Brain, Mind, and Cognition

This is your brain on music by Daniel J. Levitin

Essay
Joel Edenberg

First of all I think this book could be a lot better if it was presented in a more interactive
format. Majority of the time when I was reading I did not have access to any media player.
So I could not actually listen to the songs mentioned in the text. As a lot of the mentioned
songs where unknown to me, or at least based on the titles, the general understanding of
contexts was probably suffering. An interactive computer version with links to music
samples could offer a lot better overall experience.

But in general I enjoyed the book and found it interesting. It contained a lot of interesting
facts and some pretty unique ideas. Even though I actually have studied music before I found
the explanations in first chapters really helpful. Sometimes the heavy usage of people names
got a bit annoying but other than that it was good.

The most interesting though or idea

I found the explanation why we enjoy the music the most interesting. It made me think
about something I had not thought about before. Why do we like music and what kind of
music we like? Before reading this book I considered this question too abstract to actually
answer. Similarly we could ask that why do you like this specific color or why do you like that
car? The answer seems to lie deep in persons personality and coming up with a reasonable
explanation seems hard.

The author states that we like music because it plays with our expectations. When we hear
music our brain tries to predict what sound we will hear next. Usually these predictions are
met as the thing we call music has to have some kind of structure or sound pattern. But
sometimes those predictions are violated and we hear something unexpected. These
surprises keep our mind interested in the given music.

Now why would we find listening to predictable patterns pleasurable? If we consider the
general concept of how brains work, presented by Jeff Hawkins, we know that predicting is
the core working principle of brain. So our brain is constantly predicting everything that is
happening to us. While performing activities we are constantly improving our predictions as
we get additional information. The initial guesses are often very rough approximations and
end up being changed a lot refined over time. In general predicting correctly is pleasurable
because our brain has successfully figured out the underlying patterns. We feel good as our
brain has succeeded. But after some time it gets boring and fictional - does not resemble real
life. It seems like an abstract world with ideal concepts. There are no unexpected events to
make the situation more challenging.

Now if we are listening to some very simplistic music all of our predictions are met. In real
life that is never the case. So in order to keep the music interesting there have to be some
violation of expectations. The music has to take unexpected turns to keep us interested. Our
brain is forced to focus more on the music, because it keeps getting the next sounds
wrong. It tries to come up with new schemas and patters for describing the sounds it is
hearing but every now and then the model is violated by the music composer.

But why would we enjoy predicting wrongly? Why should we feel any kind of positive
feelings when our brain fails at its core functionality predicting. I think it has something to
do with the cost of actions. In real world every action we take has a cost. Imagine a person
walking - for every step our brain predicts where to put the feet in order to complete the
next step. Based on the visual information from eyes brain predicts where to place the feet.
Now if this prediction is off by even a small margin (ground is actually lower than we thought
it will be) we are forced to waist a lot more resources - energy. We try to avoid falling down
by using a lot of additional muscles. We use arms to regain the balance, strengthen the
entire body and try to re-adjust the foot position rapidly. So every time our brain
expectations are not met we get penalized with energy loss.

Now listening to music is in some way different. There is no penalty in predicting the next
sounds wrongly. It is like a harmless game where we do not pay any fee for performing
badly. I think this is one of the reasons why we find small anomalies in music pleasurable.
While listening to music our brain does not receive any negative feedback for being wrong.

Based on these ideas we can start to explain as well why people like specific types of music.
The patterns presented to the listener need to be simple enough for recognition but
unpredictable enough to keep the listener interested.
Ideas obtained from the book for building intelligent systems:
Music is closely related with emotions. It can change our mood interact with us. But giving
emotions to machines is probably useless and could even lead to some unwanted results. So
I do not think giving artificial intelligence the ability to understand music is necessary.
Without emotions there is no beneficial value between noise and what we call music. Sure
machine could find patterns in sounds as well but without emotions there is no rewarding
value or purpose for it.

What we could do instead is to learn from our auditory system how to handle sound. The
input of sound is usually very noisy containing a lot of sound sources mixed together. The
problem of identifying sound sources and separating them can be solved by using similar
techniques to how humans do it. For example the distance could be determined by the
volume of sound and the relative position could be determined by comparing 2 sound inputs
from different locations. While even humans have trouble with some specific sound
identification tasks (for example determining whether the sound is coming from front or
from behind) we can use similar solutions to what evolution has come up with. Thanks to
outer ear some higher frequency sounds are cut off if they are received from behind. But if
we cannot predict if those higher frequencies should be present then just slightly turning our
head can identify the position. Closely learning how sound is processed by humans can lead
to new solutions for artificial intelligence.

Also the way how music and songs are stored in our memory could be beneficial to study
and understand. We remember the abstract representation or schema of different attributes
describing each song, but at the same time we can remember specific facts about it (like
lyrics, in what key it starts, tempo, etc.). By recalling one aspect of the song we can recall all
the other variables. This highly intertwined data structure would allow very flexible queries
and data retrieval.
 This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Review by Artem Kaliuk

If you develop an ear for sounds

that are musical it is like
developing an ego. You begin to
refuse sounds that are not musical
and that way cut yourself off from
a good deal of experience.

John Cage (1912 1992)

I do not know many people going for higher education in their thirties. Among those I
know (or those I have only heard of) I cannot recall anybody making not just a
successful career, but a universally-recognized name in science. This is why Daniel
Levitin already seemed to be an interesting person even before I started reading his
book. Having provided a detailed overview of a music theory in the first chapters of the
book, Professor Levitin steps into discussion of the brain predicting, reacting and
delighting us with music.

The theory behind the text lines resembles with the layered prediction-memory
framework which Jeff Hawkins introduced in his book (here the top-down and bottom-up
cases are explained by top-level and low-level processing, respectively). Accepting the
importance of physiological structure of the brain to the cognitive processes, Levitin,
however, emphasizes several times on his particular interest in mind as an abstraction
of the brain activity. Giving an analogy with software burnt into the hardwired structure,
the author tries to see the reasons for feeling and enjoying the music. As before, I
disagree with such analogy as software instructs and controls the hardwire, while mind
is something that comes out as result of electrochemical (say, physical) activity in the
brain. Our minds can be adapted by simply affecting this activity (with drugs or other
stimuli), while the software stays either running properly or erroneously due to internal
failures or memory damages. Mind is based on the current physical activity and
previous experience. I can only accept the notion of software applied to genes: the
genetic information which we receive from our parents to some extent defines our
temper, preferences and future development. But it is still a rough comparison to a
computer program what we receive encoded in genes does not necessarily define our
fate (children having aptitude for music being exceeded by their less-talented but more
hardworking fellows is an encouraging example provided by Daniel Levitin).

1
Fascinating in this book is:

- that studying music or how the brain works on music allows us to look incredibly
farther into the brain than it seems at the first glance. Music proves to be a good test
tool involving prediction, emotions and grouping.

- the newly-discovered complementary role of cerebellum. For a long time the oldest
part of the brain was thought of as a control room for human motions. Now there is
evidence that cerebellum also stores the temporal information about the music we are
listening to and then it recalls this information when while reproducing the music.
Moreover, an amazing fact is that cerebellum was discovered to be a center for
emotions;

- categorization. In previous readings we were already exposed to an amazing

paradigm of invariant representations in our memory. In This is Your Brain on Music the
author explores the idea of invariant memory as a categorization problem. Here we
witness a debate between two classical groups of memory theorists constructivists,
who stand for idea of some general low-detail pattern being stored for each experience
we encounter, while the details are defined and added later; and record-keepers who
insist on storing exact details of each object or event just the way it is done by a tape-
recorder. At the first glance constructivism seems to be a way more reasonable
approach, but Levitin breaks our expectation by giving examples which prove the two
points of view to be both right and wrong. As a result, we are introduced to a new
memory theory. Professor Levitin assumes that with multiple-trace memory every
experience is stored and, what is more important, can be retrieved and replayed in our
minds by firing the right cue a complementary experience (a melody, an odor or a
friends joke) which we had at this moment. That is why we sometimes laugh when
somebody makes a statement which is not funny by its nature (but causes us to fire a
neural network storing an inside-joke related to this particular phrase); that is why we
want our professors to give us interesting and easy-to-understand examples when
explaining a highly-complex theory. The more we access the memory (or, simply
speaking, the more we repeat a particular primary experience in a tandem with the
complimentary one), the stronger the synapses become and the faster the information
retrieval will be done. This is already a good motivational example both for chip memory
designers (and I believe similar optimization strategies are already implemented) and
teachers (to make the students remember things in an easy way. However, education
still possesses a huge potential for improvement).

- chapter about emotions. During our previous meetings several times we touched
upon the issue of having an artificial mind without emotions. There is a hard-to-observe
mechanism behind emotions when we listen to music. However, it was shown that at
least three components of the brain are involved into emotional reactions to music

2
(amygdala, cerebellum and nucleus accumbens). Even more interesting is to see when
we experience pleasure: either when predicting the next piece of music correctly or,
when a musician surprises us by violating the structure which we were expecting.
Indeed, being a good musician requires not only having the technical skills, but also
breaking the patterns to call emotions (why do you think Nickelback is the worst band
ever?). Surprisingly, this phenomenon can be discovered in the fields not directly
related to music: breaking the clichs (for instance, in product design) is one of the key
success factors in business.

