Our amusing musical brain

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks Knopf/Picador: 2007. 400 pp. $26/£17.99 This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin Atlantic: 2007. 320 pp. £17.99 Think of a favourite piece of music — a pop song or classical piece that you’ve heard hundreds of times. Think about how it starts. When you can hear the tune in your head, sing, hum or whistle it (unless you’re in a library, in which case you might want to try this later). According to experiments done by Daniel Levitin and Perry Cook in the early 1990s, even if you have had no musical training, your rendition of the tune will probably be very close to the original in tempo, and — perhaps more surprisingly — also quite accurate in absolute pitch. Why should our brains be able to perform such a feat? Of what use are our musical powers and passions? And what can they tell us about how the brain works, or how — sometimes spectacularly — it doesn’t? Oliver Sacks, continuing in the tradition of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, addresses these questions by offering a collection of ‘tales’ in Musicophilia, illustrating yet more ways in which our brains can take us by surprise. In This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin presents a more systematic account of what cognitive neuroscience has to say about how we process and respond to music. Both authors make the case.....read on