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Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
How sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are.
Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind, Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on--we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes--and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word--or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.
Our hearing brain, Kraus tells us, is vast. It interacts with what we know, with our emotions, with how we think, with our movements, and with our other senses. Auditory neurons make calculations at one-thousandth of a second; hearing is the speediest of our senses. Sound plays an unrecognized role in both healthy and hurting brains. Kraus explores the power of music for healing as well as the destructive power of noise on the nervous system. She traces what happens in the brain when we speak another language, have a language disorder, experience rhythm, listen to birdsong, or suffer a concussion. Kraus shows how our engagement with sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are. The sounds of our lives shape our brains, for better and for worse, and help us build the sonic world we live in.
Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind, Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on--we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes--and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word--or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.
Our hearing brain, Kraus tells us, is vast. It interacts with what we know, with our emotions, with how we think, with our movements, and with our other senses. Auditory neurons make calculations at one-thousandth of a second; hearing is the speediest of our senses. Sound plays an unrecognized role in both healthy and hurting brains. Kraus explores the power of music for healing as well as the destructive power of noise on the nervous system. She traces what happens in the brain when we speak another language, have a language disorder, experience rhythm, listen to birdsong, or suffer a concussion. Kraus shows how our engagement with sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are. The sounds of our lives shape our brains, for better and for worse, and help us build the sonic world we live in.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published September 28, 2021
103 people are currently reading
868 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
November 9, 2021
Like most genres, popular science goes through phases - for the last couple of years, neuroscience has been the in thing, to the extent that I tend to think 'not another brain book' when I see one - but for someone who has always sung, the idea of finding out more about the relationship between the brain and sound, especially music, was attractive.
Nina Kraus is certainly enthusiastic about her topic and generally the book is well-pitched (appropriate given the musical connotations) and readable. However, Kraus does occasionally fall for a classic academic's failing of making use of unnecessary jargon. For example, she defines two terms 'afferent' and 'efferent', apparently adjectives for direction of travel. Kraus even points out how easily confused they are - so why use them? This isn't a textbook - there's no need to load the reader with all the jargon.
Some sections worked particularly well for me. The chapters on language and sound were very interesting, as were those on noise and ageing. Kraus demonstrates well how sustained background noise - even at relatively low levels - can have a negative impact on achievements. The positive outcomes of being an active musician are also of interest. I use the term 'active' here, as Kraus emphasises that listening to music is good, but to gain the benefits she mentions you have to play an instrument or sing, not just listen. Those benefits are in having an improvement in your 'sound mind', something Kraus defines as 'sound, what our brains do with it, and also what this does to us.' It seems that 'Music does an exceptional job of engaging [the cognitive, motor, reward and sensory] systems, providing effective avenues for learning through sound.'
As is almost always the case in neuroscience books, there is too much text given over to labelling bits of the brain and describing their role. By the time I'm half way through these sections I've already forgotten what all those labels mean - science shouldn't be about learning labels. In at least one case, too, there is evidence of the author being too close to the subject - we are told about hair cells in ear, but it's not mentioned that they aren't actually hairs.
A particularly poor aspect of the book are the illustrations, which look like they belong in a self-published effort. Many of them fall into one or other of the two most common problems with DIY illustrations - they either don't add anything to the text or they are so small and/or murky that it's impossible to make out what it is that they are illustrating.
Overall, I repeatedly found it hard to find any solid meaning in the content of the book. When defining the sound mind, for example, Kraus comments 'I think the sound mind is a force behind a continuum from the past to the present and into the future.' That's alright, then. Time and again, this kind of vague waffly comment made me struggle to follow what was intended. I'm sure some will love it, but for me Of Sound Mind could have been better.
Nina Kraus is certainly enthusiastic about her topic and generally the book is well-pitched (appropriate given the musical connotations) and readable. However, Kraus does occasionally fall for a classic academic's failing of making use of unnecessary jargon. For example, she defines two terms 'afferent' and 'efferent', apparently adjectives for direction of travel. Kraus even points out how easily confused they are - so why use them? This isn't a textbook - there's no need to load the reader with all the jargon.
