Musicophilia - music & relationship to the brain

i am fascinated with the field of music therapy. I often say that it is my Prozac. More recently music therapy has been used in the speech rehabilitation of stroke patients with good success. I know in my case, after a long hard working day with lots of stress, coming home and listening to music gets me back to my (ab)normal self. Thanks for the post.

Another great, related book I'm now reading: "This is your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin, who's been a musician & record producer. Fascinating stuff.

I have often felt that we audiophiles clearly must have something uncommon going on in our chemical or neuronal makeup to care so much for getting as close as possible to the original event.

For most people I think the experience of hearing a fantastic system doesn't resonate with them. We all know lots of people who are avid music fans with large collections for whom once the sound quality reaches a certain threshold, there seems to be no additional pleasure derived from even great fidelity.

I'm also convinced that changes I hear in my system due to tweeks, new components, etc, that I consider to be significant, would hardly even register to the average person. So we must either be dedicating considerably more brain activity, or perhaps have more grey mattter in our auditory center, or perhaps are just wired in such a way that the auditory center drives he pleasure center to a greater degree than other people.

When I recently put in hi fi tuning fuses in my amps, I couldn't believe how much more inner voicing and detail I was hearing, but at the same time really wondered to myself if anyone else could I know could really detect any difference at all.

In a similar veign, an audio friend told me of a guy he knew who use to work testing used plumicon video tubes for broadcast video cameras. He could detect color shifts as small a 1 degree I believe (I could be wrong on the number) I sometimes color correct tv shows all day long on pro video monitors and yet could not detect this small a color shift.

So while we can all learn to be better listeners, I think there are definitive biological reasons for why we are the way we are. Personally I have been into audio since I was a kid, literally. And though my father and brother always played music and had some sort of stereo, I was the one who ended up obsessed. My brother is still using the stereo he had from high school, 30 years ago, even though he found some Denon seperates in an apartment he bought. I don't think he ever set them up.