What's so special about music? We experience it internally, yet at the same time it is highly social. Music engages our cognitive/affective and sensory systems. We use music to communicate with one another – and even with other species – the things that we cannot express through language. Music is both ancient and ever evolving. Without music, our world is missing something essential.
In Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective, Jay Schulkin offers a social and behavioral neuroscientific explanation of why music matters. His aim is not to provide a grand, unifying theory. Instead Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective guides the reader through the relevant scientific evidence that links neuroscience, music, and meaning. Schulkin considers how music evolved in humans and birds, how music is experienced in relation to aesthetics and mathematics, the role of memory in musical expression, the role of music in child and social development, and the embodied experience of music through dance. He concludes with reflections on music and well-being. Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective is a unique and valuable tour through the current research on the neuroscience of music.
Jay Schulkin is Research Professor in the Department of Neuroscience and member at the Center for the Brain Basis of Cognition, both at Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous books, including Roots of Social Sensibility and Neural Function, Bodily Sensibility: Intelligent Action, Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective, and Adaptation and Well-Being: Social Allostasis.
"The affective neuroscience of music is a relatively new topic. This excellent, novel, and highly creative book brings it alive, with a diverse array of insights from philosophy, cognitive science, neuropsychology, and evolutionary biology. Schulkin clearly is a master when it comes to thinking about the brain and music."
– Kent Berridge, University of Michigan
"Reflections on the Musical Mind discusses the relationships between music, the evolutionary psychology of music, and molecular, cognitive, and social neuroscience. Although one can take issue with some of the arguments presented, this book is a useful and entertaining survey of a wide range of neuroscience evidence related to music and the brain."
– Peter Cariani, Harvard Medical School