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Music and the Brain
In Music and the Brain, neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology Aniruddh Patel of Tufts University probes one of the mind's most profound mysteries. Covering the latest research findings-from the origins of music's emotional powers to the deficits involved in amusia, or the inability to hear music-these 18 enthralling half-hour lectures will make you think about music and your brain in a new way. "Ani's series of lectures hit all the right notes. A gifted and engaging guide, he delivers an extraordinarily comprehensive and accessible dive into the most fascinating topics in the neuroscience of music. Watch all of these and you'll know what one of the greatest minds in the field has to say about the exciting world of music and the brain." -Daniel J. Levitin, Author of This Is Your Brain On Music and Professor of neuroscience and music, McGill University Designed for music lovers and brain enthusiasts at all levels, Music and the Brain assumes no prior background in the subject. The course is truly interdisciplinary, covering fundamental ideas of music theory, neuroanatomy, and cognitive science, while spotlighting the diverse range of experiments, discoveries, and debates in this fast-changing field.
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Published January 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
November 1, 2019
This was a decent course. Professor Aniruddh D. Patel has an naturally easy teaching style and presented interesting content throughout.
The course begins with Patel telling the viewer about a 40,000 year old bone flute that was discovered in what is now Germany, proving that the history of music is much older than we previously thought.
Professor Patel hypothesizes that areas in the brain responsible for language could also be responsible for music cognition. He brings an evolutionary lens to the subject of music and musicality, which is always interesting for me.
The course covers much of the newest research around music and the brain, with lectures ranging from "Music: Culture, Biology, or Both?", to "Perceiving and Moving to a Rhythmic Beat", to "Are We the Only Musical Species?", and many others in between.
I enjoyed this course overall. Professor Patel covers many interesting topics here, and his lectures are entertaining and informative.
I would recommend this course to anyone interested in how music and the brain interact.
4 stars.
The course begins with Patel telling the viewer about a 40,000 year old bone flute that was discovered in what is now Germany, proving that the history of music is much older than we previously thought.
Professor Patel hypothesizes that areas in the brain responsible for language could also be responsible for music cognition. He brings an evolutionary lens to the subject of music and musicality, which is always interesting for me.
The course covers much of the newest research around music and the brain, with lectures ranging from "Music: Culture, Biology, or Both?", to "Perceiving and Moving to a Rhythmic Beat", to "Are We the Only Musical Species?", and many others in between.
I enjoyed this course overall. Professor Patel covers many interesting topics here, and his lectures are entertaining and informative.
I would recommend this course to anyone interested in how music and the brain interact.
4 stars.
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June 11, 2022This is a remarkable production chock full of musical arrangements. It's just too dense for me to listen through. I want to read it--because I think much of the research discussed in this is fascinating--I just can't.
August 11, 2019
A mixed bag on this one.
For me, it started off strong, bogged down in the middle, and only got more interesting with lectures 15 and 16 before bogging down again at the end. I listened to this with my spouse, who knows far more about music theory than I do. My interest was the psychological and physical effects of music. Regardless of those differences, both of us were lunging for the fast-forward button at the same spots and agreed that this GC was disappointing and didn't really live up to the synopsis.
The presenter is an evolutionary biologist, so the material is slanted from more toward looking at the research of music on primates than on musicology. or the effects of specific aspects of music on humans. And the research is...undetermined. For every study that says one thing, he presents another study that refutes it. So, we're left with a lot of "But this is a young field of study and the research so far is inconclusive."
I had hoped the series would be mostly focused on the effects of specific keys/styles or rhythms on the brain, the advantages of musical training in early childhood versus later life stages (although there is a little of this), and the mood/psychological effects of music on listeners and participants.
I also expected more musical examples and of much higher quality. The examples were not only bland and boring, but the sound quality was terrible, as if they were performed on a very cheap synthesizer.
