Our Brain + Music

January is Alzheimer’s Awareness Month in Canada. And while currently there’s no cure for the decimating disease, we know that music – playing AND listening to it – is good for the brain. In fact, you can learn a lot about the brain by studying music and you can learn a lot about music by studying the brain. Those were the two intriguing facts neuroscientist Daniel Levitin and conductor Edwin Outwater intertwined for their ideacity demo and Talk. With Stewart Goodyear on the piano playing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they offered a fascinating look at the neurological aspects of music and our intuitive understanding of it. Using the symphony’s famous four-note motif as an interactive case-in-point, they show-and-tell us that the brain is an amazing “giant prediction device.”