 'know its place'. It reads in parts like an academic text, maybe an undergraduate thesis. Then it veers off into the world of gossip, anecdotes, and conjecture. It is almost like a mild Schizophrenic who thinks on the one side, they are an MIT professor of socio-musicology and on the other that they are an orator, a teller of stories, tales and anecdotes in an c.18th circus. Throughout this tussle one cannot help but think Professor Levitin is not one of those sad baby-boomers who (under his sterile lab-coat) still tucks his paunch into a pair of faded blue-jeans, which he wears as some empty statement of post-conformist rebellion.
To the text...
The plusses.
i) There are lots of very interesting correlations between the points he makes, and the visual Arts, something which interested me personally.
ii) In contains some genuinely fascinating revelations.
iii) It appears to be mostly well researched and well founded.
iv) It gives the novice reader a window into both musicology and neuroscience - albeit a tedious and dull one.
The minuses:
i) It is VERY, very, VERY boring in parts. Is this due to the subject matter? or the penmanship? One is never quite sure.
ii) It is full of dull, mostly irrelevant anecdotes. The sad professor mingles with the has-beens, the never-rans and the odd star.
iii) Levitin appears not to know how to use personal pronouns. The text is littered with THE most bizarre use of 'he' and 'she', when a simply 'they' would suffice.
iv) Sadly the edition I purchased contains spelling mistakes and errors in literary protocol.
v) Very often conjecture masquerades as Truth, with no citation to support his stance.
vi) Levitin occasionally leaves his field of obvious expertise and wanders into other academic disciplines where he looks like an ill-informed half-wit.
vii) Overall, the text lacks continuity in parts; continuity of both argument and of logic.
The conclusion.
To restate, I would say it is worth investing your time into reading this and it is worth persevering until the end. Although there are a LOT of minor annoyances such as those mentioned prior, there are conversely, a good deal of genuinely interesting points, which may or may not assimilate with areas of your personal interests. Like Santa, though, I feel that there is surely something here for everyone, no matter how small the gift may be.
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