Inspiration for building intelligent systems

I am quite sceptical about the idea of creating a silicon chip with a voice of Christina
Aguilera (however, mounted on top of a dancing robot, it could be a perfect participant
for the Eurovision song contest), so I did not consider any androids for this part. Instead,
reading about the categorization for MP3 search engine made me recall some thoughts
I had several years ago. The author mentioned problems of finding the versions of the
same song by different artists. It could be useful to apply the speech recognition
techniques to extract the lyrics of the song. As each artist has a distinct timbre, it would
be interesting to analyze the timbre of the voice (in the way humans do) on each
uploaded song based on a small fragment and create a category for this particular artist.
Based on the recognized text we could now look up for the song Mr. Sandman; based
on the difference in voice timbres, it will give out versions by different artists.

Creating an artificial auditory system as a functional replica of the human one can be
widely used for sensor fusion. Most of the current applications in robotics involve
processing visual and vestibular data from cameras and accelerometers. Analyzing the
audio data coming from the environment can help significantly when detecting obstacles
or moving threats for both human and robot navigation applications (inside the factory
building, on the road or even in the air). It was mentioned that visual and auditory
systems are the best developed. It would be also interesting to apply similar processing
techniques (recall that cortex regions for each sensory system are all of the same
structure and functional principle) for haptic interactions and odor analysis.

After all, I cannot restrict myself from the negative emotions I had about the book:
Professor Levitin LOVES referring to numerous people he met, talked to, had a drink
with or was just ignored by. I consider this constant name-dropping together with a deep
excursion into the music theory (which I find much less useless and annoying) to be one
of the reasons for my slow progress through some of the chapters (I got simply lost in
names and DAH-dah-ta DUM-dums). Despite that (and the authors criticism of Frank
Sinatra), this book made me think of a music in a different way and it is quite likely that I
may read it once again (and I have already recommended Your Brain on Music to
some of my friends).

3
 This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Letvin
Scott Kenealy
January 7, 2012

1 Introduction
Daniel Letvins book, This is Your Brain on Music, is best thought of as a series of essays related to the
role of music in the evolution, development, and operation of the human brain. Although it sometimes
runs off on self-indulgent tangents (such as the chapter about meeting Francis Crick), the core of the book
revolves around musics significance to humans, why we are programmed to have a disposition towards
music (and certain musical styles over others), as well as what use music serves in other brain functions.

2 Main Point of Your Brain on Music

Pinning the main point of the book down to just one thing is rather difficult, as the book seems to me to be
closer to a series of essays involving the brain and music rather than a monolithic whole. I dont consider
this a bad thing, as the book doesnt seem to try to present any unified theory, but rather considers several
facets individually. That being said, the book seems to focus around three main points: music utilizes
a large variety of basic brain functions, it is closely tied to emotion, and seems to be advantageous to
survival in line with Darwinian natural selection.

2.1 Music and Brain Functions

It is sometimes claimed that swimming is the best exercise one can do, since it requires one to work nearly
every group of muscles. Music can be thought of as the brains analogue to swimming. In its most basic
and passive form, it exercises timing functions, matches patterns and makes predictions. Pay a little closer
attention, and spatial details, such as the size of the room, become clear. Perhaps youre listening to Jimmy
Page of Led Zeppelin play guitar with a violin bow, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth shoving a screwdriver
into his guitar, or Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine shoegazing a wall of sound out of a single guitar,
and simply pondering over how such strange sounds could be produced. At the more active end, you may
be engaged in creative pursuits, performing, composing, or engineering music.
It should be fairly obvious that even simply listening to music hones a variety of brain functions.
Looking back to Jeff Hawkins book, On Intelligence, one is immediately reminded of the themes of
prediction, pattern matching, and invariant representations. Despite the fact that a song can vary greatly
among live versions, covers, etc., it is not difficult to recognize any of these variations of a song we already
know. Likewise, we expect certain patterns to hold, such as time signature or overall style, and can be
pleasantly surprised when artists slightly violate these expectations.
Overall, one of the defining factors of music enjoyment is this twist in expectations. Too little variation
is seen as boring, while too erratic of a composition sounds incomprehensible. Thus, little children who

1
have no real music experience tend to enjoy very simple music, as just noticing the pattern is difficult
enough. Casual listening adults expect some variation, and tend to enjoy the semi-stable music of Sinatra,
U2, and Metallica, but are turned off by the chaos of The Velvet Underground or Captain Beefheart and
his Magic Band.
The complexity of music is described by the degree to which expectations are broken and also the dif-
ficulty of noticing a pattern out of seeming chaos. Variation can be manifested in a variety of independent
parameters, such as tempo, timbre, and pitch. Although I dont remember it being mentioned in the book,
I would assume that the brain regions associated with operations in these domains begin developing rather
independently, and different experiences result in unequal development of these regions, so a large deal
of musics enjoyment could come from chaos in one domain firmly grounded in the predictable in other
domains.

2.2 Ties to Emotion

Its no secret that music, as a form of art, attempts to express that which is difficult to express adequately
in words. Music in movies sets the tone (fast-paced music during a chase scene), prepares us for what is
coming next (the approaching shark song in Jaws), or misleads us (any horror film where suspense is built
out of nothing). Ballads try to go beyond simple statements of love, while religious hymns express many
of mankinds deepest hopes and desires.
All of these are closely tied to emotion, and it is generally accepted that any emotions and our perceived
significance of an event correspond to one another. Neuroscientists point to the relation of the amygdala
and memory, as well as the evolutionary need for quick responses to dangerous events. When music can
easily be coupled with emotions, it is easy to understand the widespread significance of music across
human cultures.
This also leads to the interesting effect that as to why we tend to enjoy the music we heard as teenagers.
The teenage years are an emotional roller coaster, so it is no surprise that music is one of the details which
become well-preserved in memory from that period.
It does amaze me how well the two are linked, though. For example, I remember driving several years
ago to see my then-girlfriend on a particularly nice day, with a Neutral Milk Hotel album in my car, and
just thinking how happy I was at that time, and now every time I hear the opening line of the third track
on that album, I not only immediately think of this, but I can remember very specific details, such as the
spot on the road where my car was, accurate within a few meters.

2.3 Natural Selection

Since music appears in every human culture, one must gather that it was either advantageous for survival,
a byproduct of something advantageous, or universally accepted as a desirable quality in a mate. Letvin
seems to lean on the first, but also implies that it may be a combination of all of these factors.
A smarter creature is more likely to survive than a dumber, but otherwise equal, counterpart, and Letvin
establishes earlier that music tends to involve large parts of the brain. Thus, applying music as a form of
mental exercise, it would make sense that those creatures practicing music would more effectively develop
their brains, increasing the odds of survival. Music can also serve for communication purposes, and simple
tone patterns may be good substitutes for basic communication, such as yes/no or group hunting orders,
so music would be just as necessary to survival as language.
Other scientists claim that music is a spandrel, a byproduct of something useful. This probably has
some degree of truth in it. After all, it is not difficult to think of situations in which good recognition

2
of timing, pitch, and timbre would be useful to most any animal. Thus, music may simply play on our
necessary natural capacities in such an enjoyable fashion that it managed to easily arise and stick around.
Sexual selection may also be related. Supposing music to be a completely useless skill, the mere
means to develop such a skill would be indicative of a creature with its more pressing affairs, such as food
and shelter, already so well taken care of that it can squander its efforts elsewhere. In short, it may be
equivalent to the peacock tail or the sports car.
Im no evolutionary biologist, but Id say that all three have something to contribute. I can think of
situations in which music would be directly advantageous and of important survival skills indirectly related
to music. Meanwhile, its no secret that successful musicians can sleep with pretty much whomever they
want, so it certainly must play a role in innate preferences in mate search.

3 Application to the Construction of Intelligent Machines

This book struck me as a good extension to On Intelligence. Like the Hawkins book, Brain on Music was
teeming with ideas related to pattern recognition and prediction. It mainly served to reinforce my faith in
Hawkins ideas.
One thing the music book focused a bit more on is the role of emotion. Im not exactly sure how
one would make some sort of emotion processing unit artificially, but in the human brain, it is critical for
sorting the useful from the irrelevant. Perhaps we could build a system very different concept of emotions
than could serve as an analogue to human emotions; that might prevent an intelligent system to get caught
up in superstition and flimflam. On the other hand, many of the most important modern conflicts, such
as Israel/Palestine, are incredibly emotionally charged, and I cant see an intelligent computer coming up
with good solutions to these problems without being able to properly understand the emotional stances of
the involved parties.
Towards the end of the book, there is a brief comment in passing about mirror neurons, which fire both
when observing an action and when performing the action, and are important for learning. Supposing we
can get a brain-like architecture successfully prototyped in hardware, the next biggest challenge will be
the training of such a system. These mirror neurons seem like a good place to look for inspiration.

