He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, From Perception to Pleasure: The Neuroscience of Music and Why We Love It, and reported the following:
I am using page 98 as page 99 has only a few lines on it. On page 98 the reader will find a summary of the content of Chapter 3. I organized the book so that every chapter has a roughly one-page summary, which I label the "Reprise" to give a musical allusion.Learn more about From Perception to Pleasure at the Oxford University Press website.
If readers happen onto this page, they would get a succinct account of the previous 33 pages, which deal with the brain circuits involved in perceiving and processing patterns of sound, including of course music. The neural mechanisms described in this chapter are referred to as "the ventral stream" because information flows from the auditory cortex towards regions located down and to the front, as opposed to other circuits described in other chapters. This particular system is essential to perceiving musical structures such as melodies, harmonies, and so forth, because it enables individual sounds to be concatened together in memory. Music (or speech for that matter) would make no sense if one could only retain one sound at a time—the relationships between sounds have to be determined and retained over a short time period, and this is one of the key roles of the ventral stream. Another essential feature is that the processing in the ventral stream enables predictions to be made about upcoming events based on past events. This predictive capacity is critical to perception because we do not simply respond to events as they appear, but rather, we anticipate what events will happen at a given moment based on what just happened, or what normally happens. In music this capacity is essential, as every musician knows, because one can play with these expectations to provide novelty, interest, and pleasure. When this system breaks down, it results in the phenomenon of amusia, also known as tone-deafness. People with amusia do not perceive the relationships between tones and hence music makes little sense to them. Brain scans show that this condition is associated with less well-organized connections in the ventral stream.
Chapter 3 is important in terms of the organization of the book, whose title of course is "From Perception to Pleasure" because this chapter is within Part I of the book, "Perception" where many different brain circuits are discussed that enable us to perceive and produce music. It contrasts with Part II of the book, "Pleasure" where I discuss the reward system of the brain which is responsible for pleasure, motivation, emotion, and much else. The central thesis of the book is that musical pleasure arises from the interaction between the processing streams responsible for perception with the deep brain structures responsible for reward processing. So, reading the content of page 98 would give the reader a very good idea of the type of content in Part I of the book, but it would not give a very good indication of what happens in Part II. It's really in Part II that the ideas come together to explain why we feel such strong pleasure and emotion from music. But to understand the content of Part II, it is necessary to understand the fundamental brain circuitry described in Part I.
In putting this book together, I had a choice between writing a straightforward academic book, or something more geared towards the general public. I leaned more towards the former, but it’s a bit of a hybrid; I wanted to make it reasonably readable by interested, nonspecialist readers without sacrificing content. For that to work, I decided to include a few anecdotes and some personal angles, along with the facts and figures. I hope it will prove accessible to an educated person who is looking for something more than pop science, and who wants a thorough explanation of how our brains are exquisitely evolved for making and enjoying music.
--Marshal Zeringue
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