Summary Of This Is Your Brain On Music By David Levitin

I am driving in my car to the library with music playing and all of a sudden I feel a rush of excitement. When I get to the library parking lot, I glance down at my car radio and think, “What about that song caused me to get a rush of chills?” In David Levitin’s novel “This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” Levitin describes the neural pathways that make the human brain and how they connect with music to create this sensation along with other topics. Levitin goes into detail of why people gravitate to certain types of music as opposed to others, which musical components cause that rush of chills, and the undeniable connection between music and the brain.

To begin, as a prospective music major, this book not only enhanced

Levitin used situational analogies such as asking readers to imagine hitch hiking from one place to the next and having the driver go off the main road to take short-cuts. Then Levitin then explains that most of us would feel scared while others would feel excited when going away from the familiarity of those “landmarks”. Thus, “those parts of the piece that become landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be; his knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain ‘hooks’ in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds” (238). In addition, Levitin also used experiments from Alexandra Lamont from Keele University to prove to readers that our music preferences are influenced by the music we hear while in the womb, “In Lamont’s experiment, mothers played a single piece of music to their babies repeatedly during the final three months of gestation” (224). After the baby was born the mothers were asked to not have the babies listen to the piece of music until the second part of the experiment. After a year passed, the infant would be placed in front of two speakers. Speake A would play the piece of music hear during the final three months of gestation and Speaker B would play another piece of music. Whichever way the baby’s head turned the speaker would play their specified song giving the infant control of what it listened to. After the experiment, “she found that they tended to look longer at the speaker that was playing music they heard in the womb than at the speaker playing the novel music, confirming that they preferred the music to which they had the prenatal exposure” (224). The use of analogies and experiments not only assisted in the readers’ understanding, but also kept readers engage in their