4 Concluding Thoughts
I found the book to be well thought out and a pleasant enough read, but Im not entirely sold on the amount
of content it held which was relevant to the course. Overall, it seemed much of the important content was
a restatement of the Hawkins book. I listen to a wide variety of music, play a few instruments, can read
sheet music, and know basic music theory, so much of the material was familiar, but I imagine to someone
who is not, some of the content was difficult and not particularly important.
Having started on the final book for this class, Ive noticed that there isnt a book which focuses
on superstition, trickery, or fallacious thinking, but that seems like a highly relevant complement to the
Hawkins book. On the topic, Ive only read Michael Shermers Why People Believe Weird Things, but there
are enough books on the topic that I imagine one would be well-suited for this class. Perhaps something
from that field would be a better choice than the music book.

3
This is your Brain on Music
Thomas Knauer
Throughout the book Levitin is contrasting a prototype theory with an exemplar
theory for storing memories. The first concept holds that only an abstract invariant
version of the perceived data input is stored. Whereas the second one implies that
everything is explicitly saved in a conceptual memory system. Although I personally
felt as Levitin opposes the detailed record tape version, at some point he starts
doubting. Further he supports his doubts with some examples which show that one is
able to recall tiny little details from their past. How is it possible to remember certain
details with a simple invariant pattern? He finally holds that:

we are storing both the abstract and the specific information contained in
melodies. This may be the case for all kinds of sensory stimuli.

As I was convinced by Hawkins idea of using invariant representations

retained through patterns in our brain, I stopped thinking about other possible storing
mechanisms. But there was one thing Hawkins did not mention in his book, namely
how we can recall stored things. Levitin, on the other hand, is promoting the multiple-
trace memory model as a possible solution. It assumes that:

context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have
listened to at various times in your life is cross-coded with the events of those
times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are
linked to the music.

In theory everything we observe is potentially stored and we only need the

right cue to recall it. In the authors opinion memory is encoded in groups of neurons
and by recreating the required configuration it can be retrieved. Here is where music
comes into play, respectively musical pieces. They can give crucial hints in order to
remember certain things. Songs, among other sensory stimuli, can retrieve almost
forgotten memories.

Let us continue with the mind game that theoretically everything can be
remembered by getting the right cue. The ability to remember things then could be
maximised by having a unique hint for everything saved on your personal mind hard
disk. The obvious problem here is that we have only a limited amount of cues. What I
want to point out is that if there are several clues available for one and the same
memory cell it becomes easier to evoke it. In addition, along one memory trace other
traces can arise and reveal whole memory networks. For this reason thinking about
your 10th birthday might remind you of details from your childhood that you had not
thought of for a long time. Associating one and the same hint with too many
memories, however, can lead to the opposite effect. That is why you cannot use a
popular song, which you have heard again and again in different situations, as a cue;
since there are too many memory traces having the same source.
 To sum up I experienced the discussed topic as being the most interesting
one. It was complementing ideas of Jeff Hawkins and brought up some new ideas.
However, I still do not feel well informed of how one explicitly recalls memories and
how the theatre of minds can be imagined.

Using the knowledge of the book This is Your Brain on Music to build
intelligent machines might sound unconnected at the beginning. Interestingly, these
research areas have more in common than one might expect.

What is an intelligent device? How do you define intelligent behaviour? And is

an intelligent machine supposed to be inerrable? General speaking artificially created
intelligence must work properly under all circumstances. People tend to lose their
trust in machines if they feel overburdened by their uncontrolled behaviour. Now think
in terms of intelligence as an imitation of the human brain, mind and cognition.
Incorrect decisions made by humans are simply handled as human failure. Yet hardly
anyone mistrusts human confidence. Is that not contradictory? Copying our
brainpower but not allowing wrongdoing? In my opinion it is essential to find a trade-
off between acceptable errors and degrees of intelligence.

Furthermore, I personally attach importance to the mentioned trust issue.

While I was working as a student trainee at the Institute for Data Processing my
supervisor was doing research in the field of Trust between Cognitive Vehicles. This
provided me with some insight information in this area and taught me how difficult it is
to define trust in an abstract way. Once a sophisticated framework is established the
next challenge is to teach how trust, reputation and other factors can be combined
and adjusted by participants of a trust network. One main approach was to find out
how fast wrong information spreads out within a mesh for different trust
implementations.1 This leads to the origin of trust, namely security. Sometimes it
feels like while rushing from one achieved success to another we forget about the
new created potential for hackers and other bad guys to manipulate and misuse
intelligent devices. Thus I think that more attention should be paid to this topic as its
importance will even increase in the future.

A representative for trust in combination with intelligent devices is how to

decide which source of information is most reliable if there are multiple sources
available. Another concrete example is to consider trustfulness in terms of the
possibility to influence or obscure either the device itself, the way of data collection by
sensors, or, as mentioned before, the data origin.

Much of what we perceive contains missing and obscured information. Thus it

is necessary to implicate the environment when creating intelligent procedures. One
and the same intelligent device probably performs different outside than inside which
can lead to unexpected behaviour. In fact, miscellaneous surroundings affect the

1
http://mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/997457/997457.pdf
data we are receiving with our set of sensory organs. Since our brain is steadily
adapting to the given environment it seems that our sensation is working somewhat
independent to it. On that account, for example, we usually do not need to
understand every single word in order to understand a sentence. For working out the
message two steps are required. The first one is to readjust the organs to the
ambience and the second one is to fill in the occurring gaps. How we can use this for
our purposes is discussed in the following.

I would like to introduce one approach which is performing with a perceptual

system that can restore information. The basic idea is to create a multi sensory
perception system with a parallel working feature extraction. The features are
calculated independently and the outputs are continuously updated. The main task of
a multidimensional framework is to support the detection of the desired information.
The following paragraph will illustrate the discussed concept.

Think about creating a device for detecting fire and setting of a fire alarm. The
most common concepts are using smoke detectors to become aware of an
emergency. Now this system can be expanded to a more sophisticated multi sensory
arrangement by adding an infrared camera and a microphone. The IR camera can be
used to identify fire pockets before enough smoke is produced in order to activate a
smoke detector. The sound pick-up can be used to extract fire specific sounds. All of
them are working independently. An intelligent device can be trained to react properly
in different situations as it comprises and controls all of the extracted information.
With this concept it would be possible to distinguish between a case of emergency
and a simple candle light. Further it would work faster and more reliable than present
systems and could help to reduce false alarms and would thus provide more safety.
The predicting aspect for this system is that, for instance, the sound of an explosion
or a new unusual source of heat could be compared to previous happenings or
predefined patterns and with its result corresponding actions can be operated.

Levitin holds that it is a tricky issue to categorise things with a specific scheme.
He tries to define characteristics of a typical bird; having wings, being able to fly and
being monogamous. Further he is asking whether or not a penguin fits into this
definition. It does in some ways, but it is very far from the stereotype. Indeed, there
are approximately 8,800 species of birds. With this and some other examples he
points out that it is not always possible to draw a strict line between categories in
order to satisfy all cases. Most of the time, however, it is not necessary to take all
individual cases into consideration. A limited number of possible input data can
reduce the possible outputs. With this knowledge, instead of using a simple Fast and
Frugal Tree approach, it could be more accurate to use an overlapping and modified
prototype theory where one object can be part of several categories, as it was
proposed by Lakoff2.

2
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/leo/rahmen.php?seite=r_wiss/steffen_hecke.php
This Is your brain on Music
The science of a human obsession Eric Lambers

At one point of reading this book I asked myself why is Mr Levitin even
searching for answers? Is he trying to create music that will affect people
psychologically, or he is he just innately curious? I think the latter. Whilst
he does not aim to map the brain and what happens where, he is more
concerned with the how and why things happened in the brain as a direct
result from listening to music. Many of the ideas that he refers to, or
studies that he has personally conducted, are quite interested. With
respect to the brain, he talks about how the brain is different in people
who are accomplished musicians compared to the average layperson. I
forget which part of the brain is enlarged, but he refers to a part of the
brain that can grow to be larger through practice, and that musically
inclined people do actually have different brains to tone deaf karaoke
singers like myself!

To be critical at the same time the book drags in with a seemingly infinite
number of explanations and analogies that had me losing interest very
rapidly in what he had to say. However his ideas were quite stimulating,
once again the topic of invariant representations is fundamental to
listening to music, and how we can so easily remember a song. I find this
aspect of music and our brains to be the most interesting concept of the
book. I myself have problems remembering names of songs (or even
people for that matter), but I can remember tunes and recognise tunes
(and people similarly) with ease. I can remember basic chord
progressions, when the pitch should increase or decrease, and many other
factors. The way in which music is stored in my brain, as invariant
representations is quite accurate. I can recognise a familiar song whether
it is played on a different instrument, with a different pitch, loudness,
tempo, even rhythm. The brain is so well adapted to making these
connections that our intelligence goes far beyond that of computers.

The case of labelling mislabelled songs on peoples MP3 databases was
simple for a computer to rectify as easy as scanning a barcode at a
supermarket. However this is far from intelligence. Computers struggle to
identify music if it is slightly different, in any way. Be it a cover band
(which is highly recognisable) or simply a faulty set of speakers that do not
reproduce hi-fi sounds, computers are in no way at the same level as
humans for listening to and distinguishing sounds.

