Music to Mind

Abstract

We discuss further differences in genes and brain physiology between humans and their “evolutionary cousins” as it relates to music. No other creature creatively expresses themselves on the scale humans do, and certainly not in the domain called music. We discuss arts and literature, and how this may be accounted for by the human’s adeptness for syntax and semantics. We cover studies that show that brain regions related to emotion—amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, and critical regions of the cortex including insula, cingulate, and orbitofrontal. These organs generally mediate the depths of our feeling.