Steven Mithen says that "musicality is deeply embedded in the human genome, with far more ancient evolutionary roots than spoken language." That made me think about when I saw Oliver Sacks speak, and he told a story about how a spider in Rachmaninoff's music studio used to descend from its web every time Rachmaninoff played a certain song.
Sacks also talked about the visual blind, blind people who have a heightened sense of visual imagery, and expained that a deaf people can develop extraodinary musical abilities, like Beethoven. He said that by looking at an MRI, you can identify a musician's brain - but that's not the case for any other profession or hobby, obviously. You can also have amusia, an inability to recognize music.
Thinking about this makes me really want to read Musicophilia.
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