Some sections worked particularly well for me. The chapters on language and sound were very interesting, as were those on noise and ageing. Kraus demonstrates well how sustained background noise - even at relatively low levels - can have a negative impact on achievements. The positive outcomes of being an active musician are also of interest. I use the term 'active' here, as Kraus emphasises that listening to music is good, but to gain the benefits she mentions you have to play an instrument or sing, not just listen. Those benefits are in having an improvement in your 'sound mind', something Kraus defines as 'sound, what our brains do with it, and also what this does to us.' It seems that 'Music does an exceptional job of engaging [the cognitive, motor, reward and sensory] systems, providing effective avenues for learning through sound.'
As is almost always the case in neuroscience books, there is too much text given over to labelling bits of the brain and describing their role. By the time I'm half way through these sections I've already forgotten what all those labels mean - science shouldn't be about learning labels. In at least one case, too, there is evidence of the author being too close to the subject - we are told about hair cells in ear, but it's not mentioned that they aren't actually hairs.
A particularly poor aspect of the book are the illustrations, which look like they belong in a self-published effort. Many of them fall into one or other of the two most common problems with DIY illustrations - they either don't add anything to the text or they are so small and/or murky that it's impossible to make out what it is that they are illustrating.
Overall, I repeatedly found it hard to find any solid meaning in the content of the book. When defining the sound mind, for example, Kraus comments 'I think the sound mind is a force behind a continuum from the past to the present and into the future.' That's alright, then. Time and again, this kind of vague waffly comment made me struggle to follow what was intended. I'm sure some will love it, but for me Of Sound Mind could have been better.
April 30, 2023
I expected more from "Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World" (2021) from a book written by a neuroscientist specializing in auditory processing, Nina Kraus. I was hoping to delve more deeply into how we hear, make sense of sound, and how it affects us. Kraus gives an account of these points but does so in a rather superficial way. The tone chosen for the science talk ends up being somewhat inane, with too much of the talk being about assumptions, rehashing ideas from the past that science has now shown to be not as correct as we thought. Science is made of constant uncertainties, but in the case of such widely studied subjects, we expect that current knowledge is followed and not that which is more poetic in scope. Still, the first part is worth a quick read, while the second part, fragmented in its impacts on multiple distinct areas, may be of interest to those who work in each of these areas.
Análise em português completa no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Análise em português completa no blog:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
May 15, 2025
This is a very rewarding book on how our brain processes sound input, and what a significant building block our auditory system is for our cognition. Kraus calls this the "sound mind" (nice pun), and convincingly demonstrates that it is much vaster than one might suspect. It certainly was a revelation to me, geared as I was like most people into thinking sight and visual pattern matching was our killer app (seeing being the "second brain" almost).
This is not to discount sight of course. Most of us value our sight more than hearing, and for good reason. Almost all of us are grateful for the mesmerizing richness of our visual qualia. (Although I've heard musicians ascribe visual-like qualities to sound, it's tough for me to "see" it.) Sight helps us navigate our spatial environment more surely than sound. (We do get some subtle help from sound too, but even that is, by definition, invisible, so we tend not to give it quite the same respect or even notice.) Sight maps out a visual field for us to scan. While we are twitchily alert to changes in it, even a largely unchanging field has usable information to help us identify what we need in it, or to move in it.
Sound, on the other hand, is a linear source of information that necessarily changes every instant in order to be meaningful. A constant sound that has the same frequency and amplitude conveys very little information (and quite a lot of annoyance). While we do use binaural information for some very basic gauging of the _direction_ of the sound, that's not where the magic is (animals are better than humans at this, by the way). A large part of human sound processing is the extensive post-processing of _linear_ input near instantaneously. If we miss any input, it is gone forever, we cannot go back to retrieve it as we can with visual input. In this respect sound is practically our physical understanding of that great mystery, Time itself. Like time, our perception of sound is inherently fleeting and not just one-dimensional but one-directional. We cannot pan and scan in time as we can in space.
