Brother John

Ever wonder why music has such a powerful hold on humanity? Well, a scientific scholar in Canada and other really smart people are devoting their careers to how music effects our brains. According to a recent Boston Globe article, what they're finding is pretty awesome.

There is an emerging field of study on the science of music and why it has such an intense effect on us. One of the leading figures in the science of music is Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal. Last summer Levitin published "This Is Your Brain on Music," a layperson's guide to the neuroscience of music.

On a recent afternoon in his cluttered studio/lab, Levitin hits a button on his computer keyboard -- and out comes a half-second clip of music. It's just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but any Stones fan could immediately identify it as the opening lick to "Brown Sugar." Similar experiments with diverse subjects suggest that no matter what our tastes or generation, the sound of our favorite artists deeply resonate in our minds -- and can profoundly impact the way we think and act.

"You hear only one note, and you already know who it is," Levitin said in the Globe article. "How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?" The answer, he says, is that "by the age of 5 we are all musical experts. This stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us."

Hell yeah! Of course freaks like us already knew this. But if bonafide scientific study proves music is more powerful than many people think, maybe artists will get more respect, maybe they can quit their day jobs, or be used as weapons of mass connection to unite the world and stop wars.

Levitin is not your typical egghead. He's one of those total right-brain, left-brain combos. A former punk rocker, record producer, and working artist with nine gold and platiunum albums to his credit, he has serious street cred and is also full of scientific knowledge. For example he says that babies begin life with synesthesia, a trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. And that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments also suggest that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording. Whoa, dude, I guess that explains the whole Deadhead thing.

Ultimately, experts say, studying the impact of music offers a new way to learn how our brains really work: the way memories are triggered, how people with autism think, why our ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play.

We may soon even unlock the age-old mystery of why even the butt ugliest of musicians get laid all the time.