Every generation learns music over again from scratch. That is the reason your Smashing Pumpkins sounds obvious, basic, and tedious to me, and my John Lee Hooker sounds spookily pre-destined to you. Or, you may adore (say) "Surf City", and maybe "Surf City" always brings you back to a certain summer on a certain beach somewhere. But, my man, I know how to play "Surf City", and it is fun, but it is not hard to play. (Nor is anything by Smashing Pumpkins, nor anything on that Blue Album, nor on my beloved White Album...)

Music is mysterious, but musicians of all generations soak it up, suck it up, while mere critics always write astounded books about Music And The Brain, and such. The critics and the fans would be far better off if they just bought guitars or drum sets, and arranged for some lessons.

Instead of reading about how incredible music is, in a book by somebody who does not even play music, I suggest: 1. Listen to music, and enjoy it, and, 2. Play music. Trying to understand music is a boring waste of time, compared with music itself.

Listen, play, enjoy. Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it is good." If you spend the same amount of time practicing your guitar as you would spend reading this book, you will know a great deal more about music, and you will be much happier.

In addition to the cerebellum, music taps into the frontal lobes (a "higher-order" region that processes musical structure), and it also activates the mesolimbic system, which Levitin explains is "involved in arousal, pleasure, the transmission of opiods and the production of dopamine." This is why certain music can feel so pleasurable, producing such deep emotions -- it's simultaneously operating on various parts of our brains, and the response is something on the order of taking a hit of heroin.

Endorphins are assumed responsible for these kinds of feelings just because they're there.

But is listening to music really like taking a hit of heroin? Does music make people disconnect, detach and nod out? No, music doesn't do that.

And neither does running, another activity whose pleasurable sensations have been attributed to the opioid system.

But there's a new neurochemical system in town. (Well, not really new, but newly researched.) The endocannabinoid system, the neurochemical and immune system that marijuana taps into when it works in the human brain and body.

At Georgia Tech last year, research showed that the "runner's high" could very well be a natural endocannabinoid high. People who run for 45 minutes show a drastic increase in their levels of anandamide, the brain's own natural analog of marijuana.

http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=229

So it's probably not heroin the brain is imitating when it likes music. The brain is most likely imitating marijuana.

And what drug has traditionally been most associated with musicians? Let's face it -- pot comes first to mind, way before heroin.

Last month I went to a block party in my conservative neighborhood and they were listening to music written or performed by known potheads. That was sooo funny. These were people who voted to ban medical marijuana dispensaries from their community.

But when they need to have a good time, they cannot leave marijuana culture alone. It's in minds, they'll never get it out.

I think Levitin will probably want to rewrite portions of his book a few years from now when the effects of the endocannabinod system become better understood.

I'm pretty sure they're going to find out it's very much involved in making music, especially in improvisation.

After all, even the most ardent pothead hater in the world has probably loved a song written by the enemy.

Manjoo writes:

We all have music like this, music that burns into the soul when we're young and remains essential for the rest of time. [...] it's surely something -- there's a tape or record or CD that once knocked you out with a force that, cheesy as it is to remember, felt like true love.

I'm just a few years shy of thirty. And I don't have music like that. There's no tape or record or CD that "felt like true love" to me. I have music that I enjoy, sure, but I honestly can't think of any that stirs me with the intensity he describes. Nor do I feel particularly deprived by the lack.

I am therefore skeptical of this claim that musicality played some sort of key role in human evolution. I'm human; or at any rate I see one in the mirror, and people seem to treat me more or less as they treat one another, and not as they would an animal. Since that's the case, why don't I recognize some aspect of myself in this?

Basically, claiming universal applicability to all members of a species six billion strong is a hard claim to make, and in this case I'm an odd one out.

-- P.S. In case anyone is tempted to make a smart-aleck remark like "the exception proves the rule," I'd like to point out that in that context "prove" means "test" not "verify."

Or is it? It is, at best, confusing science, as Levitin says first that the emotional connection to music that is current during our teen years (and therefore generational) is "no accident" and then says it is the result of "evolutionary design." This sounds suspiciously like a subversive reference to Intelligent Design - except of course that it all revolves (pardon the expression) around brain chemistry and neurological functions that take place in the cerebellum (talk about "Precious and Few"!). And the opioid receptors, too, not the cannaboid ones, as Patricia Schwarz points out. At least according to Levitin it does.

Now then: how does that explain my absolute aversion to the music of my full-blown (or perhaps that should be "fully blown" or "totally wasted") teen years, say 15,16, 17 and 18? Why were my friends and I desperately seeking oldies (from the mid-to-late 1950's) and older jazz and pop standards from the American songbook, as well as Ellington and Basie? Why were we so horrified by the popular music of 1960 - '63? Could it be because most of it SUCKED?

Yes, I suffered undue influence from my musical family and the friendship of guitarist John Fahey during my formative years. But not all my friends did. By the time I arrived in suburbia at age 14 Buddy Holly was dead and, coincidentally, pop music was being weaned from the respirator in favor of a morphine drip. It was only 1n 1964, when I was 19 (do the math) that popular music got a huge shot of adrenaline and began to morph onward into its next truly creative phase. And still we longed for the occasional fix of 50's R&R and R&B. Why? Were ALL our brains defective? Well I guess that's an attractive theory. But it doesn't explain the magical responses evoked now by songs I came to know and love in my late 20's and onward, either. Nick Drake, who was to be discovered by the music loving public some 25 years after his untimely death, moved me with his stark-yet-lovely music while he was still alive. It struck chords in me that hadn't been touched since I'd first heard the centerpiece from Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini" as a small child; Ronnie Earle's "Skyman" took me back to childhood as well, in the late 90's. What the hell was going on in MY brain?

I appreciate Levitin's "...encyclopedic knowledge of popular music..." and his grasp of the physics of light and sound (especially where he explains the tree falling in the forest thing - thanks for putting that in black and white for my pysics-impaired friends). All this probably does make the book "delightful" (I haven't read it yet) but it doesn't account for my personal experience of music, and I have been referred to more than once as a "reptile", so the cerebellum probably does have its role in all this. But the overall notion of generational musical neurological imprinting doesn't ring true for me, at least where the teen years are concerned. There's something else going on, and I think it lies where psychology and neurology overlap and collide with...something else. I dare not put a word to it. Use your imagination.