Glutter

Musique...

I suppose the one thing that's good about having a blog again. I can start putting notes of interesting articles I have read again...

This is fabulous.. It's about how our brains react to music...

Levitin writes. "Each person can throw as many ping-pong balls as he likes, and as often as he likes. Your job is to figure out -- just by looking at how the pillowcase moves up and down -- how many people there are, who they are, and whether they are walking toward you, walking away from you, or are standing still. This is analogous to what the auditory system has to contend with in making identifications of auditory objects in the world, using only the movement of the eardrum as a guide."

Levitin's point is that when we're listening to music, our brains are engaged in an enormously complex computational task -- so complex that no man-made computers have yet been able to do anything nearly as sophisticated with sound. Another insight is that much of what we think of as the sounds of the world actually occur inside our heads, not outside. The air molecules that strike our eardrums, for instance, carry no inherent "pitch." Instead, the molecules oscillate at a specific rate, and our brains measure the rate, and then construct an internal representation -- a high or low pitch -- based on that frequency. (In the same way, light waves carry no color -- our eyes and brains construct color by measuring the frequency of the waves.) In other words, sound is essentially a psychological phenomenon. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? "Simply no," Levitin points out. "A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard."

Your brain doesn't just come up with an internal representation of sound, it also derives meaning -- in particular, pleasure -- from sound. But how it does so surprises even neuroscientists. In his lab, Levitin has found that when people listen to a song they like -- as opposed to something that they don't like, or simply noise -- one area of the brain that's activated is the cerebellum. This seemed odd: The cerebellum is, evolutionarily, one of the oldest parts of the brain, what some people call the reptilian brain; its main purpose is to coordinate the movement and timing of our bodies, and not, scientists believed, anything more sophisticated, such as the experience of emotions. But if the cerebellum wasn't involved in emotion, why was it being activated only when people listened to something that they liked -- an emotional choice -- rather than just anything at all?