It is sound that the human brain uses to construct meaning. While knowing about our auditory processing system doesn't explain cognition itself, Kraus's book goes a long way toward explaining that it is a large part of the _implementation_ of cognition. Not for nothing do most religions prioritize sound as the sensory input par excellence, despite its evanescence. ("In the beginning was the Word", "sabda brahma", etc.) Sound gives us language. The auditory system, pressed into service within our brain for internal communication, has been implicated (Jaynes) in the creation of consciousness itself.
We employ more post-processing than we are aware of for both sight and sound, but after reading Kraus, it is apparent that sound trumps sight handily in this regard. The order-of-magnitude change in frequency that we are capable of recognizing is considerably larger than our visible spectrum (although the individual light frequencies sampled for sight are tremendously higher). The sound system also needs to be much faster than our sight in order to get at the rapidly changing sound, to get not just the instantaneous frequency and amplitude, but any modulations thereof, and the harmonics. (This is the reason why, counter-intuitively, we hear things faster than we can see them when they are within a few feet of us, despite the overwhelming speed of light over sound. We see lightning before we hear the thunder only because it is sufficiently far away.)
All of this sound information is polled to create a rich vocabulary of sound that serves our need to create meaning in the form of language, useful for social interaction but also for our internal monologue. Not only does the sound mind give us linguistic phonemes, it also helps us to distinguish between sound sources; to recognize the emotional content of speech; and to identify the sounds of interest to us against the background sounds that aren't. Kraus shows that the sound mind isn't strictly ferrying information from ear to brain: a significant part is also going the other way, where we use the memory of sounds past to improve our sensitivity to sounds that are of special interest, which helps us more quickly recognize our own language and our people of interest. (This is why we find understanding a spoken foreign language in real time so difficult and frustrating, even after we've put in the work to understand its written version.)
The second half of the book is devoted to various sound pathologies and how we may address them. Our auditory post-processing has multiple components and they can fail separately or together, due to impoverished sound environment, injury, or aging. Kraus is passionate about how, because of the general "invisibility" of sound, and the relative vastness of our sound system that makes do most of the time, we do not seem to be careful enough to protect our sound environment. The losses in cognitive ability because of our neglect of our sound environment add up however, and we are the poorer for it. Many educational deficits can be blamed squarely on injuries to the sound mind of children, and these could be easily corrected, if only they were noticed for what they are. Corrective measures that we as individuals can adopt at any age include making music, using multiple natural languages, and increasing our physical fitness, as these strengthen some or all components of our sound mind. As with muscles, there is a "use it or lose it" aspect to our sound mind, and indeed, this is by design, as it has evolved to focus on what it deems important in a very short period of time amid an avalanche of data. It is up to us to make sure that we feed it with the data that we value instead of junk sound. When inundated with sound that we must ignore, we desensitize our sound mind, permanently shutting off things that should work.
By increasing our physical fitness, we reduce the generation of internal noise ("static") that corrupts the external sound. With music and language, we practice attention and thus strengthen the components of our sound mind instead of numbing them. Kraus herself is bilingual and she champions the learning of languages as an important exercise for the sound mind. While language learning can be valuable for fun or utility, it does come with some demerits that Kraus does not varnish away: Increasing the linguistic vocabulary with duplicates does slow down retrieval times both when hearing and creating language. (Perhaps being able to recognize multiple accents in the same language is good enough to get the required benefit for the sound mind!)
The sound mind, like the self, is so implicitly pervasive and invisible that by default we tend to not notice it as something special and in need of protection. Kraus's book is a passionate and enthusiastic call to action for us to do something about it.
This is not to discount sight of course. Most of us value our sight more than hearing, and for good reason. Almost all of us are grateful for the mesmerizing richness of our visual qualia. (Although I've heard musicians ascribe visual-like qualities to sound, it's tough for me to "see" it.) Sight helps us navigate our spatial environment more surely than sound. (We do get some subtle help from sound too, but even that is, by definition, invisible, so we tend not to give it quite the same respect or even notice.) Sight maps out a visual field for us to scan. While we are twitchily alert to changes in it, even a largely unchanging field has usable information to help us identify what we need in it, or to move in it.