For me, it started off strong, bogged down in the middle, and only got more interesting with lectures 15 and 16 before bogging down again at the end. I listened to this with my spouse, who knows far more about music theory than I do. My interest was the psychological and physical effects of music. Regardless of those differences, both of us were lunging for the fast-forward button at the same spots and agreed that this GC was disappointing and didn't really live up to the synopsis.
The presenter is an evolutionary biologist, so the material is slanted from more toward looking at the research of music on primates than on musicology. or the effects of specific aspects of music on humans. And the research is...undetermined. For every study that says one thing, he presents another study that refutes it. So, we're left with a lot of "But this is a young field of study and the research so far is inconclusive."
I had hoped the series would be mostly focused on the effects of specific keys/styles or rhythms on the brain, the advantages of musical training in early childhood versus later life stages (although there is a little of this), and the mood/psychological effects of music on listeners and participants.
I also expected more musical examples and of much higher quality. The examples were not only bland and boring, but the sound quality was terrible, as if they were performed on a very cheap synthesizer.
July 18, 2020
Like most of the Great Courses I have listened to, this course was well done. Unfortunately, it only partly addressed what I was looking for. Patel does a very thorough job of addressing the research into the effects of various components of Music on specific parts of the Brain.
I was more interested in the effects of Music on the whole Brain, Personality and Mental Health of the Listener. The last few chapters do address current research on Alzheimer, Parkinson’s and Stroke patients. He highlights some of the positive effects but points out that more research needs to be done.
The course’s emphasis on the arguments for Music as a product of Biological Evolution vs an acquired Human Practice was well presented but it’s more of interest to Academics and didn’t really hold my interest.
So I would recommend this course to Academic readers interested in the Neurological Effects of Music rather than Musicians and Music Lovers just interested in the overall effects of Music on the Culture and the Human Experience.
I was more interested in the effects of Music on the whole Brain, Personality and Mental Health of the Listener. The last few chapters do address current research on Alzheimer, Parkinson’s and Stroke patients. He highlights some of the positive effects but points out that more research needs to be done.
The course’s emphasis on the arguments for Music as a product of Biological Evolution vs an acquired Human Practice was well presented but it’s more of interest to Academics and didn’t really hold my interest.
So I would recommend this course to Academic readers interested in the Neurological Effects of Music rather than Musicians and Music Lovers just interested in the overall effects of Music on the Culture and the Human Experience.
February 4, 2026
I rate this book’s impact 4 out of 5.
It gave me rich insights about music’s evolutionary and neurological role. These insights felt genuinely new and fascinating, especially because I am a musician. At the same time, the book did not trigger the kind of personal behavior change that my highest-rated books caused.
What I learned and what stood out
The book says humans can transpose a pitch and still recognize it. Primates and even songbirds cannot do this.
The book says songbirds can learn to tell the difference between patterns like ABCD vs DCBA, or BACD vs A, B, C, D.
Adult male and female vocal pitches differ by about 50%.
Listening to a melody lights up more of the right side of the brain, based on an fMRI study.
Relative pitch uses the same brain areas used for spatial processing, like rotating an object in your mind. This helps explain how you recognize the same tune when someone plays it in a different key.
Why music may have evolved
The book suggests music may have evolved along with humans’ ability to form groups with in-group members. It probably does not link strongly to sexual selection, like how birds sing to attract mates, because men and women do not differ much in musical ability.
I also found this contrast interesting:
In music, repetition of phrases can feel normal and even good.
In language, repetition often feels like poor style.
The book also says the oldest musical instrument is about 40,000 years old, a Bone flute.
What animals and babies reveal
In experiments on monkeys, they chose silence over Western classical music.
In experiments with chimpanzees, they liked Indian classical and North African classical music. They did not like Japanese music that used rhythmic drums.
Studies in apes show they act differently with different music:
With soothing music, they help each other more.
With aggressive music, they get more animated.
Studies on babies show they can tell sad vs happy music.
