Like Mac Davis, I believe in music. When I listen to music, or at least certain kinds of music, I feel transported to another place, my mood is elevated, I feel a new sense of harmony, and I am able to focus more clearly on what seems to matter most. A physicist might come along and say that what I call music is merely the scraping of horse’s hairs across cat gut, a mechanical vibration in a particular frequency range. A neurologist might come along and explain that I am merely experiencing the transduction of kinetic energy into electrical energy as processed by neurons in the auditory and higher associative cortices of the brain. And yet, there is something about the music that is hard to reckon in such terms. It would be like saying that a passionate embrace is merely the pressing of flesh on flesh.

“Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in 1942.

Now, in a meditation on the limits of neuroscience, Richard Gunderman considers what that “something” might be when it comes to the transcendence music makes us feel.

Complement with the science of how music enchants the brain.

(via explore-blog)

(via explore-blog)

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