“This is your Brain on Music”

I finished this book up on Monday night while in Fargo.  While some of the science terminology confused me, it was pretty easy to read through.  And if I had noticed that there were appendixes in the back (with pictures even!) I might not have been so confused with the science lingo.  Overall I give this book a B+.

Why only a B+ if I liked it so much?  To be honest sometimes I felt that the anecdotes or explanations got off topic (or maybe my brain was interpreting it that way) and I forgot what the chapter was even about.  But I did like what the book was about.  When I could, I looked up the songs he was talking about and listened to the specific parts to make the correlation.  It was pretty cool when I was able to do that.

What I learned from the book is that the cerebellum, frontal lobe and other parts of your brain I can’t remember the names of, work together to determine what music we like, why we associate certain memories with songs and that certain dissonance is an acquired taste.  When you listen to music, you interpret the artists’ feelings and may feel that way yourself and thus it becomes part of your memories.  Then whenever you listen to that song, you remember how it made you feel and thus it becomes a favorite song or one that you’ll always remember because it is now associated with emotions/memories.  For me, some of those songs are “Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe or “Bittersweet Symphony” by  The Verve.  He also talks about how sometimes you’ll simply learn to like a song because of its repetition.  We get a new CD for work every so often and there’s always one or two really annoying songs that seem to play constantly.  After a few days, we realize that hey, the song is growing on us and we start to sing along and dance when it plays.  Weird huh?

I highly recommend this book to anyone.  In fact I want Andy to read it so he and I can talk about it.  Him being the engineer might pick up on some different things that I didn’t.

Sorry this post was pretty crap.  I started reading “A Room of One’s Own” so hopefully that’ll make for interesting blogging.  Then after that I have a book of poetry by Louise Erdrich and after that, if I don’t become too distracted, I think I’ll start on my summer project.  Although I think I’m going to make some time to read “World War Z” and “Good Omens”.