This Economist article on the biology of music is fascinating. It describes various experiments which have analyzed how our brains process music. These have shown that music and language are processed independently of each other and that the processing of music is broken down into several tasks handled in different parts of the brain. Perception of rhythm and pitch are handled in separate areas. Being a musician, I was especially intrigued by the study done on musicians and nonmusicians which found that blood flow increased to the left brain of musicians but not nonmusicians when they listened to music. A musician’s training affects the way she perceives harmony. I definitely listen to music differently if I want to “pay attention” to how it is constructed, and as I learned more about music theory I found it harder to turn off the thinking part of my brain when listening to music. The last part of the article discusses the connection between music and emotions, stating that the place where music has its most profound effect is in the brain’s emotional core—the limbic system. When men and women were asked why music was important in their lives, “emotion turned out to be not merely an answer. It was, more or less, the answer.” It has been proven that music elicits emotions, not merely expresses emotions that people recognize. Another study showed that music’s emotional and conscious effects are completely separate. I’ve always been facinated by how tightly music is interwoven into my emotional state of mind. And I’m always taken aback by people who don’t seem very emotionally affected by music. Surely they’re missing out on one of the profound wonders of the human mind.