Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 4

I found chapters 4, 5, and 6 to be the most interesting parts of the book. Without giving much away, I will try to provide my concise review of these chapters. Some of the topics covered in chapter 4 are the role of functional units (called schemata) in our long-term memory stores which help us in perception and enable anticipation of incoming information and how composers violate them to create a sense of novelty in the listener; the role of neurotransmitters and receptors in providing the listener with emotions w.r.t expectation and satisfaction or violation of expectations; hemispheric specializations and their functional roles in the context of music and language; and the effect of musical training on hemispheric specialization. At the end of this chapter, Levitin provides us with a summarized, high-level hypothetical picture of the neural organization of the brain for music and speech.

Chapter 5 deals almost entirely with functional processes pertaining to memory and categorization. Cognitive science students/researchers should find this chapter appealing. In addition, frequency effects of melodies, and melodic invariance are also briefly mentioned in this chapter.

I found chapter 6 to be the most enjoyable chapter of the book. I hope that other readers would find the remaining chapters equally interesting unlike me, because herein lies the problem. After reading chapter 6, I felt like a sky diver who completed a jump in the middle of the day.....experienced an intense adrenaline rush....after which he/she had nothing better to look forward to for the rest of the day, and had to experience the remaining part of the day in lethargy. To do justice to the book, I will end my review with chapter 6, and hope that someone more deserving will inform readers about the remaining chapters. Hopefully other readers will hit their high notes at later points in the book. Music, to most people, is an emotional activity, and this chapter highlights it beautifully, while informing us about the neural correlates involved in causing those emotions. Cognitive psychologists have studied various cognitive processes, but most have shied away from studying emotion. I am glad that the role of emotion was treated on par with other cognitive processes in this book, more so in the context of a routine yet wonderful activity such as listening to music.