Tuesday, September 05, 2006

"This Is Your Brain on Music"

Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's wonderful new book explains why music is a critical step in human evolution and why the songs we loved as teens remain stuck on "play" in our heads.

If you happened to have been born between about 1978 and 1981, there's a fair chance you count yourself an obsessive of the Southern California rock band Weezer. The affection would not make sense to those even just a bit older or younger, who might regard Weezer's guitar pop as clever and pleasing but also somewhat too shallow to have much lasting significance. Those of a certain age, though, experienced the group's 1994 eponymous debut release, known to fans as the Blue Album, as a thing of precise and overflowing emotion -- 10 tracks that functioned like keys to secret locks in the teenage brain, opening up all the awkwardness and anxiousness of those melodramatic high school years.

Read more here!

By Farhad Manjoo - salon.com

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