music + neuroscience = nerdtastic

Interesting review of "This Is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin.

"Humans prefer music of their own culture when they're toddlers, but it's in our teens that we choose the specific sort of music that we'll love forever. These years, Levitin explains, are emotional times, "and we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdala and neurotransmitters act in concert to 'tag' the memories as something important." In addition, our brains are undergoing massive changes up until the teen years -- after that, the brain structure becomes more fixed, and it begins to prune, rather than grow, neural connections."

This helps explain why I know every single (intelligible) word to every R.E.M. song released before 1991. All six of them.