The Creative Power

The latest talk in the Library of Congress's Music and the Brain series featured author, musician, producer and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, the author of This is Your Brain on Music.

Levitin has a new book out - The World in Six Songs and that seemed to be the focus of his talk. However, the lecture and the question and answer period allowed fascinating insight into how and why we love music so much.

Levitin works with the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise and is on the faculty of McGill University's psychology faculty in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has the unique quality of having been a professional musician, as well as a producer and now studies music from a neuroscientific viewpoint. He has 14 gold and platinum recordings to his credit.

During the talk, Levitin recalled how once as a producer, Carlos Santana came in to lay down some guitar tracks for an album. Levitin found himself feeling "goosebumps" as Santana played. He was fascinated by the reaction, and wondered why the music affected him so much. That was the beginning of his journey through neuroscience and led to his place now.

"I had dutifully lit all the candles in the room," Levitin said. "And he was in the studio and I was at the board. It is such an extraordinary experience to be in the presence of someone like that. It was amazing. I thought 'what in the world is going on here?'"

The author said that another of his mentors Norda Michael Waldon told him that if you want to be a producer, you have to feel the goosebumps every day. If you don't - if it's just a job - then you don't belong there. Levitin's curiosity led him back to school at Stanford and UC Berkley. Neuroscience classes were asking the right questions.

The field of neuromusicology got a kick in the pants in 1997 when MIT professor Stephen Pinker (Author of The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works). And he told a room full of music cognition scientists that what they were doing was really not worth anything, "auditory cheesecake" is what he called music. And the challenge was on.

The point of the book was to gather the thought about why we have music and what the latest psychology and neurological studies indicate about the subject. Levitin went back to early origins of music - including going back to what he called Neanderthal speech, which he said was more musical than our current language. He likened Neanderthal speech to the teacher in Charlie Brown, using pitch trajectory and emphasis.

The talk also touched on the argument that music is older than speech by looking at the areas that humans have in common with all vertebrates. These areas light up in brain scans when people listen to music. So since the so-called "reptilian" areas of the brain fire without the speech centers being involved, it suggests that music is an older form of communication.

Levitin mentioned that for most of human history music and dance were inseparable - music-dance. According to Levitin, humans are the only animal species that can synchronize our movement to sound - in dance. Sound comes through the ear, and the motor system figures out how to move the body through another sense and synchronize to sound. Levitin said that large-scale human cooperative enterprises such as building cities and other "civilization" were evidence of the necessity to synchronize movement to music.

I found the talk interesting and - as in all these talks - too short. The evening ended with a question and answer period and there were more questions than there was time to answer them.