Music and the Brain (The Great Courses Series)

Welcome to a course introducing you to the 'new' field of music and the brain. Learn about the relationship between music and emotion; the different ways music expresses emotion, different ways music can evoke emotion in listeners' brains, and how those relate to music's ability to communicate cross-culturally. The course explores how perception of musical sounds involves complex mental processing, and how implicit learning gives rise to powerful expectations that shape your perception of and your emotional responses to music.

You will learn that there is much more to musical rhythm than the beat, and that beat processing is surprisingly complex from the standpoint of brain science. You will learn that the brains of musicians differ from those of non-musicians and about the role of experience (vs. innate factors) in shaping these differences. You will learn about cognitive benefits associated with musical training, and whether these are caused by musical training or merely correlated with musical ability. Explore how music cognition develops 'normally' and how it goes awry with neurological music perception disorders.

The course delves into the relationship between music and neural rehabilitation, focusing on people with a variety of medical conditions, from newborns in neonatal intensive care units to older adults with strokes or Parkinson's disease who suffer from language or movement problems.