Review of "This is your brain on music" by Daniel Levitin - Part 3

Chapter 3 is where Levitin starts involving the reader in the neural correlates of music cognition. The gross functional generalizations of the four lobes of the brain (frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital) are mentioned, along with the older/reptilian brain. It is nice reading about the several functional processes involved in different kinds of musical activity - perception, memory (both working memory and long-term memory), attention, motor control during performance and listening, and of course...emotion. Levitin highlights the fact that almost every neural center in the brain has a part to play for perceiving, recognizing, reading and performing music....vocal or instrumental. Another interesting thing to note is the similarity between music and language in the way they are organized and perceived, as well as the neural correlates they share such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area.

Two final points of interest in this chapter are 1) perception is the end product of a long chain of neural events, and is not instantaneous; 2) perception need not always be correct....our brain can actually misinform us and fool us into believing something.
It is just amazing thinking about how complex an activity "perception" is, and how our brains have evolved to respond to the requirements of perception with incredible efficiency.....something that most of us take for granted. However, in order to achieve this kind of efficiency, there has to be some kind of trade-off in accuracy. Our brain uses stored information, does some kind of probabilistic computation to complete/fill in perceived bottom-up information with top-down context. This is what enables us to "expect" things....in a lot of cases subconsciously.

This brings us to the interesting topic of auditory as well as musical illusions analogous to visual illusions such as the Ponzo and Kaniza illusions. The book led me to investigate Sardinian acapella music for the first time. (Unfortunately, I could not decipher/perceive the illusion, although I really liked the music). But I came across other auditory illusions with respect to melody, where the pitches were segregated into different ordered patterns for the right and left ear involving high and low pitches. But when heard, we perceive the segregation different from the actual order (we tend to group lower pitches as perceived by one ear, and higher pitches as perceived by another). This definitely needs to be tried out with earphones.

I will finish my review of "This is your brain on music" within my next two blogs. If you still haven't purchased the book, or at least checked it out from your local library.......you are seriously missing out!