![]() ![]() In fact much more of the brain is recruited for the perception of music, for the perception of language so that pitch and rhythm and melodic contour and everything all have their own parts of the brain, and probably 15 or 20 parts of the brain are involved, going from frontal lobes right down to the cerebellum in the musical experience. What is clear is that the human brain is uniquely wired for dealing with very rapid, complex, segmented streams of sound, whether this is speech or song. Oliver Sacks: Well, of course one can only speculate there, and people have been speculating like crazy, and often very contentiously for the last 250 years, wondering whether speech gave rise to music or visa versa, the extent to which one is dependent on the other, the extent to which they might have evolved independently. But what does Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia and a brain scientist himself, think about the origins of our love of music? And what about those cases he's written about? What do they tell us about it all? Robyn Williams: Alan Harvey, a brain biologist in Perth. Norman Mailer's comment that jazz is orgasm might be closer to the biological truth than even he suspected. These areas are generally associated with emotion, with reward systems associated with food, sex and so on, with linkages to the autonomic nervous system, all of this perhaps reflecting the early evolutionary importance of music in prosodic communication in our ancestors and cousins. Interestingly, areas of the limbic system are also activated when listening to music. It seems music has biological and not just cultural roots. ![]() Is it a matter of habit? Culture? Or is music wired in?Īlan Harvey: Numerous recent brain-imaging studies confirm there are identifiable regions involved in the processing of music. So why do our brains respond to music positively or with revulsion. Why, on the other hand would you use this music to keep rowdy teenagers away from railway stations where they may cause trouble? That's Chopin, a favourite composer of Oliver Sacks. ![]() Robyn Williams: Why do those sounds beguile us so? Some of us. ![]()
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