Aug 31 2009
This Is Your Brain on Music
In his book This Is Your Brain on Music, neuroscientist and musician Daniel J. Levitin discusses the effect music has on the human brain. He notes that music is unique in its ability to stimulate all areas of the brain at once. He says, “Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem.”
In my five-step Brain Education method, the goal of the fourth step, Brain Integrating, is to unify the three layers of the brain—the primitive brain stem, the emotional limbic system, and the rational neocortcx. Very often one part of the brain undermines another, as when rational thinking is overcome by emotion. The goal of Brain Integrating is to get the various parts of the brain working together harmoniously, rather than competing with each other. Since it activates diverse parts of the brain, music seems to be a good step in that direction, which may also explain the cognitive advantage that children who study music seem to have over their nonmusical peers (Levitin).
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