From reading this book, music has become something so much more than
pleasing sounds. The psychological processes involved are not simple
processes, such as sound waves reaching the ear > converted to electrical
signals > simple emotional response. Different pitches fire in your brain at
specific frequencies, different processes occur for every song. Music is
something amazing that has been evolutionarily developed from (I would
now like to agree with Darwin) mating ceremonies in primitive human
populations. Music is used in Australian Aboriginal tribes to tell their
history, the Old Testament used to be orated to hymn music music also
helps to remember. It is not a mere parasite of communication, for I think
it is too intertwined with communication to call it a parasite they are
almost one and the same. Music communicates emotions, and in that way
it is a medium for story telling. Listen to song lyrics that you hear on the
radio it is a story. Shitty teen music is an exception, with terrible music
such as Rebecca Blacks Friday (lyrics go along the lines of, should I sit
in the front seat or the back seat, as if it is some sort of moral dilemma it
is a truly painful song to listen to). Whilst Levitin mainly focuses on
listening to music in regards to emotional reactions, I think playing of
music is also an outlet for many people. A lot of very popular music stars
have consequently committed suicide and my personal explanation may
be a bit off line but it is my opinion. I think that some musicians play and
compose music to free themselves from negative emotions, and sometimes
that can be too much for them, leading to drug and alcohol abuse, along
with other problems. As such I think that music is a highly psycho-
emotional concept that can be pleasing to most people, either playing
music or listening to it.

The emotional attachment to music is also quite interesting to me. I can
personally think of several songs that will always bring memories flooding
back into my mind. One of Bruno Mars songs, about catching a grenade for
lover, will forever remind me of driving around British Columbia in
Canada. It was forever overplayed on the radio, and will always remind me
of the positive memories of cruising around on road trips with mates to go
skiing. I am sure that I will also have songs from my time here in Germany,
such as Fliegerlied, and Living Next door to Alice from Oktoberfest of
course! Without music in those instances, my memories would be so much
less than what they are for me mentally.

So what can be taken from Daniels research and to be used in reality, to
somehow better our society, and how people act and feel? I find his idea
about personal radio stations to be quite interesting. He mentions towards
the end of the book that in the near future personal radio stations may be a
reality. A station that is fine tuned and manicured over time to ensure that
it plays music according to an algorithm of ones personal music tastes,
their openness to new styles of music all leading to what could be termed
a perfect radio station. What goes beyond this notion of a personal radio
station is that there is an element of control that can be extracted from the
algorithm that selects music. Since Levitin has proved through evidence in
his novel, different kinds of music and sounds make different parts of the
brain fire, and encourage different hormones to be released in the brain.
Dopamine, for example, to relax people, has been found to be released in
the brain when certain music is listened to. On a side note, even as I write
this essay, I listen to classical music, as I believe it calms and helps to
generate clarity, especially in times of mental writing blanks!

Levitin explains that the emotions we experience from listening to music
arise from the prediction models inside our brain, that happen
subconsciously. He says that if a song is too predictable, it in effect over
satisfies, and provides little stimulation. But when a song requires more
complex prediction models within the brain, when expectations are met,
the brain rewards itself with emission of certain hormones. He even says
that when composers go against these predictions, our brain can
sometimes also enjoy these variances as a way for the brain to work
harder to accurately predict the next chord progression.

This automated intelligence could be quite an important program to be
developed in the near future. Personally, I do not take the time to
download/buy music that I like and to install it upon my iPod, categorise it
into playlists and favourites all on top of having to carry an iPod around
with headphones. I find it too much of a nuance, and I do prefer just to
listen to a radio station that has an infinite number of different songs, as
well as the radio stations that are known to always play those classic hits! I
think that is it not beyond the realm of computer intelligence to eventually
arrive at a point in time when it is able to simulate music according to
preferences in rhythm, tempo, groove, beat many different factors. As I
have commented in my previous rambling essays, I think that there is a
fine line that should not be crossed by computer intelligence that. I think
that human input is still required and should not be eliminated from music
especially!

The human component of music is quite integral the emotions conveyed
by a human through singing, or playing music can send clear messages to
the listener. Levitin alludes to this when he mentions Frank Sinatra, and
how all his music post 1980 was sung with the satisfaction of someone
who just had someone killed or along those lines. However pre 1980 he
sang with passion and strained every note in a specific way in order to
create different emotions.
My Thoughts on This Is Your Brain On Music

By Marius Loch

Intro

Daniel J. Levitin started his career as record producer and sound engineer while being a musician
himself. He later turned into a neuroscientist specializing in music perception and cognition. In
his book This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession(2006) he combines
the fields music and neuroscience to give an overview to the layperson, exploring the connection
between the subjects. After an introduction to some musical basics (which reanimated many
forgotten memories from my high school music classes) he talks about why we like music and
what we like in music (much is about fulfilling and violating expectations) and why we like what
we like (we mostly acquire our musical taste in our childhood). In the later chapters he discusses
musical expertise, always stressing the point that everyone is somehow an expert in music as
there are different kinds of expertise. The last chapter is about where music comes from from an
evolutionary point of view.

Fluid and crystallized intelligence

Another memory from my time in high school was evoked when Levitin writes about
categorization and how our music memory works. In my philosophy class (in the book cognitive
psychology is referred to as empirical philosophy) in 11th grade we had a guest speaker: Prof.
G. Curio, a neuroscience professor from Charite Berlin. He gave a class about freedom of will and
within talked about the difference in intelligence between young and older people: he claimed
younger people have a fluid intelligence, enabling them to quickly pick up new skills and solve
problems. Adults on the contrary have a crystallized intelligence, they have a structured
framework of knowledge based on experience and prior learning; it becomes more difficult to
pick up things in a new field, but easier to apply existing knowledge or to classify objects within
our developed framework. I remember how I liked the idea how we developed a structure of our
world and sort new information into that structure.

This correlates to much from Levitins book. In the chapter Anticipation he tells us how we
build our frameworks: An important way that our brain deals with standard situations is that it
extracts those elements that are common to multiple situations and creates a framework within
which to place them; this framework is called a schema (p.115). He claims we have musical
schemas as well for all kind of things: styles and eras, certain bands, artist and genres, covering
rhythms, chords, typical motifs and sequence, etc. - we learn what the legal moves in the music
of our culture are.

The author also describes how these schemas are developed mostly in our youth: we start
already prenatal, in the womb of our mothers. By the age of two children start to show
preference towards the music of their culture (p. 230), then the age ten to eleven becomes a
turning point when all children start to care about music, even those who didnt care so far (p.
231). The most influential period is the age around fourteen when teenagers start their
emotional self-discovery and use music as social identification (p. 231). By the age of twenty
the brain is mostly finished and it becomes seemingly more difficult to learn new skills (p. 233)
also our framework for music is mostly set.

This framework (and the containing schemas) describe how we think music has to be and what
its legal moves are these are our expectations towards music. As the author goes on and
points out several times in the book, we like music that fulfills our expectations, but violates
them every now and then:

The thrills, chills, and tears we experience from music are the result of having our expectations
artfully manipulated by a skilled composer and the musicians who interpret that music. [] The
setting up and then manipulating of expectations is the heart of music.

If it is too simple we perceive it as boring; if it is too complex we cant find any structure or
familiarity and dont like it (p. 235). The terms simple and complex of course depend on our
framework and how advanced it is in a particular style or genre.

This correlates well to Prof. Curios description of fluid and crystallized intelligence. In our
childhood we use our fluid intelligence and pick up the rules of our cultures music. The music we
listen to in that time shape our understanding of what music is and what to expect of it. By the
time we become adults these expectations represent our taste in music. We dont learn any
more new music (unless we actively strive to do so), but we apply our crystallized intelligence.
We listen to music and try to fit it into our framework and based on that decide whether we like
it or not.

Memory-prediction framework with multiple-trace memory

In chapter five where memory and categorization are discussed the author describes one
problem: it is easy for a computer to recognize a song by look up. But it is very difficult to
recognize two different versions of the same song by comparison. The brain does this with
ease, but no one has invented a computer that can even begin to do this. (p. 135) he
immediately gives a reason in the next sentence: This different ability of computers and
humans is related to a debate about the nature and function of memory in humans.

As scholars of Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence this rings a bell of course, memory as a crucial part
of an intelligent system. There are more parallels: Hawkins intelligent system as memory-based
prediction system corresponds perfectly to the humans perception of music. Build a frame work
in memory by pattern recognition, predict what comes next and be alert (or in the case of music
pleasurably surprised) if the prediction wasnt quite correct.
When we then read Levitins description of tune recognition the parallel is complete: Tune
recognition involves a number of complex neural computations interacting with memory. It
requires that our brains ignore certain features while we focus only on features that are
invariant from one listening to the nextand in this way, extract invariant properties of a song.
(p 133). The abstraction of invariant features is also a central theme in Hawkins book.
In other words Levitins description of how we perceive music reads like a manual to Hawkins
intelligent machines. So exploring the debate about the nature and function of memory in
humans (see above) seems like a good point to help with building intelligent systems.

