God and the Astronomers

by Robert Jastrow

Why You Will Like This Book:

• Although written by an agnostic, it discusses how the Big Bang Theory (not the show) and other related cosmological theories are surprisingly true to Genesis. It also discusses the scientists involved in these discoveries, and their reluctance to agree to something so seemingly Christian. (The second idea especially is not one discussed frequently, which makes this book cool.)

And Why You Might Not:

• It's really short and there's not a lot there besides the central idea and some short scientist biographies.
• It's really not a great book physically, either. The layout is confusing, they typesetting is strange, and there are page errors. 

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

by Oliver Sacks

Thoughts: A collection of interesting and unusual anecdotes about strange musical happenings related to brain functions,  from musical hallucinations to perfect pitch, brain worms to synesthesia. Oliver Sacks is a physician and professor of clinical neurology and psychiatry, and man must he have an interesting life if even half of these stories were true. (And they almost definitely are, by the way. This is a fairly well documented and scientific sort of book.)

Some interesting things I learnt:
--A professional musician's brain has an enlarged corpus callosum and increased volumes of grey matter in motor, auditory, and visuospatial areas of the cortex and cerebellum. It is more unique and recognizable than that of a visual artist, writer, or mathematician. (pg. 94) Similarly, there is a striking change in the left hemisphere of children who've had a only a year of violin training. (pg. 95)
--Physical music practice increases activity in various areas of the brain, but mental practice excites those same areas (i.e. going through the motions in your mind). (pg. 95)
--There is a theory that perfect pitch is inborn bust lost. Infants, apparently, rely much more heavily on absolute pitch cues, and adults on relative pitch cues. (pg. 129)
--On of the longer stories (pg. 188 ~ 205) was about a man called Clive Wearing who couldn't remember anything longer than a minute or so at most. And yet he could play entire pieces of music with as much fervour as before his accident. There is a documentary about him on Youtube which is quite interesting. There are also many other stories of people who have completely lost their memory, and yet still retain their memory for music, which is quite astounding. (See some of these on pg. 337-9.)
--Apparently there have been children that have had their entire left hemisphere removed from their brain, and yet still recovered speech and language. (pg. 220)
--Freud hated music. In his own words, "Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me." (pg. 293) I find this really interesting, and as someone who's not a huge Freud fan, I'm rather pleased to find him with such an unusual weakness.

Grade: 3 stars

Music, Language, and the Brain

by Aniruddh D. Patel

Grade: 3 1/2 stars

Thoughts: This was actually the textbook for a university class I recently took called "Language and Music". Normally I would never include textbooks on my book blog, but this was the exception for a few reasons:
a) I actually read it all the way through, cover to cover, without skipping sections. This is unheard of for me and textbooks.
b) It was more a book than a textbook, we just happened to use it as our textbook.
c) It could be quite fascinating, and I wanted to talk about it briefly.

The book is divided into six sections, each comparing an attribute that language and music both posses: sound elements (pitch and timbre), rhythm, melody, syntax, meaning, and evolution. Patel goes into great depth, discussing current thought, dispensing with outdated ideas, and laying out new areas to study further.

I'd like to share a few random little facts here that I picked up along the way. And they really are random--not the focus of the chapters or anything, simply a few things that struck me.

--There is this Amazonian tribe, called the Pirahã, whose language doesn't have numbers or fixed terms for colours, who don't have a creation myth or any drawing outside of stick figures, and yet they have music in abundance. (pg. 3)*
--There is evidence that children's rhythm is syllable-time (like French speaking adults), as opposed to the stressed-timed rhythm of English speaking adults. This doesn't really mean much to most people, especially if you haven't had "syllable-timed" and "stress-timed" explained to you, but I thought it was a super cool observation that made a surprising amount of sense. (pg. 134-5)
--There are important syntactic features of language shared by ALL human languages. There are very few of this syntactic universals in music. (pg. 242)
--When musicians and non-musicians are asked to draw something that visually describes short orchestral pieces, musicians tend to create abstract representations (focused on structural aspects such as repetition and theme structure), while non-musicians draw images or stories. (pg. 323-4)
--Simply overhearing a different language casually (if before the age of 6) will better your pronunciation of that language's phonemes when you're an adult. (pg. 362)

*All page numbers are for the 2008 paperback edition.