[
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2008, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]
216.199.169.94
I recently discovered that a neurologist, Oliver Sacks, has written a book entitled "Musicophilia" in which he argues with strong medical evidence that music and the human brain are intimately bound up in each other.
Dr Sacks discusses how music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species!
Dr Sacks also discusses the medical effects of music on certain mental illnesses, or how our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong. Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. He also tells us about people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds--for everything but music. I can speak from personal experience how music can sooth my pain and lull me back to sleep late at night when even my narcotic pain meds cannot.
Sacks further describes how:
1) music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move.
2) give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak.
3) calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia.
Music effects us as people in many, many ways. Yet despite this evidence from Dr Sacks a neurologist and from Dr. Daniel Levitin, an associate professor of Psychology, the objectivists continually mock my theory that it's equally, if not more important, to discover how & why the human ear/brain reacts to & interprets music, as it is to know an audio system's measurements and specs, when determining how we as humans judge the performance of a system.
Thetubeguy1954
A Rational Subjectivist
Follow Ups:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2008, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]