In this discussion two views are introduced. One is the constructivist theory (relational memory),
claiming the brain only stores relations between objects and ideas, but not necessarily details
about the objects themselves (p. 135). This implies we actually construct our memories every
time we access them and details are more of a sophisticated guess.
The second view is the record-keeping theory (absolute memory), claiming memory stores most
our experience accurately and in detail.
Unfortunately there is a lot of evidence for both theories. An easy and intuitive example: every
one of us will recognize a song we know, even if it was transposed by some tones. We will also
recognize it, when it is played faster or slower than the original. This would support the
constructivist theory, as the different versions are identified by the relationship of the sounds.
On the other hand everyone will notice, when a song is played different to a famous
performance like a radio version listened to all summer long. In fact most people will not only be
able to tell the difference, but be able to reproduce the famous version (as far as their musical
means will allow). This supports the record-keeping theory, as it requires absolute information
about a certain performance.

One interesting aspect that comes up in the discussion about the two memory systems:
apparently we rely on sequences to memorize music. Most humans and even expert musicians
cant evoke the memory of an arbitrary moment in a song. If we want to remember a specific
part, we have to scan the song from the beginning or another significant landmark within the
song. Levitin concludes: This suggests that our memory for music involves hierarchical
encodingnot all words are equally salient, and not all parts of a musical phrase hold equal
status. We have certain entry points and exit points that correspond to specific phrases in the
music []. Another two important keywords from Hawkins book: sequences for memorization
and applying a hierarchy.

As a solution to the two conflicting memory systems the author introduces a hybrid theory: the
multiple-trace memory. According to this theory we store specific (absolute) information as
record-keeping would suggest. Furthermore it is suggested: As we attend to a melody, we must
be performing calculations on it; in addition to registering the absolute values, [] we must also
be calculating melodic intervals and tempo-free rhythmic information [] creating a pitch-free
template [] in order to recognize songs in transposition. [] [This] suggest[s] that we are
storing both the abstract and the specific information contained in melodies.
As this theory claims to preserve the context of a memory, it would explain how we link music to
certain situations in our live and how listening to a song can conjure the memory of a forgotten
event far in the past.

So we saw how closely linked the perception of music in the sense of Daniel Levitin is to
intelligent machines in the sense of Jeff Hawkins. A key feature of both seems to be the human
memory system. Therefore Levitin introduced the multiple-trace memory theory somewhat
combining the record-keeping and the constructivist approach by storing absolute, but also on-
the-spot calculated (abstracted) information. Maybe a further development and analysis of this
memory system could applied in computer systems deliver a breakthrough for intelligent
machines.
 This Is Your Brain on Music
The Science of a Human Obsession

Alexandra Marinescu
Brain, Mind and Cognition

We are [...] under the illusion that we simply open our eyes and we see. A
bird chirps outside the window and we instantly hear. Sensory perception
creates mental images in our minds representations of the world outside
our heads so quickly and seamlessly that it seems there is nothing to it.
This is an illusion. [...] Our perceptual system is supposed to distort the
world we see and hear. We naturally assume that the world is just as we
perceive it. But experiments have forced us to confront the reality that this
is not the case.

Normally, while reading a book, I have to underline specific passages of

text, which I find of great importance, passages that somehow say and
mean more to me than the rest of the book, passages that manage to
change my beliefs or the way I understand my surroundings, the
environment I live in. The quote above did more than that. I had to write it
down, I had to think about it. Underlining it wasnt enough anymore.

So the world isnt what we perceive it to be. Everything we see or hear or

touch or even taste is just a mental projection of the real world. I found
myself thinking about a normal day in my life starting with the moment I
wake up in the morning and start seeing, perceiving my surroundings.
And I surprisingly got stuck at this point, since my first thought was about
the daylight. If what we perceive as light is only a mental image, the
response of our brain to the sensory perception of an oscillation, can it be
that there is no light at all?

It seems that the human brain assigns a label to everything he processes,

based on the different categories he learns over time. And if we also
recall the beliefs of E. Rosch, we can also understand why something can
be more or less a category member; rather than being all or none as
Aristotle has believed, there are shades of membership, degrees of fit to a
category, and subtle shadings. Our sensors perceive light and we think
of it as a day, or dark and we know that the night has come. We
perceive something in between the two categories, neither a day nor a
night, so we it must be either a dawn or a sunset. But then again, these
are only mental images. Light, as we perceive it, may indeed not exist.
The day is just the label we gave to a category of sensory data our brain
processes. One might jump to the conclusion that we live in the dark, but
that cannot be true, since dark is also just a label.
I kept reading the text passage again and again and couldnt get to a
conclusion. I tried to find answers in the book, but instead I found only
further questions and text passages to write down. For example this one:
Perhaps the ultimate illusion [...] is the illusion of structure and form. So
not only does our world look, sound and feel differently as we all perceive
it, now it also doesnt have a structure at all! It seems that we make sense
of the world depending only on the environment we grow up in, on the
things we learn over the years, on our experience.

To sum up, we do see light or dark instead of a certain wavelength, or a

bed or a table instead of the individual atoms they are made of. They
might not exist in the real world as we perceive them, but that doesnt
make them, in my opinion, unreal, just different. We see a bunch of
organized, oscillating particles and assign them a label based of the
categories we learned over the time; we are the ones giving a structure
and a sense to our world by interpreting our sensory perceptions.

How can the knowledge obtained from the book be used for
building intelligent machines?

I strongly believe there is still a very long way we have to go before

building truly intelligent machines. I also believe that we will not be able to
do that unless we have an understanding of how the brain really works.
Unless scientists come up with a theory that manages to provide a unitary
answer to the raised questions, no breakthrough will be made.

The book of reference may not make a breakthrough, but it most certainly
introduces an entirely new point of view in studying the brain, by
considering music and its effects.

So what if we learn how to endow robots with emotion from the brains
perception on music? Tempo is a major fact in conveying emotion. Songs
with fast tempos tends to be regarded as happy, and songs with slow
tempos as sad. [...] In order to be moved by music (physically and
emotionally) it helps a great deal to have a readily predictable beat. [...]
Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of
expectations. As music unfolds, the brain constantly updates its estimates
of when new beats will occur, and takes satisfaction in matching a mental
beat with a real-in-the-world one, and takes delight when a skillful
musician violates that expectation in an interesting way.

For a robot isnt, of course, a trivial task to react emotional to the different
violations of their expectations, with these expectations being nothing
else but a probabilistic model based on the training data they were given.
But when interacting with people, this could take a totally new turn.

People do react differently when interacting with machines, compared to

the times when they are dealing with fellow humans, mostly because they
know that such machines dont share the same internal structure
reactions, emotions, thoughts as they do. But if we were to apply on
machines what we learned from music, robots would be able to give rise to
emotions only by violating the expectations of the humans.

By adapting the tempo and the timbre of their voice, robots should be
therefore able to communicate different emotions to the people they are
interacting with.

Of course, this is yet another way of tricking people into thinking that
robots are truly endowed with emotions. It still doesnt represent a step
forward in building truly emotional robots.

Another big constraint is, of course, the mind. For cognitive scientists,
the word mind refers to that part of each of us that embodies our thoughts,
hopes, desires, memories, beliefs and experiences. The brain, on the other
hand, is an organ of the body, a collection of cells and water, chemicals and
blood vessels, that resides in the skull. Activity in the brain gives rise to the
contents of mind. [...] Different programs can run on what is essentially the
same hardware different minds can arise from very similar brains.

I do want to believe that there is more to us than an evolved brain. I refuse

to believe that this feeling the self could be an illusion, just as it
certainly feels as though the earth is standing still, not spinning around on
its axis at a thousand miles per hour. And for this reason I also strongly
believe that robots will remain just hardware; they might get to have the
intelligence of a human brain, but they will never have a mind the self.
 Audrey Pedro

This Is Your Brain On Music from Daniel Levitin

12/01/2012

Daniel Levitin is interested in music (he works as a music producer) and in particular

in how music is processed by the human brain in order to understand why is music such a

big deal for most of the people. His book This Is Your Brain On Music presents his theory
and researches results on the topic.

Two points were to me particularly interesting in this book, the first one because of

personal experience and the second because of its power. What I found very impressive in

this book due to personal experience is the theory about how music tastes are created.

Indeed I always found it very funny that people stay so attached to the music they were

listening in their youth and when they are listening to it they become the young person they

were almost instantaneously. This phenomenon can very easily be observed in wedding for

example.

Here Daniel Levitin gives an explanation: as a language or any other learned skill,

music structures are acquired without too much effort in the youth. The parallel made with

language was the one that spoke to me. Young children are able to learn a language without

any grammar lessons and so on: they just ear it and memorize what other say. Then they
build language structures and become native speaker which means they master the

language with no much effort. In comparison to older people learning a new language the
way young children become expert in their mother tongue is astonishing. For music it is

exactly the same: until a certain age learning new structures is very easy and then it
demands some effort. Yet this learning ability decreasing with age has nothing so illogical but

what I found interesting is the combination with the fact that people do like music if they are

familiar to its structure. When I read that I was surprised, it means then that new songs we

like are just similar to other songs we already like, boring no?

