Hey guys, would you agree if we said that we are deeply connected to music?

We are.

Look at the way our body responds to music therapy or how we can’t help but shake a little to the beat.

Even animals respond to music! (read about Snowball the cockatoo here!)

So here’s an interesting interview between Claudia Dreifus and Aniruddh D. Patel, the author of the book Music, Languages, and the Brain. It’s about the connection we have with music and how it has been pre-programmed within us. And of course, the story of a bird who likes the beat.

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A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel
Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind

by Claudia Dreifus

Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows.

Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?

A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.

But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.

Read the rest of the interview right here »