reptile brains
David Byrne talks to Daniel Levitan, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, about music, language, and memory.
DB: When somebody tells us what this song is about, or what this painting is about, we're kind of stuck because talking about the art, and the art itself, are almost separate areas. The music seems to have straight access to the so-called "reptile brain," and we feel it immediately. But often it's also touching all kinds of other parts of the brain. If it has lyrics, there's language in it. If it has a strong rhythmic element it's touching what you would call the motor parts of the brain and muscle. All kinds of stuff is involved. How do you think this all happens?
DL: My guess is it starts with trying to unite rationality with irrationality.
DB: I'll bet you get resistance too from people who say you can't analyze this.
DL: Well, I remember a quote from Allan Watts, the philosopher. He wrote a number of books on Eastern philosophy in the 70s. He said that the problem with science is that when it wants to study the river, the scientist will go to the river with a bucket, take a bucket of water out, bring it to the shore, sit there, and study the bucket of water. But of course that's not the river.
And you know a lot of people have tried to study music by getting rid of everything except pitch or everything except rhythm. Or by using very strange, computer-generated sounds, to see what the brain does in response to them.
There's always this tension in science that you want to control your variables and you want to know what it is you're studying. And yet you want to have what we call ecological validity, which is just a fancy way to say it has to be like the real world. There's a tension between these two, and I've erred on the side of having ecological validity in my own experiments because I want to see the real phenomena.