Babies who are played music are more likely to help each other, because music can increase an in-group feeling.
Emotion in music
People can understand emotion in speech even when they do not understand the language. The book says people can also understand a complex mix of emotions in music, including anger, sadness, fear, happiness, nostalgia, and excitement, even from concert music outside their culture.
Some patterns the book mentions:
Minor key feels sadder than major key.
Slow vs fast also changes emotion.
Most music people choose causes positive emotions, not anger or fear. That fits, because people rarely choose music that makes them feel bad.
Chills and goosebumps
One physical sensation people feel is chills or goosebumps. The book explains this as a two-part reaction:
A dramatic change in music can signal danger and trigger the body.
Another part of the brain recognizes it is not real danger, it is music. That split can make the moment feel pleasurable.
The book also says people like music that connects different parts of the brain, through functional connectivity of audio regions.
Instinct, culture, and personal memory
The book separates musical feeling into different sources:
Instinctual feelings (fast tempo feels energetic, foot tapping changes how you feel).
Culturally learned feelings (what “fits” and what feels normal depends on the music you grew up with).
Individual feelings (your personal memories, like hearing a song during falling in love or at a party with friends).
It also says there are eight ways music affects you, spread across these categories.
How the brain analyzes sound
The book describes specialized processing:
One side focuses more on temporal analysis (timing).
The other side focuses more on frequency analysis (precise pitch content).
It also explains two core parts of instrument sound:
Pitch: the fundamental frequency.
Timbre: the mix of harmonic frequencies that gives an instrument its character.
A key insight: even if you remove the fundamental frequency, you can still guess the pitch from the harmonics.
The book also mentions language metaphors people use:
People describe pitch with pairs like young vs old, thick vs thin, to describe high vs low sounds.
It also says sounds have a timeline. If you play a piano note backwards, it will not sound like a piano.
Recognition happens fast
The book says people can identify songs from very short clips:
Under half a second for popular songs.
People guessed correctly about 25% of the time.
It also says emotional response can happen extremely fast:
Within 30 seconds, and even within 1 second. This suggests fast recognition of timbre matters for survival-linked reactions.
Harmony, dissonance, and “home”
The book explains the harmonicity theory:
When you add two tones, their harmonic structures can combine into equally spaced tones (harmonicity).
If they do not, the result feels disharmonic.
It says this is biologically common, but culture shapes preference. Some cultures value disharmonic sounds to express specific emotions.
It also describes tonal “gravity”:
The tonic (like C in the C scale) feels like a central tone you return to.
When people rate how well notes fit with a C scale, they rate C highest, then G (the dominant).
A dominant seventh chord creates tension and incompleteness that resolves with the next chord. Even disharmony can help music move forward.
Rhythm, speech, and language links
The book distinguishes:
Rhythmic and periodic beats in songs.
Rhythmic but not periodic patterns like Morse code, which still have temporal structure.
It also connects speech timing and musical phrasing:
When you speak, you often stretch sounds near commas, full stops, or phrase endings.
Long pauses and stretched words can signal a pause in meaning.
It says cadence differs across languages, like English vs Japanese vs French. It also suggests composers’ musical spacing may reflect the language they grew up with.
It adds that kids learn some of these patterns quickly across cultures.
It also says people tend to like beats around 100 BPM, which sits near heart rate range.
Vocal learning, beat tapping, and measurement tools
Some animals are vocal learners and can recognize a song even when played in a different key.
Many apes are not vocal learners.
The book suggests sea lions may be vocal learners, and mentions seals and walruses as vocal learners.
Parrots are vocal learners.
Humans can tap to a beat. Some apes react about 200 milliseconds after hearing a beat, which means they react rather than predict it. The book treats this as a key difference.
It also compares brain measurement tools:
EEG has high time resolution (up to 1 millisecond).
fMRI has less time resolution but helps with location, though EEG cannot pinpoint location precisely.