Sound, on the other hand, is a linear source of information that necessarily changes every instant in order to be meaningful. A constant sound that has the same frequency and amplitude conveys very little information (and quite a lot of annoyance). While we do use binaural information for some very basic gauging of the _direction_ of the sound, that's not where the magic is (animals are better than humans at this, by the way). A large part of human sound processing is the extensive post-processing of _linear_ input near instantaneously. If we miss any input, it is gone forever, we cannot go back to retrieve it as we can with visual input. In this respect sound is practically our physical understanding of that great mystery, Time itself. Like time, our perception of sound is inherently fleeting and not just one-dimensional but one-directional. We cannot pan and scan in time as we can in space.
It is sound that the human brain uses to construct meaning. While knowing about our auditory processing system doesn't explain cognition itself, Kraus's book goes a long way toward explaining that it is a large part of the _implementation_ of cognition. Not for nothing do most religions prioritize sound as the sensory input par excellence, despite its evanescence. ("In the beginning was the Word", "sabda brahma", etc.) Sound gives us language. The auditory system, pressed into service within our brain for internal communication, has been implicated (Jaynes) in the creation of consciousness itself.
We employ more post-processing than we are aware of for both sight and sound, but after reading Kraus, it is apparent that sound trumps sight handily in this regard. The order-of-magnitude change in frequency that we are capable of recognizing is considerably larger than our visible spectrum (although the individual light frequencies sampled for sight are tremendously higher). The sound system also needs to be much faster than our sight in order to get at the rapidly changing sound, to get not just the instantaneous frequency and amplitude, but any modulations thereof, and the harmonics. (This is the reason why, counter-intuitively, we hear things faster than we can see them when they are within a few feet of us, despite the overwhelming speed of light over sound. We see lightning before we hear the thunder only because it is sufficiently far away.)
All of this sound information is polled to create a rich vocabulary of sound that serves our need to create meaning in the form of language, useful for social interaction but also for our internal monologue. Not only does the sound mind give us linguistic phonemes, it also helps us to distinguish between sound sources; to recognize the emotional content of speech; and to identify the sounds of interest to us against the background sounds that aren't. Kraus shows that the sound mind isn't strictly ferrying information from ear to brain: a significant part is also going the other way, where we use the memory of sounds past to improve our sensitivity to sounds that are of special interest, which helps us more quickly recognize our own language and our people of interest. (This is why we find understanding a spoken foreign language in real time so difficult and frustrating, even after we've put in the work to understand its written version.)
The second half of the book is devoted to various sound pathologies and how we may address them. Our auditory post-processing has multiple components and they can fail separately or together, due to impoverished sound environment, injury, or aging. Kraus is passionate about how, because of the general "invisibility" of sound, and the relative vastness of our sound system that makes do most of the time, we do not seem to be careful enough to protect our sound environment. The losses in cognitive ability because of our neglect of our sound environment add up however, and we are the poorer for it. Many educational deficits can be blamed squarely on injuries to the sound mind of children, and these could be easily corrected, if only they were noticed for what they are. Corrective measures that we as individuals can adopt at any age include making music, using multiple natural languages, and increasing our physical fitness, as these strengthen some or all components of our sound mind. As with muscles, there is a "use it or lose it" aspect to our sound mind, and indeed, this is by design, as it has evolved to focus on what it deems important in a very short period of time amid an avalanche of data. It is up to us to make sure that we feed it with the data that we value instead of junk sound. When inundated with sound that we must ignore, we desensitize our sound mind, permanently shutting off things that should work.
By increasing our physical fitness, we reduce the generation of internal noise ("static") that corrupts the external sound. With music and language, we practice attention and thus strengthen the components of our sound mind instead of numbing them. Kraus herself is bilingual and she champions the learning of languages as an important exercise for the sound mind. While language learning can be valuable for fun or utility, it does come with some demerits that Kraus does not varnish away: Increasing the linguistic vocabulary with duplicates does slow down retrieval times both when hearing and creating language. (Perhaps being able to recognize multiple accents in the same language is good enough to get the required benefit for the sound mind!)
The sound mind, like the self, is so implicitly pervasive and invisible that by default we tend to not notice it as something special and in need of protection. Kraus's book is a passionate and enthusiastic call to action for us to do something about it.