Actually not so much because as Levitin explains the same structure allows many

variations (music has many components that can be changed: pitch, rhythm, timbre) and
the known frame is just a safety for the listener. This idea impacted me because of personal
experience (it is even an example used by Levitin about Latin music). I grow up with a

Colombian mother who was listening to salsa, merengue, beguine and other Latin music. I

now appreciate this kind of music very much and I love dance on it but it is very difficult for

me to find dance partners and to put my music on parties. Worst I have the impression that

people dont get the difference between salsa and merengue when I can hear it since the first

notes . Well reading the page concerning that (241 in my edition) was a relief. I finally know

why I feel so alone when listening to Latin music.

I must admit that this book was the first I was not so enthusiastic to read. First of all

the beginning was very technical in music and I think that knowing what pitch, timbre, meter

and loudness are do not help for enjoying music listening. As Levitin says the expert

language is too complicated and creates a separation between musicians and other people

which first was not always there and then is not necessarily justified. Id like to come back to

the parallel with languages: native speakers are able to detect very easily if a sentence is

correct or not but in general they do not know the grammatical rule violated. Concerning
music, people can appreciate music without naming everything. I was hoping that after this

chapter the book would become more interesting but I was disappointed. I did not manage to
get really in the book before chapter 6 and it is now difficult to synthetize ideas about what I

read before this chapter. Chapter 6 gets my attention by presenting what I felt like the core
idea of the book: how music experience is anchored in the reptilian brain and how it calls the

emotion region of the brain (amygdala).

Music is an art from whose medium is sound and silence, definition of music from

Wikipedia mentions the music as an art and it is the most common definition. Art belongs to
the evolved human skills about just creating aesthetic for itself without any vital need

underneath. But in his book Levitin explains that music is something managed by the older
part of the brain, a region we have in common with reptilians such as snakes and that this

region makes the link between music experience and strong emotion reactions. The reptilian

brain allows us to protect ourselves: it normally manages inputs that lead to strong emotion

reactions in order to make us act without thinking too much in dangerous situations. When

we feel burning for example, the reptilian brain will immediately transmit that we have to run

away from fire to save our live and the amygdala is the medium used to make it quick. So
here the theory seems contradictory: how an art can be managed by a region dealing with
vital needs? Levitin explains how music isnt just an art but an evolved skill still being an

instinct (see chapter 9).

The music-as-an-instinct theory is very satisfiable concerning the main question of the

book understanding a human obsession or why is music such a big deal in all societies and

cultures known. It is not just an art but an instinct that we still have and this explains why
mothers sing to their babies to calm them down and why dance is considered as something

so erotic / intimate.

This leads us to the second part of the essay concerning what would be useful in this

book if I was working on an intelligent machine. This book is not so easy to use for building

intelligent machines since the author does not mention any theory about intelligence in

general but focuses on music. Nevertheless understanding music can be considered as a

part of human intelligence.

The first point mentioned above about structures learning and recalling them is an
interesting track. An intelligent machine could learn to build structures in order to apprehend

other unknown things when the structure is similar. This ability could be useful for other
domains of learning (mathematics, linguistic). This characteristic corresponds to a

synthesis ability. It joins the theories of the two previous books that a frame of memorized

known structures that can be adapted to new situations is the basis of intelligence.

This common point emerging from the three first books confirm that intelligence

probably rely on it. Intelligence is the adaptation of known frames to the unkown.
Brain, Mind and Cognition Nadja Peters

Whats your opinion of the most interesting thought?

Where did the book give you inspiration for building intelligent systems and what is your
inspiration?

Why is it sometimes so hard to remember all the interesting things one is supposed to learn in
class? Even though the professors try to teach us in the most passionate way (at least lets
assume that for now), most people have a hard time understanding (e.g. math) and
remembering facts (e.g. differences between programming languages or computer
architectures). On the contrary it is quite easy to remember non-relevant things like the
number of marriages of your favorite actor or the number of goals your soccer team achieved
in the last season. Such facts are usually very interesting, but they do not at all help us passing
the upcoming exams. So why are facts, which we need to learn to move on in our careers, much
harder to remember than unnecessary details about our favorite athletes? As Daniel Levitin
tells in his book This Is Your Brain On Music, we need special cues to retrieve memory from
our brain (Chapter 5, You Know My Name, Look Up The Number). He also tells us that the more
passion is related to a memory, the more likely we will remember it.

So how can we possibly add as much passion to remembering boring things as to things we
are really interested in? Usually the problem is not about the content of a class being boring (at
least this SHOULD not be the problem, although one never finds every subject equally
interesting), but the problem is about sitting down and start learning, memorizing. Although
one has acquired more knowledge and has a great chance to pass exams after doing some
successful learning process, it still involves a lot of stress and pressure. As shown in the
statistics, many people are not able to keep up with that kind of pressure and simply quit their
studies (to keep things correct: being under pressure is of course not the only reason to quit
studies but in these days it is becoming more and more relevant2).

Students giving up university1

50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0

Daniel Levitin This Is Your Brain On Music 09-01-2012

Brain, Mind and Cognition Nadja Peters

As this is a topic which is important for every one of us, it is interesting to find ways to improve
this situation and bring more joy into the lives of stressed students. But how are we supposed
to improve this situation? There are different possibilities:

1. Take away the pressure from student

2. Find methods of learning that are so effective that the student feel comfortable
3. Find methods of relaxing that restore the students psychological condition

Possibility one is definitely the easiest one. Taking away the pressure can be done by simply
making the classes less challenging. As that is usually not increasing the esteem of a university
the pressure could also be taken away by increasing the number of semesters that a student
need to achieve a degree.

As we are studying brain, mind and cognition we will not go the easy way but try to figure how
we can use our knowledge to develop solutions for possibilities two and three. So how can we
manipulate the neurons in our brain to make learning more effective and how can we
manipulate them to make ourselves feel comfortable and relaxed (without using drugs or
similar)?

As Daniel Levitin points out, for remembering things we need certain cues. A cue can be
compared to a key to a door. When one possesses a certain key, that person can open a special
door in ones brain and get access to the information lying beyond. Levitin also says that
memories which involve certain emotions can be remembered easier by our brain. How can we
use this knowledge to stimulate our brain? How can we create some sets of mnemonics for
certain topics and fill those with emotions, so we can remember them most effectively? In this
case effectively means that one uses the smallest amount of time possible for learning but can
remember the things for a long period of time. Moreover learning should not be tight to sitting
at the desk and staring at formulas all over again but involve some kind of actions that make it
more comfortable. But how can we achieve that something a person does not like is actually
fun?

To go with Levitin we could pick some music that makes us feel good and listen to it before
learning. Every time we feel bad we can turn it on and get some positive emotions out of it. At
this point, I would like to cite my favorite quote: Repetition, when done skillfully by a master
composer, is emotionally satisfying to our brains, and makes the listening experience as
pleasurable as it is, (Chapter 5, p. 167). But is it really enough to stimulate our neurons with
some really good pieces of music? As we have learned, the brain is of versatile structure. So
what happens if we listen to some pieces of music that we like and then do something else we
do not like? In my opinion the stimulation will lose its effect because the structure of the
neurons will adapt after some time and the association we have with a certain piece of music
will change. We cannot even compare music to drugs although many people like to do this: If
someone takes drugs, that person will simply increase the dose to get satisfied, but if we
increase the dose of music we do not like anymore, it will probably make us feel worse and8

Daniel Levitin This Is Your Brain On Music 09-01-2012

Brain, Mind and Cognition Nadja Peters

frustrated. So in my opinion to keep the positive effect of music we should not use it to make us
happy before doing things we do not like. After some time it will not work anymore.

We found out what probably will not help us learning more effectively, but what is it that WILL?
What we need for a good strategy is not only a good set of cues and some emotions make the
cues more effective but we also need to repeat the things we want to remember all over again.
Repetition is, besides understanding the context, the most important clue to remember things.
But what is able to get stuck in our minds by being repeated all over again and being pleasant
as well? In our everyday lives, most of us are listening to music most of the time. We can
remember a lot of songs and even sing along to a lot of songs? What if we do not sing along to
lyrics sung by Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley but create our own songs, songs we use to
memorize things we have to learn for an exam for example? What if professors would create
songs and record their lessons? So we would not only buy scripts by the beginning of the
semester but also some recordings to listen to on our MP3 players while going to university in
the mornings. After some time we could sing along and remember all the lessons simply by
humming the melody of the song. Sure, this method cannot save us from solving difficult math
equations but in most cases doing practical exercises is not half as boring as memorizing things.
Doing learning sessions could get another meaning if students simply met in a club and started
dancing and singing to the lectures.

As Levitin says in his book, the ability to make music and being affected by music is natural to us
because it is determined by our genes (Chapter 9, The Music Instinct). So when we want to
build intelligent machines, what kind of genes do we need? What are we supposed to tell it so
that it can function properly? Stephen Jay Gould is of the opinion that music is nothing that we
developed to survive, but that it is a by-product by other functions as language. What happens
if our intelligent system developed some by-products that we did not want it to develop?
Whenever we design a system we want to be in control of that system. How can we be sure
that intelligent systems do not develop their own mind? By their own mind I do not mean, that
they decide to take over planet earth because they are of the opinion that human kind is not
able to control the system properly. What if they simply make mistakes? Actually, it would be
normal, because making mistakes is human, but how can we trust in a machine that drives our
car in the wrong direction, for example?