Music training and brain change
The book argues music is not “right brain only”. It connects many regions across both sides, including the front left areas involved in cognitive processing.
It also says musicians show more brain activity in finger areas, including fingers that non-musicians use less, like the left hand or the left little finger.
The book says the brain is more sensitive before age 7. Training before 7 is more likely to change the brain. It also says students with music training learn reading and other academic subjects faster when they enter school.
Babies, the womb, and calming
The book includes a fascinating example: sound from the father singing can reach the baby in the uterus.
It describes experiments at 37 weeks pregnancy:
Babies in the uterus react to music they heard a couple of times before.
After birth, babies react to music they heard in the uterus, but not to other music. This suggests early hearing and learning.
It also says babies prefer hearing an unfamiliar person speak in a language they know, because their native tongue appeals most.
When babies feel distress, they calm faster when:
The mother sings.
The mother speaks.
The mother shows physical affection.
The book suggests singing calms babies even more strongly than physical affection.
Music, medicine, and therapy
The book mentions conditions where a person cannot perceive or understand music. It links this to disrupted communication between brain areas, even if some areas still light up with music.
It also claims:
Surgical patients who listen to music use about 15% less anesthesia medication.
They report about 20% less pain.
It also notes NICU babies face many alarms, injections, and routine interruptions. It suggests they may show anxiety sooner, likely because of lower cortisol.
It says people with Alzheimer’s have better outcomes if they listen to music, and they tolerate medications more.
It also says people recovering from stroke, or people with speech disorders in therapy, can benefit from music intonation therapy (MIT), where they sing short phrases instead of speaking them.
Patterns in birds and early human development
The book says if you slow down parrot or songbird songs, you can hear musical patterns, including repeated short phrases.
It also says human babies babble even if they cannot hear their parents, for example if they are deaf. Over the first few years, they gradually lose the ability to understand and reproduce languages that are not native to their environment.
Similarly, the book says kids at a young age can recognize many pieces of music.
I first wrote this reviews at: https://www.harshal-patil.com/post/mu...
It gave me rich insights about music’s evolutionary and neurological role. These insights felt genuinely new and fascinating, especially because I am a musician. At the same time, the book did not trigger the kind of personal behavior change that my highest-rated books caused.
What I learned and what stood out
The book says humans can transpose a pitch and still recognize it. Primates and even songbirds cannot do this.
The book says songbirds can learn to tell the difference between patterns like ABCD vs DCBA, or BACD vs A, B, C, D.
Adult male and female vocal pitches differ by about 50%.
Listening to a melody lights up more of the right side of the brain, based on an fMRI study.
Relative pitch uses the same brain areas used for spatial processing, like rotating an object in your mind. This helps explain how you recognize the same tune when someone plays it in a different key.
Why music may have evolved
The book suggests music may have evolved along with humans’ ability to form groups with in-group members. It probably does not link strongly to sexual selection, like how birds sing to attract mates, because men and women do not differ much in musical ability.
I also found this contrast interesting:
In music, repetition of phrases can feel normal and even good.
In language, repetition often feels like poor style.
The book also says the oldest musical instrument is about 40,000 years old, a Bone flute.
What animals and babies reveal
In experiments on monkeys, they chose silence over Western classical music.
In experiments with chimpanzees, they liked Indian classical and North African classical music. They did not like Japanese music that used rhythmic drums.
Studies in apes show they act differently with different music:
With soothing music, they help each other more.
With aggressive music, they get more animated.
Studies on babies show they can tell sad vs happy music.
Babies who are played music are more likely to help each other, because music can increase an in-group feeling.
Emotion in music
People can understand emotion in speech even when they do not understand the language. The book says people can also understand a complex mix of emotions in music, including anger, sadness, fear, happiness, nostalgia, and excitement, even from concert music outside their culture.
Some patterns the book mentions:
Minor key feels sadder than major key.
Slow vs fast also changes emotion.
