Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Ani Patel's Book

If you happen to have a spare week ... Ani Patel's book Music, Language, and the Brain is out and about and available on Amazon for a very reasonable price. It's an Oxford University Press 2008 release.

The book was very positively reviewed in Nature Neuroscience by Josh McDermott and very, very positively reviewed in Nature by me and Elika Bergelson from TB East.

This thing is 'fiercely' scholarly (to quote Christian from Project Runway). It's just fierce. The book summarizes an unbelievable amount of reading and reflection. If you are at all interested in music cognition and its relation to language processing, this pretty much sets the high bar. Its references are almost ridiculously complete. It's slightly disturbing that Ani knows this much. Ani, go take a vacation!


2 comments:

Whitney Anne Postman said...

"Puttin' the FUNK in FUNC-tional MRI!"

As a brief follow-up for TB readers interested in the neural substrate for music, allow me to call your attention to a recent article on jazz performance conducted inside a 3T magnet, published at the end of February:

Limb CJ, Braun AR (2008) Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. PLoS ONE 3(2): e1679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

Best,
Whitney

Unknown said...

just to second the praise for Patel's book...it's great for grad students looking for a project idea or increased knowledge about complex auditory brain processes. Full of testable theories and hypotheses ripe for the researchin'!