Maybe we could create a machine that records lessons at university and automatically converts
them to songs we can listen to. Those machines would not harm our lives by making mistakes. I
really do think that listening to songs instead of simply sitting at your desk and staring at a book
would improve our learning performance and make the learning process more enjoyable but
who would actually transform the content of a lesson into a song and record it? There is not
only need in people who actually do know the subject but other people who can do the
performance. Although the effort seems quite large on the first glance, I would love to test that
method of learning.
______________________________________________________________________________
1 Das Studentenportal, Studienabbrecherstudie, 2005, http://www.studserv.de/studium/statistik.php (access: 05-01-2012)
2 Nina Zimmermann, Studenten unter Druck, 2008, http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/0,1518,569612,00.html (access: 05-01-2012)

Daniel Levitin This Is Your Brain On Music 09-01-2012

 Written Discussion on Daniel J.
Levitins This Is Your Brain On
Music
Martin Reverchon
January 9, 2012

1 What is in your opinion the most interesting

thought/idea?
Being only an expert listener and unfortunately having no visible talent in be-
ing an expert performer this book made me joyfully think about how music and
sounds affect us in our daily life. My roommate is a clarinet student at the Uni-
versity of Music and Performing Arts Munich and therefore we tend to talk a lot
about music in general (and I certainly did bombard her with a lot of questions
about the little of music theory we were taught in the book). However, I by myself
never made a connection between music theory and our brain. Therefore, I was
especially surprised by the in hindsight relatively obvious fact that music and
sound like any other perceptional sense we have constantly affect the state our
brain and each individual neuron in it.
Stimulating electrodes deep inside the brain begin to unfold their potential.
Depth-electrodes can cure Cluster-Headaches, muscular spasms or obsessive com-
pulsive disorders. Patients who washed their hands hundreds of times daily can
now again lead a normal life. With the help of depth-electrodes it was even possi-
ble to awaken a patient who was in coma for six years.
I have recently heard about a neuro-technology called controlled reset (CR R
).
In brain regions that are affected by a certain type of diseases with symptoms of
tremors and tinniti often lack sensory input that influences the state the affected
set of neurons is in. Without this input it is possible that these cell assemblies
fall into a self-induced state of mutual pathological synchronisation of which
the above mentioned symptoms stem from. Without the input it is impossible to
desynchronize the afflicted neuronal areas. This is the point where neuro-implants

1
come into play. An electrode is surgically inserted into the patients brain. Firing
at specific frequencies the electrode is able to weaken and ultimately desynchro-
nize the synchronous firing of the neurons resulting into the relief of the malady.
Surprisingly it was found that in certain cases where a proportion of the visual
or in this case auditory nerve was still intact, no surgical operation is neces-
sary. Presenting the patient a sound pattern similar to the electrodes impulses
resulted into the cure of the symptoms, too! This is another very good example
of how sound affects us. Since all of the above mentioned therapies with depth-
electrodes work, is it possible to affect our brain by mere presentation of audio or
visual patterns to cure these sicknesses? Could it be an even more powerful tool?
Music is able to lift our mood, bring us down, soothe our temper or enrage us.
As shown above it might even cure cerebral illnesses. I think it would be great
if we found the principles in how exactly music and sounds affect our brains. If
we could wield that power like a scalpel surgical non-invasive sound therapies
could be used to cure or relieve a wide variety of mental or structural cerebral ill-
nesses. It could be used to put us in several desired cerebral states. May that be
a soothed state for patients with bipolar disease or excitement and agitation for
lethargic people. It is even thinkable to reach some kind of transhumanism via
sounds and music. We could put ourselves into states where we are able to per-
ceive the world better, where we are able to learn quicker and, on the other hand,
where we can erase unwanted memory (if this is desirable is of course a broad eth-
ical discourse).

2 Where did the book give you inspiration for

building intelligent systems and what is your
inspiration?
I recently had the chance to visit ACE in its lab. ACE stands for Autonomous
City Explorer. The ACEproject envisions to create a robot that will autono-
mously navigate in an unstructured urban environment and find its way through
interaction with humans. To achieve this, research results from the fields of au-
tonomous navigation, path planning, environment modelling, and human-robot
interaction are combined. However, on first sight I have to admit that I felt a bit
frightened by its appearance. Besides its bulky built and its massive jaws that
look like they could easily crack a coconut it had a red antenna wiggling in a snake-
like way on its head (which is used to point in different direction a pretty use-
less feature as it turned out, I was told by the researchers). Being asked for direc-
tions by this clunker Id rather change the side of the sidewalk than help this odd

2
penguin-shaped massive monstrosity. Designing a more appealing shape for this
robot will certainly wield a higher acceptance during human-robot interaction.
But the right set of sounds could also be employed to make a valuable positive
first impression, when this robot approaches humans in order to fulfil its objec-
tive. Moreover, during all situations where human-robot interaction is necessary
the right choice of a comforting voice can set a positive mood for human-robot in-
teraction. However, this does admittedly not lead to intelligent machines. It may
just change the way we look at robots and intelligent systems.
Gerd Gigerenzer stated in his book Gut Feelings that a specific intelligent
system I suppose a neural network of some kind was able to learn speech if it
was presented with only simple sentences. I wonder if this was possible for music,
too. Could an intelligent understand music if we presented it with simple chimes
like commercial jingles, simple enough for a toddler to hum. Advancing over a bit
more complex music like minimal music to big symphonies a structure similar to
those that are processing our speech could emerge. Would a similar neural net-
work be able to learn the basics of pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour, timbre, meter,
key, melody and harmony like the different cues of speech; grammar, vocabulary,
syntax, semantics and prosody?
Taking Daniel J. Levitins approach of looking at the brain under the influence
of music could be adapted to analyse the behaviour of neural networks. This would
not only help in the field of research of neural networks. With the achieved in-
sight in neural networks we could also get more knowledgeable about the impact
of sounds and music on the brain on a functional level.
There are two remaining big questions in this world. The first one is How
did the universe into existence. The second one is How does our brain work.
Achieving an understanding of the brain on both, the functional and the behavioural
level, would bring us closer to a solution for the latter problem. Thus, applying
music to several different aspect of brain research on a biological and a techni-
cal level can be of great interest. This gets even more clear if look at one of Lev-
itins statements in the book: Cosmides and Tooby argue that musics function in
the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive
and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands
placed on it by language and social interaction.. Taking this as an analogy for
the development of technical system, I think that a similar approach could bear
feasible results.

3
Tudor Timisescu

Report on the book This Is Your Brain on

Music

1. What is the main point of the book according to your opinion?

With the book This Is Your Brain on Music, the author, Daniel J. Levitin, intends to familiarize
the reader with basic aspects of musical theory, related to the various aspects of musical
perception and interpretation, with the way all of these aspects are processed by the human
hearing apparatus and the brain and with how they all fit it together to create emotions and
impressions inside the mind.

Music is composed of a large palette of elements, such as pitch, rhythm, tempo, contour,
timbre, loudness, reverberation, meter, key, melody and harmony. All of these elements come
together to create a specific impression on the listener. That we can distinguish between a note
played on a piano and the very same note played on a clarinet or if a piece of music is played in a
small cramped room or a big concert hall is nothing short of miracle, the author believes. Human
perception is far more advanced than any of todays fancy computer algorithms and will be for
much longer.

All of these individual elements are processed in different regions of the brain, from areas
of the neocortex, to the cerebellum (the oldest part of the brain), to the amygdala (the part of the
brain that deals with emotions). This last connection reinforces the profoundly emotional role that
listening or playing music has. The music processing machine follows the layered approach
proposed by Hawkins in his book On Intelligence.

Seeing as how music has a very big emotional charge linked to it, memories that are
associated with musical passages also share this charge. This helps them to be better
remembered, even in extreme situations like those of Alzheimers disease patients.
 Music has a natural flow to it. Sounds coming at us without any structure to them will
only be perceived as noise. It is the structure of musical passages that give music its sound and
feel. Anticipation of what will come next in a musical piece is key to what the listener feels.
We have all experienced the feeling that while listening to a particular passage of music we have
never heard before we still kind of know what will come up next. Sometimes though, these
anticipations are violated and a sort of inner turmoil is created. It is through a mix of these two
states that good music is made: if a piece is too predictable, then it becomes boring; a piece that is
too unpredictable sounds foreign. The way composers create these mixes is what separates the
skilled ones from the novices.

Although too simple pieces of music (childrens songs for example) are indeed boring,
complicated music is not necessarily good music. Very often, you will find a great deal of
proficient players, who can play notes at lightning speeds without making any mistakes, but their
playing sounds bland and boring. It is the ones who can transmit the most emotion that are the
most successful (as if pouring their soul into their music) and the human mind is very good at
telling these ones out.

