Book Review: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

In his innovative 2006 bestseller, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin, a path-breaking McGill University neuroscientist and former world-class music producer, led readers on a trip inside their musical brain. Music, he argued, was more than a fortunate evolutionary by-product of language development. The book made a persuasive case that our minds and our bodies would have evolved very differently without it. And it did so in an entertaining style with excursions into autobiography, popular culture, and every imaginable musical genre. Now in The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, Levitin extends that argument beyond individual brains to human civilization and culture. For fans of Brain on Music, this is a must-read. For other readers, this is a literary, poetic, scientific, and musical treat waiting to be discovered. read more

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