December 22, 2024
I came across this book recently while delving into my research on music & literacy. It emphasizes the profound impact of sound processing on cognitive functions, including reading skills. As a music teacher, incorporating musical activities can enhance phonemic awareness, auditory discrimination, and memory, all of which are crucial for reading development. Engaging children in activities like rhythm exercises, singing, and listening to music can create neural pathways that support language and literacy skills. The potential to make a significant difference in their educational journey is exhilarating!
June 13, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed this in-depth (but accessible) exploration of the relationship between sound and the brain. As an acoustician, I’d really only ever studied sound outside the body, which is introduced succinctly in Chapter 1. I learned much about everything from neuroscience to birdsong, and I was fascinated by the connections between the sound-processing and language parts of the brain and the implications for learning. I highly recommend this to my acoustician and musician friends, as well as anyone interested in how sound and music impact education.
January 3, 2022
Excellent. The author's enthusiasm for the subject is infectious
March 23, 2022
Well, this was a nerdy dose of awesomeness. I loved Daniel Levitin's "This is your brain on music", so I was excited to read this....basically, anything music + science is totally on my "to be read" list.
As someone who has intentionally blocked all my previous neuroscience coursework from my memory, I was surprised at how easy this was to follow. She does a great job of explaining things for people who have never taken a neuroscience or an anatomy and physiology of the ear course. Yes, there's some jargon and technical info in there, but it's not too technical that it tripped me up while listening to the book on my afternoon walk. This definitely reads like a non-fiction book for the masses, rather than a bunch of scholarly journal articles compiled into a book. It's well developed with a nice amount of personal anecdotes and human-interest examples to balance the more "sciencey" info. She covers all sorts of things from the differences in sound processing for bilinguals, to how sound and hearing is impacted by aging (and vice versa), and of course, many mentions of music.
Overall, a worthwhile read if you're interested in sound, language, and/or music and enjoy science-based non-fiction.
Full disclosure: Nina Kraus is a faculty member at my university (and in my dept), but I have only met her once like 5 years ago in passing, so this is an unbiased review. But, I've always been intrigued by her work, particularly when I read once about her hanging out with Mickey Hart (the Grateful Dead drummer). This book gave me more insight into what her lab does, and it's fascinating.
I listened to the audiobook version (a bit meta, given the topic), so I can't comment on the figures or illustrations in the book.
As someone who has intentionally blocked all my previous neuroscience coursework from my memory, I was surprised at how easy this was to follow. She does a great job of explaining things for people who have never taken a neuroscience or an anatomy and physiology of the ear course. Yes, there's some jargon and technical info in there, but it's not too technical that it tripped me up while listening to the book on my afternoon walk. This definitely reads like a non-fiction book for the masses, rather than a bunch of scholarly journal articles compiled into a book. It's well developed with a nice amount of personal anecdotes and human-interest examples to balance the more "sciencey" info. She covers all sorts of things from the differences in sound processing for bilinguals, to how sound and hearing is impacted by aging (and vice versa), and of course, many mentions of music.
Overall, a worthwhile read if you're interested in sound, language, and/or music and enjoy science-based non-fiction.
Full disclosure: Nina Kraus is a faculty member at my university (and in my dept), but I have only met her once like 5 years ago in passing, so this is an unbiased review. But, I've always been intrigued by her work, particularly when I read once about her hanging out with Mickey Hart (the Grateful Dead drummer). This book gave me more insight into what her lab does, and it's fascinating.
I listened to the audiobook version (a bit meta, given the topic), so I can't comment on the figures or illustrations in the book.
February 3, 2022
Interesting research and concepts about the importance of music, learning languages and doing sports and how it affects our mind and how we interact in the world.
January 29, 2023
Brillant ….
C’est un livre indispensable pour tout professionnel qui opère dans un univers sonore. Les sons pour devenir ici ce qui structurent et organisent notre identité. Du meilleur au pire, de la musique au bruit, il y a ce qui améliore notre sensibilité à l’existence et ce qui la détruit.. . À lire absolument !
C’est un livre indispensable pour tout professionnel qui opère dans un univers sonore. Les sons pour devenir ici ce qui structurent et organisent notre identité. Du meilleur au pire, de la musique au bruit, il y a ce qui améliore notre sensibilité à l’existence et ce qui la détruit.. . À lire absolument !
