"I found this book � disappointing. I am a fairly smart, well-educated person, but neither a neuroscientist nor a musician. If anything, I veer towards complete musical ignorance. As a result, I am intrigued by titles that seem to promise a key to understanding what it is about music that evokes such strong responses in other people. Instead, I found this book dense, very dense, packed with terminology from both those fields. There is a glossary at the end, but that doesn’t help much when every third word must be looked up and masticated to comprehension.

Beyond that, to my order-loving mind, the organization seems almost random. Here is a discussion of music and brain structure; over here are some interesting experiments focusing on people with Williams syndrome, or Alzheimer’s, or PTSD; everywhere there are cameos of some Great Musician Who Is My Best Bud. Everywhere there are So. Many. Words. A torrent of words. A raging downhill flood of verbiage which left me grasping desperately for a solid structured tree to hang on to. I’m not sure what audience this book was written for � maybe verbose and musical neuroscience grad students? � but certainly not for a broad, general-reading population.

And so my search continues for an explication of the musical brain that someone who does not have one can understand.
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