Many studies have been done to determine the impact of nature vs. nurture in musical
ability. There is no clear evidence either way. Some people tend to think that musical talent is
something that only some people possess. They give as examples musically inclined families.
This argument, though, can be countered with the positive reinforcement argument: children that
grow up in such families are more likely receive positive reinforcement for pursuing musical
activities and will be much more inclined to continue to do so. There is also a theory stating that
there is a certain minimum of practice anybody needs in order to become an expert in a certain
field (ten thousand hours). According to this theory, anyone can become an expert as long as he
or she spends this much time honing his or her skills. Such an argument can also be countered by
the fact that different people progress at different rates. As it is with most everything, the truth is
probably somewhere in the middle.

The final chapter of the book is devoted to the evolutionary aspect of music. The
questions on researchers minds are why and how did musical ability develop in humans. The
author challenges one of the major theories of human evolution saying that music is simply a by-
product of other evolutionary traits such as speech and did not evolve separately. He proposes a
theory in which music serves a central role in early human mating, much as it does for some
species of birds. An individual who can spend effort on such a useless skill such as playing
music is surely pretty well off, demonstrating a high degree of intellectual and/or physical
prowess.
 2. How can the knowledge obtained from this book be used to
create intelligent machines?

This books main focus is on musical perception, interpretation and, to a lesser extent, playing.
My view is that the quest to build intelligent machines is nowhere near the state of building
machines that should be concerned with any of these aspects, as there are far more other aspects
that have to be addressed first (just making a machine actually be able to hear for example).

Maybe in the far future, machines that can play music and musical instruments might get
built. In order to play music, they will have to be able to understand music, which is where some
of the ideas in this book could come in. To what degree these machines will be successful
compared to human players remains to be seen (see the argument above about conferring
emotion).

Another suggestion of where machines might take over is in any application that requires
song recognition. An example is the licensing agency where operators must monitor airplay of
songs. Algorithms for song recognition exist (the author himself worked in the field), but are
nowhere mature enough to fully replace humans, most probably because they dont consider too
many aspects of the song being analyzed.

Yet another application for musically trained machines is in personalized radio stations. I
have used a similar service like this in the past and it was pretty good (most of the times),
although Im guessing it worked based on previous categorizations of songs by human operators.
Machines that can perform this categorization automatically or even emulate a users preferences
would be a step forward.
 Essay
This Is Your Brain On Music
by Daniel Levitin
From Georg Victor

Introduction

The book This Is Your Brain On Music from Daniel Levitin is all about how music and your brain,
respectively your mind, are connected. The author is quite an interesting character, who started as a
musician, became a producer and started his academic career late in his life, compared to the majority
of scientists.

Since he never was an engineer and he never touched the topic of artificial intelligence, not during his
academic work and neither in the book this essay is about, there are much less connections to AI than,
for example, in the first book of the course, On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins.

Still, there are many ideas the two books share: Equality and consistency, for example. Also Daniel
Levitin states in different parts of the book that all sensory input is processed in a similar way. Also
talents or expertise in completely different fields is formed the same way: roughly 10,000 hours of
practice is necessary to become an expert no matter if we talk about scientists, athletes, artists, etc.

Main Point

On the other hand there is one fundamental discrepancy between the theories of Hawkins and Levitin:
the way our brain stores memories. Hawkins book is good for telling us how the neocortex is organized
and how we can build a system simulating the way we think and with that, intelligent machines. This
book, This Is Your Brain On Music, gives us a suggestion on how to organize the memory in an
intelligent way.

The author describes the two leading theories and how none of the two is completely right. In a very
convincing way he points out the strengths and weaknesses of each theory. The first one is called
constructivist. Like Hawkins describes it in his book, we humans only store the essential relations of
objects, experiences, etc. Since that, it is possible to e.g. recognize a song, even if it is distorted in one
or many ways. The second theory, called record keeping/tape recorder, lacks an explanation for this.
It says that all the details of our input are preserved and only lost due to normal biological processes.
But isnt this what we also experience each and every day, that we remember exact details of
something? Levitin calls many examples, e.g. the one experiment where people remembered the exact
pitch of their favorite songs. This experiment is particular good because Hawkins, who simplified many
things (deliberately to get a streamlined, easily understandable book that gives a consistent theory
about how our brain works the Memory Prediction Framework), stated that we just store the
relative change of pitch of a song, not the pitch itself.

Daniel Levitin develops an approach that combines the both theories in a new way. I would summarize
this approach as based on

Page 1
Georg Victor Essay on This Is Your Brain On Music

Hierarchical, prototype-based, context sensitive, dynamical categories

The author did not come up with this theory. Eleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at the
University of California, Berkeley. She did her undergraduate thesis of her philosophy study about
Wittgenstein. Later on she quit with plain philosophy and finished her Ph.D. at Harvard with the
fundamental thesis about categories.

(A) Categories are formed around prototypes.

A category, e.g. fruit, contains several attributes, e.g. peaches, bananas, etc. But each
category contains one prototype. For fruit, this could be apple for most of us Europeans.
We divide the world into basic level categories that include as much as possible attributes.
The size is limited by the second principle of sharing as few as possible members with other
categories.

(B) These prototypes can have a biological or physiological foundation;

If we take the fruit example: Of course in other cultures, where there are no apples
available, there will be another prototype for this category. If the category even exists,
since categorization itself is of course culture, time, etc. dependent. Prototypes can also be
promoted by physiological facts, e.g. the anatomy of our ears.

(C) Category membership can be thought of as a question of degree, with some tokens
being better exemplars than others;

Better means here more privileged. How privileged a certain item is, can be estimated
by these three experiments:
Response Times Prototypes are elected faster in queries than non-prototype members
Priming Participants got triggered with a certain category. For prototypes, they
identified faster, if two words are the same (apple apple), than for other items
Exemplars When participants are asked to name items of a certain category,
better (more privileged / typical) items are named more often

(D) New items are judged in relation to the prototypes, forming gradients of category
membership; []

An interesting fact is that in some experiments of Rosch, she found out that we even make
up prototypes. In one experiment she showed distorted pixilated images to the
participants. These images were varying only a little bit from the prototype image. A
week later, they were shown again the images, now including these prototypes. A huge
percentage thought that they saw the prototypes before. So whenever we sense a new
item we ask ourselves (unconscious): how good does it relate to the (real or made-up)
prototype? for each category.

(E) There dont need to be any attributes which all category members have in common,
and boundaries dont have to be definite.

The borders of any category are not strict. Also, objects (attributes) can be the member of
more than one category.

Page 2
Georg Victor Essay on This Is Your Brain On Music

How can this idea help us building intelligent machines?

If we start asking the question from above, we only have to look at ourselves and our everyday live to
find the many advantages and surprising things we can achieve with the memory we have.

Of course there is the size of the memory. Nobody knows the exact number but Paul Reber, professor
of psychology at Northwestern University, states that we can keep information with an approximate
equivalent of 2.5 Petabyte. Sure, there are already supercomputers with this amount of storage
capacity and whats now huge will be found in personal computers in the near or middle future. Still, I
find this number stunning. It can only be achieved by the very organization of how we store
information. The brain uses the relation of objects, respectively sensory input - it does not store every
tiny aspect.

But much more than the sheer size of it is the organization and how it allows us to react in new
situations, how we interpret new sensory input. In the end it is this organization that really makes us
able to think the way we do. We can classify objects within seconds. We can distinguish easily if
different sensory input belongs to one entity or to different objects. Certain triggers bring back dozens
of memories, associations, and similarities with past events within fractions of a second. We can group
new experiences into the right cluster of familiar experiences and understand a lot through our
memory. We can even predict the future through our past at least partly. All of these points are until
now extremely hard to implement into machines and computers.

Personal Opinion

I personally quite liked reading the book. Unfortunately I started reading it too late (after New Years
Eve) so I had some time pressure and could not fully appreciate all the aspects of it. Still, it gave me a
good understanding of how complex the affects of music on our brain are and how deep it is involved in
our evolution.

It is funny to read that Darwin was equating music with the peacocks tail. But isnt that what we are
all thinking? That the guys playing the guitar or singing in a cool band (thus having the biggest tail)
always get all the girls? Now I finally have the scientific evidence. It has to be like that. No reason to get
intimidated or insecure. Fortunately the author points out many other peacock tail categories we can
choose from, if we are bad musicians: luxurious items, extensive dancing, general display of fitness, etc.
So there is hope for everyone!

It made me a little bit sad, or should I say frustrated, that Levitin states several times how our brain-
development is finished more or less with the beginning of our twenties. How difficult it is to learn
completely new things when we did not develop the brain structures before this time of your life. How
determined your preferences are. I mean, of course I know all of these, I heard it before. I dont believe
we can invent ourselves completely new just if we want it. But to read it over and over again black on
white is quite depressing, isnt it? Thank you, Daniel Levitin

Anyway, the thing that made me stop crying is what the book is all about: music. Levitin names so many
different bands and tells anecdotes about different artists that I started to listen to a lot of new music
while reading this book. I started to appreciate music and my Nubert loudspeakers, my Yamaha AX-497
even more than before. Thank you, Daniel Levitin

Page 3