From: MARK TRAMO To: Robert Kuhn <1 Bcc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Closer To Truth Topics Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 19:01:12 +0000 Attachments: Tramo2011MusicMedicine.pdf Thank you for your email, Robert - The subject matter is topical for me at the moment: I'm working on a book for a general (erudite) audience that addresses how music probes mentality and how the bran makes music. Several ideas sparked by my numerous discussions about music, mind, and brain with Jeffrey, and the time his support has provided for their cultivation, are ripe for discussion on the show. The Science reprint I sent last week includes a model for how the brain makes music at a gross anatomical level vis a vis regional specialization and connectivity patterns. There are deeper questions at the levels of neural coding and computation that address aesthetics (e.g., why it is that some combinations of tones sound pleasant and others not) and hedonics (e.g., why some music is so pleasurable it gives us goosebumps). The wording in the opening paragraph of the Science paper was, of course, meant to invoke Chomskian linguistics and to remind the logocentrists dominating academia that some claims relevant to the biology of language and its evolution apply to the biology of music and its evolution. After all, speech communicates emotion and meaning via intonation as well as words: often, it's not what you say but how you say it. For the question of how music probes mentality, I'd like to address concepts surrounding limerence, chaos, collective behavior/group size, pleasure, "self-talk," and humans' compulsion/gift to bring the future into the present. (David Brooks has a nice section on limerence in his best-seller from a few years back, The Social Animal.) Re: discussing specific content or additional topics, a real-time dialogue might be helpful - I'm available via my cellphone (310-913-7879) in L.A. all day/night today Sunday and in the evenings on Monday, Tuesday