Brain Advance Access published online on February 17, 2008
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awn017
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book Review |
Another musical mystery tour
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and they have a point. Beyond technical description, musical experience rests ultimately with music itself. If I compare the entry of the second subject in Schubert's B flat sonata to a shaft of sunlight, it is hardly illuminating unless the music has a similar effect on you, in which case my saying it is superfluous. Writing about music and the brain, on the other hand, might be a more promising proposition. Music is of great antiquity and exists in all human societies, only humans produce and appreciate it, and (despite certain similarities to language) it is unlike other complex cognitive functions. From the scientific perspective, therefore, music illustrates a universal mode of brain operation with unique features that cannot easily be captured by studying other brain processes. There are metaphysical analogies, too. Like the brain itself, music has the
Dementia Research Centre, Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, UK