The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 081122418X
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A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction. A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

This is Your Brain on Music

This is Your Brain on Music
Author: Daniel Levitin
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2019-07-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0241987369
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From the author of The Changing Mind and The Organized Mind comes a New York Times bestseller that unravels the mystery of our perennial love affair with music ***** 'What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode and John Cage fundamentally have in common?' Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. From Mozart to the Beatles, neuroscientist, psychologist and internationally-bestselling author Daniel 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. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothing less than a new way to understand music, and what it can teach us about ourselves. ***** 'Music seems to have an almost wilful, 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' Sting 'You'll never hear music in the same way again' Classic FM magazine 'Music, Levitin argues, is not a decadent modern diversion but something of fundamental importance to the history of human development' Literary Review

The Musical Brain

The Musical Brain
Author: Abel James
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2014-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781483915647
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Music is everywhere; it pumps through earbuds, elevators, commercials, arenas, and it's even beamed out to space. But - despite its rampant abundance in human experience, history, and culture - music has no clear adaptive function. This begs the question: What are the origins of music, and why does it play such an enormous role in our lives?Did music arise from sexual selection, from the faculty of speech, as a group-oriented communication device, or is it merely a fortuitous side effect of various perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that serve other functions?In this multidisciplinary review of academic literature, Abel James incorporates research in neuroscience, linguistics, perception and challenges a wide range of eminent thinkers to uncover the origins of music and explore its profound effects on the human brain."The Musical Brain is a technical review of extraordinary breadth. There are books that you read and there are books that you study. The Musical Brain falls into the latter category."- Tony Federico

The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs
Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2008-08-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1101043458
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The author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music’s role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that “will leave you awestruck” (The New York Times). Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types—friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love—then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these “six songs” work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species. Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved—right up to the iPod.

Music and the Brain

Music and the Brain
Author: Macdonald Critchley
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1483192792
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Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music is a collaborative work that discusses musical perception in the context of medical science. The book is comprised of 24 chapters that are organized into two parts. The first part of the text details the various aspects of nervous function involved in musical activity, which include neural and mechanicals aspects of singing; neurophysiological interpretation of musical ability; and ecstatic and synesthetic experiences during musical perception. The second part deals with the effects of nervous disease on musical function, such as musicogenic epilepsy, the amusias, and occupational palsies. The book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of disciplines that deal with the nervous system, such as psychology, neurology, and psychiatry.

Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Evolution, the Musical Brain, Medical Conditions, and Therapies

Music, Neurology, and Neuroscience: Evolution, the Musical Brain, Medical Conditions, and Therapies
Author:
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2015-03-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0444635521
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Did you ever ask whether music makes people smart, why a Parkinson patient's gait is improved with marching tunes, and whether Robert Schumann was suffering from schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease? This broad but comprehensive book deals with history and new discoveries about music and the brain. It provides a multi-disciplinary overview on music processing, its effects on brain plasticity, and the healing power of music in neurological and psychiatric disorders. In this context, the disorders the plagued famous musicians and how they affected both performance and composition are critically discussed, and music as medicine, as well as music as a potential health hazard are examined. Among the other topics covered are: how music fit into early conceptions of localization of function in the brain, the cultural roots of music in evolution, and the important roles played by music in societies and educational systems. - Topic: Music is interesting to almost everybody - Orientation: This book looks at music and the brain both historically and in the light of the latest research findings - Comprehensiveness: This is the largest and most comprehensive volume on "music and neurology" ever written! - Quality of authors: This volume is written by a unique group of real world experts representing a variety of fields, ranging from history of science and medicine to neurology and musicology

Music, Language, and the Brain

Music, Language, and the Brain
Author: Aniruddh D. Patel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 019989017X
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In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This volume provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities. Winner of the 2008 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

Language, Music, and the Brain

Language, Music, and the Brain
Author: Michael A. Arbib
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 677
Release: 2013-06-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262018101
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A presentation of music and language within an integrative, embodied perspective of brain mechanisms for action, emotion, and social coordination. This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple levels of structure from brain to behavior to culture; the semantics of internal and external worlds and the role of emotion; and the evolution and development of language. The book offers specially commissioned expositions of current research accessible both to experts across disciplines and to non-experts. These chapters provide the background for reports by groups of specialists that chart current controversies and future directions of research on each theme. The book looks beyond mere auditory experience, probing the embodiment that links speech to gesture and music to dance. The study of the brains of monkeys and songbirds illuminates hypotheses on the evolution of brain mechanisms that support music and language, while the study of infants calibrates the developmental timetable of their capacities. The result is a unique book that will interest any reader seeking to learn more about language or music and will appeal especially to readers intrigued by the relationships of language and music with each other and with the brain. Contributors Francisco Aboitiz, Michael A. Arbib, Annabel J. Cohen, Ian Cross, Peter Ford Dominey, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Leonardo Fogassi, Jonathan Fritz, Thomas Fritz, Peter Hagoort, John Halle, Henkjan Honing, Atsushi Iriki, Petr Janata, Erich Jarvis, Stefan Koelsch, Gina Kuperberg, D. Robert Ladd, Fred Lerdahl, Stephen C. Levinson, Jerome Lewis, Katja Liebal, Jônatas Manzolli, Bjorn Merker, Lawrence M. Parsons, Aniruddh D. Patel, Isabelle Peretz, David Poeppel, Josef P. Rauschecker, Nikki Rickard, Klaus Scherer, Gottfried Schlaug, Uwe Seifert, Mark Steedman, Dietrich Stout, Francesca Stregapede, Sharon Thompson-Schill, Laurel Trainor, Sandra E. Trehub, Paul Verschure

Music and the Aging Brain

Music and the Aging Brain
Author: Lola Cuddy
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0128174234
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Music and the Aging Brain describes brain functioning in aging and addresses the power of music to protect the brain from loss of function and how to cope with the ravages of brain diseases that accompany aging. By studying the power of music in aging through the lens of neuroscience, behavioral, and clinical science, the book explains brain organization and function. Written for those researching the brain and aging, the book provides solid examples of research fundamentals, including rigorous standards for sample selection, control groups, description of intervention activities, measures of health outcomes, statistical methods, and logically stated conclusions. - Summarizes brain structures supporting music perception and cognition - Examines and explains music as neuroprotective in normal aging - Addresses the association of hearing loss to dementia - Promotes a neurological approach for research in music as therapy - Proposes questions for future research in music and aging

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy

Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy
Author: Robert Jourdain
Publisher: William Morrow
Total Pages: 410
Release: 1997
Genre: Music
ISBN:
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At the evolution of music and introduces surprising new concepts of memory and perception, knowledge and attention, motion and emotion, all at work as music takes hold of us. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdain's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claimed to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who.