Music impinges upon the body and the brain. As such, it has significant inductive power which relies both on innate dispositions and acquired mechanisms and competencies. The processes are partly autonomous and partly deliberate, and interrelations between several levels of processing are becoming clearer with accumulating new evidence. For instance, recent developments in neuroimaging techniques, have broadened the field by encompassing the study of cortical and subcortical processing of the music. The domain of musical emotions is a typical example with a major focus on the pleasure that can be derived from listening to music. Pleasure, however, is not the only emotion to be induced and the mechanisms behind its elicitation are far from understood. There are also mechanisms related to arousal and activation that are both less differentiated and at the same time more complex than the assumed mechanisms that trigger basic emotions. It is imperative, therefore, to investigate what pleasurable and mood-modifying effects music can have on human beings in real-time listening situations. This e-book is an attempt to answer these questions. Revolving around the specificity of music experience in terms of perception, emotional reactions, and aesthetic assessment, it presents new hypotheses, theoretical claims as well as new empirical data which contribute to a better understanding of the functions of the brain as related to musical experience.

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

Synthesizing coverage of sensation and reward into a comprehensive systems overview, Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward presents a cutting-edge and multidisciplinary approach to the interplay of sensory and reward processing in the brain. While over the past 70 years these areas have drifted apart, this book makes a case for reuniting sensation a

Humans possess certain unique mental traits. Self-reflection, as well as ethic and aesthetic values, is among them, constituting an essential part of what we call the human condition. The human mental machinery led our species to have a self-awareness but, at the same time, a sense of justice, willing to punish unfair actions even if the consequences of such outrages harm our own interests. Also, we appreciate searching for novelties, listening to music, viewing beautiful pictures, or living in well-designed houses. But why is this so? What is the meaning of our tendency, among other particularities, to defend and share values, to evaluate the rectitude of our actions and the beauty of our surroundings? What brain mechanisms correlate with the human capacity to maintain inner speech, or to carry out judgments of value? To what extent are they different from other primates' equivalent behaviors? In the Light of Evolution Volume VII aims to survey what has been learned about the human "mental machinery." This book is a collection of colloquium papers from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium "The Human Mental Machinery," which was sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences on January 11-12, 2013. The colloquium brought together leading scientists who have worked on brain and mental traits. Their 16 contributions focus the objective of better understanding human brain processes, their evolution, and their eventual shared mechanisms with other animals. The articles are grouped into three primary sections: current study of the mind-brain relationships; the primate evolutionary continuity; and the human difference: from ethics to aesthetics. This book offers fresh perspectives coming from interdisciplinary approaches that open new research fields and constitute the state of the art in some important aspects of the mind-brain relationships.

A comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the psychology of musical development in children and adults, from theory to research and applications.

The Springer Handbook of Auditory Research presents a series of comprehensive and synthetic reviews of the fundamental topics in modern auditory research. The v- umes are aimed at all individuals with interests in hearing research including advanced graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and clinical investigators. The volumes are intended to introduce new investigators to important aspects of hearing science and to help established investigators to better understand the fundamental theories and data in fields of hearing that they may not normally follow closely. Each volume presents a particular topic comprehensively, and each serves as a synthetic overview and guide to the literature. As such, the chapters present neither exhaustive data reviews nor original research that has not yet appeared in pe- reviewed journals. The volumes focus on topics that have developed a solid data and conceptual foundation rather than on those for which a literature is only beg- ning to develop. New research areas will be covered on a timely basis in the series as they begin to mature.

Music is an important source of enjoyment, learning, and well-being in life as well as a rich, powerful, and versatile stimulus for the brain. With the advance of modern neuroimaging techniques during the past decades, we are now beginning to understand better what goes on in the healthy brain when we hear, play, think, and feel music and how the structure and function of the brain can change as a result of musical training and expertise. For more than a century, music has also been studied in the field of neurology where the focus has mostly been on musical deficits and symptoms caused by neurological illness (e.g., amusia, musicogenic epilepsy) or on occupational diseases of professional musicians (e.g., focal dystonia, hearing loss). Recently, however, there has been increasing interest and progress also in adopting music as a therapeutic tool in neurological rehabilitation, and many novel music-based rehabilitation methods have been developed to facilitate motor, cognitive, emotional, and social functioning of infants, children and adults suffering from a debilitating neurological illness or disorder. Traditionally, the fields of music neuroscience and music therapy have progressed rather independently, but they are now beginning to integrate and merge in clinical neurology, providing novel and important information about how music is processed in the damaged or abnormal brain, how structural and functional recovery of the brain can be enhanced by music-based rehabilitation methods, and what neural mechanisms underlie the therapeutic effects of music. Ideally, this information can be used to better understand how and why music works in rehabilitation and to develop more effective music-based applications that can be targeted and tailored towards individual rehabilitation needs. The aim of this Research Topic is to bring together research across multiple disciplines with a special focus on music, brain, and neurological rehabilitation. We encourage researchers working in the field to submit a paper presenting either original empirical research, novel theoretical or conceptual perspectives, a review, or methodological advances related to following two core topics: 1) how are musical skills and attributes (e.g., perceiving music, experiencing music emotionally, playing or singing) affected by a developmental or acquired neurological illness or disorder (for example, stroke, aphasia, brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, focal dystonia, or tinnitus) and 2) what is the applicability, effectiveness, and mechanisms of music-based rehabilitation methods for persons with a neurological illness or disorder? Research methodology can include behavioural, physiological and/or neuroimaging techniques, and studies can be either clinical group studies or case studies (studies of healthy subjects are applicable only if their findings have clear clinical implications).