Get your hearing sense off the recliner …

I was reading this review http://salon.com/books/review/2006/09/05/levitin/ of a book on Salon.com today. Farhad Manjoo has written a review on neuroscientist-record producer Daniel Levitin’s “This is your brain on music”. It got me thinking along many different paths. One path led me to a post-mortem analysis of my failed marriage. Another thought got me questioning the plasticity of human brains. Yet another had me pondering on parallels between a Zen thought and quantum mechanics. I voluntarily capped myself to one last stream of thoughts about our reptilian brains.

What got me thinking about our reptilian brains was this. Levitin has utilized what the reviewer calls an advanced technique to garner evidence that music activates the cerebellum, a.k.a reptilian brain. I get that. What I do not get, however, is a wild flight of fancy that states without any evidence to back it up; that, since the cerebellum is the body’s time-keeper, it picks up rhythm in music. Not content with this one clever piece of grand folk wisdom masquerading as science, there is another wild leap of faith in linking the cerebellum to emotions by a flimsy set of extrapolations.

This extrapolation is based on the finding that the cerebellum is activated only when you listen to music you like. The finding makes sense. What does not is the resultant claim that music we like is an indicator of emotional involvement. In my mind, it is decidedly reductionist to claim that. It seems to me that either Levintin or Majnoo is passing off folk wisdom as a scientifically verifiable assertion. Asking me to agree with an empirical observation that people only like the music they emotionally can relate to is bad science.

It could be that there is music that is liked because there is an intellectual component, for instance, an intricate rhythm pattern to which one has an intellectual fascination, yet absolutely no emotional involvement. That this thought has occurred to either the researcher or the reviewer is also shown, and I quote verbatim, “Part of the pleasure we find in music is the result of something like a guessing game that the brain then plays with itself …” To me, it seems like the guessing game situation is more of an intellectual activity; not an emotional one. Agreed, the driver for this intellectual activity might be a deep emotional need (if you were to believe the psychotherapists); but that still does not conclusively link music we like to our emotions.

What is known to-date about the cerebellum’s function of being our bodies time-keeper and the consequent association with rhythm in music is clever. It seems incomplete to me, however to place the cerebellum in center-stage of our brain’s responses to music only on the basis of studying polyrhythmic music. How about monorhythmic or arrhythmic music that evokes a sense of timelessness and eternity – examples of which could be found in Gregorian Chants or some works of abstract jazz that are arrhythmic; both of which have been associated with evoking an emotion of peacefulness. This is yet another example of the author or reviewer’s reductionism in a different context – based on the small sample size of studying only rhythmic music, a case has been built to link emotions to the cerebellum.
Without having conclusively made an all-inclusive case for linking emotions to the music we like, demolishing a long-held assumption that the cerebellum plays a role in emotions is a major leap of faith. To give the benefit of doubt, that is probably something the researchers have addressed in a scientific paper in the trade journals. It might also be that the book is for the general public and not for either the neuroscientist or the musician; but that’s another point with the review, it does not explicitly or implicitly mention the target audience for the book.

Having talked about Levitin or Manjoo’s fanciful association, it is now turn to talk about my own fanciful association. On reading that the Zen saying, ‘if a tree fell in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did it really fall?’ could have a scientific explanation behind it – an explanation that sound is a psychological phenomenon, I immediately thought how it mirrored the famous thought experiment — Schrodinger’s cat. Levitin constructs a theory for perception of sound that seems right, to my biased mind, influenced by quantum thinking. Levitin’s hypothesis has him say that our individual brains build a subjective representation out of objective audio frequencies.
I think Levintin has done well to ratify the validity of quantum mechanistic principles in cognitive theory, intentionally or inadvertently for he has validated that much of what we think as sounds occur inside our heads and not outside. So, the Zen saying is not all that empirical after all.

Without having read the book, I can only make a broad guess that Levintin did not conclusively state that only the music of our teens is imprinted permanently in our consciousness – which makes me wonder why the reviewer chose to highlight only that aspect prominently in his synopsis and even start the review through that filtered view.
I still listen to the music I listened to in my teens; but I cannot claim that it is permanently stuck in my mind. I never listened to opera or jazz when I was in my teens and today that is my predominant choice of music to listen to at all times today a decade and odd after my teen years bypassed me. I still listen to the music and musicians of my teens, if only to act as a baseline to measure how my musical sensibilities have evolved since. The music of my teens has definitely not burned my soul nor remained essential for the rest of my time (to paraphrase the reviewer).
Unfortunate though the reviewer’s singular emphasis might be, the bigger issue to me is that perhaps our brains are much more plastic than what we might give it credit for. I think that the conventional wisdom that Levintin has sought to reiterate – that neuronal connections are being pruned, not formed after the teens – might need further critical examination.

Finally, the review closes on a high note – it claims the most important part of music to be it’s connection to love, or, more specifically, to arousal and mating. Looking back at my failed marriage, I can’t but think if there is more than a grain of truth to that assertion. My ex-wife and I did not share similar, let alone same tastes in music. While I run wild with this new hypothesis for another justification for why my ex-wife and I were never meant to be together, I wonder if it more than my justification – that music really is the language of mating and that my next speed date should be at Lincoln Center or Covent Garden.