From Perception to Pleasure offers a detailed, concise, and beautifully organized account of Robert Zatorre's groundbreaking work. His research into how music impacts the brain and shapes our emotional lives is revelatory. Zatorre builds a crucial framework for fully integrating creative arts therapies into health and medicine. * Renée Fleming, soprano and arts & health advocate * Robert Zatorre is both a musician and a scientist. There is nothing surprising about his passion for music but the intelligence and persistence with which he has investigated his muse are unusual and have been astonishingly productive. A good part of what we know about the perception of music and about the pleasures music brings to the human soul comes from Zatorre's unique dedication. How fortunate we are now that he has decided to tell the story of his lifelong pursuit in an insightful book that may well produce as much pleasure as the music that inspired it. * Antonio Damasio, University Professor; David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy; Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, University of Southern California, Hanna Damasio, University Professor; Dana Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Neurology; Director, Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, University of Southern California * What happens in our brain when music reaches our ears? How do neurons encode, with remarkable precision, the intricate rhythmic and tonal structures that constitute a musical stream? And above all, why do some musical pieces trigger expectation, surprise, bliss, chills and goosebumps? In this highly accessible and scientifically up-to-date synthesis, Robert Zatorre, the renowned expert of musical cognition and its brain mechanisms, dissects it all for us, to our greater enjoyment. * Stanislas Dehaene, professor at Collčge de France and author of Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read and The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics * His pioneering book, based on profound research, is technical but always accessible. * Andrew Robinson, Nature * Why do we like music so much? To find out, cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zatorre analyzes how neural circuits process different aspects of musical cognition, such as perceiving distinct pitches or imagining a tune in your head long after your first listen. Zatorre posits that our enjoyment emerges from functional interactions between circuits that control cognition, perception and our reward system. His descriptions of these interactions provide a comprehensive look at the neurobiological basis for musical pleasure. * The Transmitter * This volume may appear slim, but it embodies an extraordinary achievement. * Choice *