Most music people choose causes positive emotions, not anger or fear. That fits, because people rarely choose music that makes them feel bad.
Chills and goosebumps
One physical sensation people feel is chills or goosebumps. The book explains this as a two-part reaction:
A dramatic change in music can signal danger and trigger the body.
Another part of the brain recognizes it is not real danger, it is music. That split can make the moment feel pleasurable.
The book also says people like music that connects different parts of the brain, through functional connectivity of audio regions.
Instinct, culture, and personal memory
The book separates musical feeling into different sources:
Instinctual feelings (fast tempo feels energetic, foot tapping changes how you feel).
Culturally learned feelings (what “fits” and what feels normal depends on the music you grew up with).
Individual feelings (your personal memories, like hearing a song during falling in love or at a party with friends).
It also says there are eight ways music affects you, spread across these categories.
How the brain analyzes sound
The book describes specialized processing:
One side focuses more on temporal analysis (timing).
The other side focuses more on frequency analysis (precise pitch content).
It also explains two core parts of instrument sound:
Pitch: the fundamental frequency.
Timbre: the mix of harmonic frequencies that gives an instrument its character.
A key insight: even if you remove the fundamental frequency, you can still guess the pitch from the harmonics.
The book also mentions language metaphors people use:
People describe pitch with pairs like young vs old, thick vs thin, to describe high vs low sounds.
It also says sounds have a timeline. If you play a piano note backwards, it will not sound like a piano.
Recognition happens fast
The book says people can identify songs from very short clips:
Under half a second for popular songs.
People guessed correctly about 25% of the time.
It also says emotional response can happen extremely fast:
Within 30 seconds, and even within 1 second. This suggests fast recognition of timbre matters for survival-linked reactions.
Harmony, dissonance, and “home”
The book explains the harmonicity theory:
When you add two tones, their harmonic structures can combine into equally spaced tones (harmonicity).
If they do not, the result feels disharmonic.
It says this is biologically common, but culture shapes preference. Some cultures value disharmonic sounds to express specific emotions.
It also describes tonal “gravity”:
The tonic (like C in the C scale) feels like a central tone you return to.
When people rate how well notes fit with a C scale, they rate C highest, then G (the dominant).
A dominant seventh chord creates tension and incompleteness that resolves with the next chord. Even disharmony can help music move forward.
Rhythm, speech, and language links
The book distinguishes:
Rhythmic and periodic beats in songs.
Rhythmic but not periodic patterns like Morse code, which still have temporal structure.
It also connects speech timing and musical phrasing:
When you speak, you often stretch sounds near commas, full stops, or phrase endings.
Long pauses and stretched words can signal a pause in meaning.
It says cadence differs across languages, like English vs Japanese vs French. It also suggests composers’ musical spacing may reflect the language they grew up with.
It adds that kids learn some of these patterns quickly across cultures.
It also says people tend to like beats around 100 BPM, which sits near heart rate range.
Vocal learning, beat tapping, and measurement tools
Some animals are vocal learners and can recognize a song even when played in a different key.
Many apes are not vocal learners.
The book suggests sea lions may be vocal learners, and mentions seals and walruses as vocal learners.
Parrots are vocal learners.
Humans can tap to a beat. Some apes react about 200 milliseconds after hearing a beat, which means they react rather than predict it. The book treats this as a key difference.
It also compares brain measurement tools:
EEG has high time resolution (up to 1 millisecond).
fMRI has less time resolution but helps with location, though EEG cannot pinpoint location precisely.
Music training and brain change
The book argues music is not “right brain only”. It connects many regions across both sides, including the front left areas involved in cognitive processing.
It also says musicians show more brain activity in finger areas, including fingers that non-musicians use less, like the left hand or the left little finger.
The book says the brain is more sensitive before age 7. Training before 7 is more likely to change the brain. It also says students with music training learn reading and other academic subjects faster when they enter school.
Babies, the womb, and calming
The book includes a fascinating example: sound from the father singing can reach the baby in the uterus.