March 9, 2023
The enthusiasm Kraus brings to her subject carried the day even when my interest waned. She seems like a delight: lively, funny, and with immense excitement in the work of her lab, Brainvolts. I loved hearing how much she loves her work. That said, I found a lot of the text to be skimmable. Often the experimental results confirm common sense, and I don't need all the (very well done) footnote citations to get it.
The book has that curious tone of a professional scientist summing up their life's work: too much detail and terminology in parts, too little in others. While I appreciated Kraus' fundamental point about the two-way communication between the ears and the brain, and how each unique Lebenswelt informs its owner's relationship to sound, I probably could have done with a shorter version. Her practical suggestions on the prophylactic cognitive effects of musical training were welcome as a parent. Probably a good read for musicians or speech paths, but it wasn't quite my cup of tea. It's a quick read though so I bear the book no ill will.
The book has that curious tone of a professional scientist summing up their life's work: too much detail and terminology in parts, too little in others. While I appreciated Kraus' fundamental point about the two-way communication between the ears and the brain, and how each unique Lebenswelt informs its owner's relationship to sound, I probably could have done with a shorter version. Her practical suggestions on the prophylactic cognitive effects of musical training were welcome as a parent. Probably a good read for musicians or speech paths, but it wasn't quite my cup of tea. It's a quick read though so I bear the book no ill will.
November 6, 2021
When I went to Tokyo a few years ago, I found a dense and bustling city, yet it was *so* quiet. Coming home to a suburban neighborhood, I found myself feeling claustrophobic at how loud everything was -- still is.
So, I was delighted to find this book and have the author, Nina Kraus, explain the interplay of brain-ear-sound connection. She manages to explain technical concepts in a clear and understandable fashion without it becoming dry, even for a pleb like me. It is peppered with personal anecdotes, while championing why each of our relationships with sound matters now and gives both pause and hope for the future.
Note: I did listen to the audiobook and, while I know that I missed out on some beautiful diagrams, Elizabeth Wiley did a superb reading. She was engaged and her voice itself was descriptive.
So, I was delighted to find this book and have the author, Nina Kraus, explain the interplay of brain-ear-sound connection. She manages to explain technical concepts in a clear and understandable fashion without it becoming dry, even for a pleb like me. It is peppered with personal anecdotes, while championing why each of our relationships with sound matters now and gives both pause and hope for the future.
Note: I did listen to the audiobook and, while I know that I missed out on some beautiful diagrams, Elizabeth Wiley did a superb reading. She was engaged and her voice itself was descriptive.
February 18, 2022
As a person who suffers from extensive hearing loss I was eager to read this book so I could better understand my situation. It is very heavily researched and represents a lifetime of work by the author in the area of hearing and how the brain processes sounds. It also made me realize the wisdom of my teachers in grade and high school as they tried to get us interested in playing instruments. In my case it wouldn't have made any difference then or now since I had no talent for music then but now as I am older I love it but I can't hear it well enough to either sing or play.
I think a good number of people might get bored with some parts of it as it gets technical but I did learn a lot about how my brain processes sounds.
I think a good number of people might get bored with some parts of it as it gets technical but I did learn a lot about how my brain processes sounds.
December 31, 2023
This had some interesting information; however, it had a strongly audist/oralist slant. There was one VERY brief mention of users of visual languages, and the mention did not specify whether native signers were test subjects or individuals who currently use sign. This is a huge distinction, as a lot of D/deaf and hard of hearing individuals have historically (and too often currently) been language deprived in their early years by enforcing device and spoken language use while actively avoiding use of sign. As someone who works consistently with DHH individuals, this was a hard aspect of the writing to ignore.
February 11, 2024
Even with the lowly brain of a non-musician that only speaks English this was interesting. I never realized how tied hearing was to so many facets of wellness - mental health and otherwise. Kraus’s delivery was/ the aid of illustrations made this go quicker than expected. I’d be interested to see more on the relationships to our environment in the next book. This teased the connections in a few short chapters towards the end, but was more focused on laying the groundwork for how sound works in our heads, and the impact activities and experiences have on individuals as they relate to how sound is processed.
