William James referred to our “susceptibility to music,” and while music can affect all of us—calm us, animate us, comfort us, thrill us, or serve to organize and synchronize us at work or play—it

“It alleviates boredom, makes…movements more rhythmical, and reduces fatigue.” It buoys the spirits,

Music drawn from memory, he writes, “has many of the same effects as real music coming from the external world.”

“The inexpressible depth of music,” Schopenhauer wrote, “so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves.”

Listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: “We listen to music with our muscles,” as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music,

What they do share is the fact that I have bombarded my ears and brain with them, and the musical “circuits” or networks in my brain have been supersaturated, overcharged, with them. In such a supersaturated state, the brain seems ready to replay the music with no apparent external stimulus. Such replayings, curiously, seem to be almost as satisfyi

Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it—its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.

Steven Pinker has referred to music as “auditory cheesecake,” and asks: “What benefit could there be

I tend to fall in love with a certain composer or artist and to play their music over and over, almost exclusively, for weeks or months, until it is replaced with something else.