Music Provides Window into Brain Function

JEFFREY BROWN:

On a cold winter night at Montreal's Cafe Campus recently, the Kevin Mark Blues Band was thumpin', the crowd was jumpin', the joy and thrill of music was in the air. Onstage, joining in for the classic Joe Turner number "Flip, Flop, Fly," 49-year-old Daniel Levitin wailed away on his saxophone.

Levitin spent more than a decade as an award-winning record producer, working with the likes of Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton. But he wanted to understand more about music. And today, the sax man is a scientist, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at McGill University, and author of the book, "This Is Your Brain on Music."

By combining the latest technology with traditional experimental psychology, he's become one of the world's leading researchers on how the human brain makes sense of one of humankind's oldest passions.

DANIEL LEVITIN, Cognitive Neuroscientist, McGill University:

I think of music as a kind of window into brain function, a way of studying the brain, because music is something that allows us to better understand how the brain evolved and how our species evolved, a way to better understand how the different parts of the brain communicate with each other, how the brain is wired up.

JEFFREY BROWN:

Now, for most of us, the pleasure of music is what you might call a no-brainer, something so obvious it's hard to see what science might investigate.

What is it about music that you love?

CONCERTGOER:

Ah! Ooh! Ah!

JEFFREY BROWN:

Yes? Where does it hit you? Right there?

CONCERTGOER:

When you want to dance, it's just, like — no, it's there.