Daniel Levitin: This is Your Brain on Music

[jyrgenn]

Former music producer Levitin became neuroscientist out of curiosity how music works in the brain. For my taste he explains too much, and tells too many not-too-relevant stories, but nevertheless the book is full of interesting facts.

And in the end, his solution of the mystery what music really is: Not a senseless byproduct of language evolution, "cheesecake", as Pinker put it -- the development of cheesecake being a nice, but otherwise meaningless collateral result of the human craving for fat and carbohydrates --, but an important means of sexual selection, compared to the peacock's tail. (Of course we find music much more important and profound than a ridiculously huge mass of useless feathers, but then we are humans and not peacocks.)

So that is the reason why rock stars are considered so eminently shaggable by so many. I knew I should have made a bigger effort to go into that direction myself.