September 1, 2022
Fascinating book about the workings of one of our least-appreciated senses! Kraus talks about the speed, intricacy that the ear accomplishes to deliver the magic of sound to our comprehension. I thought it was interesting that it's not a one-way path; the brain sends signals down to the inner ear to sort and give meaning to the sound that is being picked up. Kraus talks about different hearing disabilities and their insights, bilingual advantages/disadvantages, the importance of quiet spaces, and more.
April 10, 2023
Another in the very long line of books too technical/detailed for a lay audience and too simplistic for an academic audience, although unique in including scores of remarkably unhelpful drawings apparently geared to middle-school readers. Many interesting little bits of info, but I was expecting more of a high-level summary of the state of the art than what feels like a cross-between a mildly dumbed down 100-level course text and an infomercial for the author’s lab (named 73 times in this relatively short book).
May 21, 2023
Such a beautiful book. Nina Kraus combines her lifetime expertise in neuroscience to make wide ranging connections about the power of sound in our lives and the plant/animal lives of our ecological soundscapes. The books begins with an overview of sound processing, including encouragements to remember that sound processing is no-directional. Beautiful chapters on birds, sports, bilingualism, and music follow. This book has changed the way I think of sound and the lives that we connect through sound.
March 18, 2025
An interesting topic. Some chapters/sections worked much better for me than others. It seemed to go back and forth from "very dense/all science and terminology" to "here is why you should like music". It made parts of it a slog to get through, as they were very textbook like, while other parts were fun and easy. I would have enjoyed a bit more of a combination of the two things that flowed a bit smoother. Instead I will admit I skimmed a lot of the very dense stuff, and focused on interesting parts of how our brain works with the sound that I could relate to.
January 28, 2022
Jaw-dropping surprise and inspiration
The importance of music to well-rounded education has been obvious to me for years, but I had no idea of its importance to brain development. I was also surprised to learn that so much data flows back from the brain to the ears. This is a thoroughly scientific, yet enjoyable, book. I have to share it with my educator friends and family.
The importance of music to well-rounded education has been obvious to me for years, but I had no idea of its importance to brain development. I was also surprised to learn that so much data flows back from the brain to the ears. This is a thoroughly scientific, yet enjoyable, book. I have to share it with my educator friends and family.
July 25, 2022
This was a really fascinating book on the insights into how our ears and brain receive and perceive sound, and how it influences our language and cognitive development.
Some of her ideas were redundant, however, and others could have used a little more exploration.
Some of her ideas were redundant, however, and others could have used a little more exploration.
September 17, 2022
Como persona dedicada a la audiología, este libro me ha ayudado a tener nuevas perspectivas sobre cómo el sonido construye nuestra mente, además de darme directrices de cómo explicar en palabras simples el mundo sonoro a las personas.
Libro muy interesante y con harta biografía para profundizar.
Libro muy interesante y con harta biografía para profundizar.
March 28, 2023
I could not finish this book. Too much science. No amount of enthusiasm in the writing can make up for a certain amount of tedium in the details. Too often I felt the author was trying to pitch their business. I borrowed it from the library.
November 17, 2023
Took forever to get through this book. It’s pretty good and well represents a lifetime of research. It’s a nice mix of lay language and technical reporting. Not incredibly engaging or congruent in its writing though.
January 15, 2024
I really appreciated this book. It helped me better understand the complexities of the hearing process in our minds as I’ve learned to hear again with a cochlear implant. For me understanding the science a little better helped me come to terms with my situation and focus on moving forward.
December 5, 2021
Informative and very enjoyable.
February 18, 2022
3.5 stars
April 17, 2022
Being something of a nerd, I found the technical aspects of this very interesting - even if the author dives in deep to technical descriptions. I did learn much from it and really enjoyed it.
March 25, 2023
All educators and parents should read. It helps to understand child handicaps and how they can be improved to assist in aging health.
September 3, 2023
Not sure if this book is written for audiologists/neuroscientists or for the general public, but I found it fascinating.
April 20, 2024
Every music teacher, choral director, voice coach, and conductor should read this book.
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