This is Your Brain on Music
Former rock producer and current professor at McGill University, Daniel Levitin is an expert in cognitive music perception. His new book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession explores how our brains process the music of various artists and why they make us feel good. In an interview with Wired News, Levitin said, “Music activates the same parts of the brain and causes the same neurochemical cocktail as a lot of other pleasurable activities like orgasms or eating chocolate -- or if you're a gambler winning a bet or using drugs if you're a drug user. Serotonin and dopamine are both involved most people in Western society use music to regulate moods, whether it's playing something peppy in the morning or something soothing at the end of a hard day, or something that will motivate them to exercise. Joni Mitchell told me that someone once said before there was Prozac, there was her.”
Levitin writes that he’s “more interested in the mind than the brain.” The difference is that brain is a bunch of neurons, chemicals, water and blood.... The mind is the thoughts that arise from the brain. What we're trying to do is figure out (which) parts of the brain do what and how they communicate with each other. But not simply on a level of description that discusses only neuron and cells, but one that also talks about real ideas, thoughts and memories.
To view the whole story, click here.
Common Knowledge
The view that knowledge could only be decided upon by the scholarly few began to crumble in 2001 when two men named Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a project that shook the foundations of the traditional encyclopedia. They created a Web site called Wikipedia, an online knowledge base that could be edited or expanded by anyone who came along. This free-for-all approach had obvious drawbacks: know-it-all teenagers could undo the careful work of university professors, and pranksters could insert fictional details into an entry on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But to an astonishing extent, Wikipedia worked. Serious scholars and armchair academics have written more than 4.5 million entries in over 200 languages, encompassing not only the well-worn territory of Encyclopedia Britannica but all sorts of eclectic subjects never before covered in any encyclopedia.