It describes experiments at 37 weeks pregnancy:
Babies in the uterus react to music they heard a couple of times before.
After birth, babies react to music they heard in the uterus, but not to other music. This suggests early hearing and learning.
It also says babies prefer hearing an unfamiliar person speak in a language they know, because their native tongue appeals most.
When babies feel distress, they calm faster when:
The mother sings.
The mother speaks.
The mother shows physical affection.
The book suggests singing calms babies even more strongly than physical affection.
Music, medicine, and therapy
The book mentions conditions where a person cannot perceive or understand music. It links this to disrupted communication between brain areas, even if some areas still light up with music.
It also claims:
Surgical patients who listen to music use about 15% less anesthesia medication.
They report about 20% less pain.
It also notes NICU babies face many alarms, injections, and routine interruptions. It suggests they may show anxiety sooner, likely because of lower cortisol.
It says people with Alzheimer’s have better outcomes if they listen to music, and they tolerate medications more.
It also says people recovering from stroke, or people with speech disorders in therapy, can benefit from music intonation therapy (MIT), where they sing short phrases instead of speaking them.
Patterns in birds and early human development
The book says if you slow down parrot or songbird songs, you can hear musical patterns, including repeated short phrases.
It also says human babies babble even if they cannot hear their parents, for example if they are deaf. Over the first few years, they gradually lose the ability to understand and reproduce languages that are not native to their environment.
Similarly, the book says kids at a young age can recognize many pieces of music.
I first wrote this reviews at: https://www.harshal-patil.com/post/mu...
April 10, 2019
Quite technical, but a great book if you have time to absorb. Or if you have a passion for what music does to and for humans, or neuroscience
April 27, 2021
This is a neat series of lectures that go into a little bit about how music is learned, and what it means about our brain. I was especially interested in the sections that touched on how music can help patients after a stroke, or who have Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as the parts that showed how music helped in childhood development. I appreciated having audio samples of a lot of the things the lecturer was discussing as well.
July 17, 2020
I am a musician, and know a fair amount about music theory, and have taken academic courses about the physics of sound, but this was an interesting look at something I have a bit less knowledge about, which is how music relates to the mind, primarily dealing with psychology and human development, but with a bit of philosophical ideas peppered in, as well. It also focuses a good deal on cross-cultural comparisons, since music differs quite a bit around the world, which I appreciated. There are quite a few musical examples, which were at times a bit troublesome for me, because I tend to consume audiobooks at slightly more than double speed, but I would make an effort to listen to the examples at normal speed. Despite that hiccup, I feel like I learned quite a bit about a subject that interests me immensely, and which I have spent a good bit of time already learning about. This was definitely worth the effort for me, and will teach anyone interested in music something new.
Read
October 21, 2020I downloaded this course because I wanted to learn what we know about why music intrigues us, based on what we know of neuroscience. That's not what I got by the time I gave up, which was almost halfway through, though. Every lecture focused almost exclusively on evolution as a springboard for massive speculation on such things as survival advantages of music, etc. I do not mind passing references to evolution, even though I think it's a theory and should be treated as such. I wouldn't even mind an entire lecture on this, as if it's properly labeled, I can just skip it. But I cannot believe that *everything*, or darn near everything, we know about music and the brain pivots around that theory.
February 21, 2023
I enjoyed most of this course.
I found some lectures to be too technical (since I know nothing about music theory), but some were extremely interesting. I especially loved the lectures discussing music evolution and music abilities in other species. Personally, I found the more human-cognitive-related-lectures to be a bit tedious.
One other issue I had was that in many cases there were pictures involved in the lecture - and this is an audio version of the course. So that was a bit frustrating. But I did enjoy all the music recording examples and the recordings of animals. Fascinating stuff.
I found some lectures to be too technical (since I know nothing about music theory), but some were extremely interesting. I especially loved the lectures discussing music evolution and music abilities in other species. Personally, I found the more human-cognitive-related-lectures to be a bit tedious.
