This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession - Softcover

Levitin, Daniel J.

3.89

63,607 ratings by Goodreads

9781843547167: This Is Your Brain On Music: Understanding a Human Obsession

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843547163 ISBN 13: 9781843547167

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2008

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Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award
The Independent best books of the year
The Guardian best books of the year

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive explanation of how humans experience music and to unravel the mystery of our perennial love affair with it. Using musical examples from Bach to the Beatles, Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience.

Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand it, and its role in human life.

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Review:

Fluent and readable... [Levitin] rightly insists that we are all better equipped to perform and appreciate music than we think... We are, he says, hard-wired for music. Source: Observer

Fascinating... Levitin's extremely skilled at laying out complex concepts in understandable terms... an absorbing explanation of the mechanics of music. Source: Sunday Business Post

Consistently interesting... Music, Levitin argues, is not a decadent modern diversion but something of fundamental importance to the history of human development. Source: Literary Review

Endlessly stimulating. Author: Oliver Sacks

Music seems to have an almost willful, evasive quality, defying simple explanation, so that the more we find out, the more there is to know... Daniel Levitin's book is an eloquent and poetic exploration of this paradox. Source: Sting

From the Author:

Daniel Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill University, Canada, where he holds the James McGill Chair. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he was a session musician, sound engineer and record producer.

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