One other issue I had was that in many cases there were pictures involved in the lecture - and this is an audio version of the course. So that was a bit frustrating. But I did enjoy all the music recording examples and the recordings of animals. Fascinating stuff.
May 14, 2021
I had a great time with this audiobook! It covered a great variety of music-cognition/brain-related topics, presenting intriguing scientific results; I really appreciated that the audiobook version came along with a pdf (especially because it even made it even easier to check the references of the papers mentioned in the narrative). Even though I don't have any musical education (*sadness mountain*) and occasionally I had a hard time understanding some of the music theory concepts mentioned, I didn't find the difficulty unsurpassable.
May 2, 2021
This book was more interesting than I expected. Don't get me wrong, I still don't know how to sing in key. I still get confused about basic musical terms. But this did have a lot of interesting information about how our brains interact with music, as well as how unusual it is that we do have such an innate sense for music and how that might have evolved. It was also interesting to learn about some of the potential neurological benefits of listening to music or learning to create music.
January 28, 2020
(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).
This was not as interesting as I thought it might be but there are interesting portions in it.
This was not as interesting as I thought it might be but there are interesting portions in it.
March 23, 2021
Very interesting journey of how music has been a key factor in human civilisation. These lectures are informative and well delivered, though do go into greater detail than non academics (like myself) can follow. Overall I enjoyed reading/listening to the book and feel I have a more rounded understanding of the topic.
May 13, 2021
.......sometimes behave so strangely........
Music is otherworldly and that is why this book couldn't answer all the questions.
I don't sing enough and not just because of neurological health.
Learned fascinating facts about music. But this is only the beginning of the journey.....
Music is otherworldly and that is why this book couldn't answer all the questions.
I don't sing enough and not just because of neurological health.
Learned fascinating facts about music. But this is only the beginning of the journey.....
December 15, 2023
Very entertaining and quite informative set of lectures about music and the brain. Mr. Patel keeps it interesting and lively. This is research-based, so it's staggering in the implications. Great stuff
September 5, 2018
Listened to this book: too much music; not enough brain. Got to get my kids playing piano...
February 9, 2020
Of course I listened to this on an audiobook. He plays a lot of music so I can't imagine how you'd just read this book.
Want to read
September 14, 2020angie recommended
October 12, 2020
Enjoyable and interesting.
October 25, 2020
Interesting, not totally to the point.
October 26, 2020
Good course. I liked the later episodes better than the earlier ones. The later ones were more like what I expected the class to be.
November 24, 2020
Watch a detailed review along with my favorite ideas and takeaways at:
https://youtu.be/Z9M3_X-z-eU
https://youtu.be/Z9M3_X-z-eU
Read
August 1, 2022DNF—Good content, but not what I was looking for.
April 2, 2025
Slam dunk, really good.
April 25, 2023
I'm not an expert at any of this.
I thought is was a great combination of technical and aesthetic.
I learned a lot. Lots of ideas for further reading.
I thought is was a great combination of technical and aesthetic.
I learned a lot. Lots of ideas for further reading.
January 11, 2021
I believe imagination is a tapping into the subconscious as a form of open play. But in life without struggle there can be no progress. I found the class interesting, but it did not have enough of hard science or musical examples. It was a survey class. So allow things in your life which make your heart sing, feed your soul or nourish you on a daily basis. Music is our common energy. And after listening to the lectures I tried listening to different kinds of music. The kind you might struggle with. I've tried Diurnal Beats to aid in mental things but I found viruses attached to the free versions on line. So I'm trying music to find inner soul instead. Some weird dissonant sounds and foreign language songs. What Patel calls cognitive restructuring. But I didn't believe all his studies and I say only that music needs to be studied more to unravel the mysteries of the brain as regarding what music is all about. Both, empirically and emotionally. I'm looking forward to further study on this one.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews