Read to Restore: Leisure Books for Mental Wellness: Music

Shaped around twelve songs, Jude Rogers explores, in detail, why music plays such a deep-rooted role in so many lives, from before we are born to our last days. At its heart is Jude's own story: how songs helped her wrestle with the grief of losing her father at age five and concoct her own sense of self as a lonely adolescent

In this widely ranging collection of essays, a group of contemporary psychoanalyst/authors turn their finely-honed listening skills and clinical experience to plumb the depths and illuminate themes of character, drama, myth, culture, and psychobiography in some of the world's most beloved operas. Opera creates a unique bridge between thought and feeling, mind and body, and conscious and unconscious that offers fertile ground for psychological exploration of profound human truths.

For millennia, music has been known to have a powerful role in the healing process. This moving and inspiring book tells the tale of a man pulled from the brink of death by music who, in turn, uses music as medicine to help heal others.

Music plays a hugely important role in our emotional, intellectual, and even physical lives. It impacts the ways we work, relax, behave, and feel. It can make us smile or cry, it helps us bond with the people around us, and it even has the power to alleviate a range of medical conditions. The songs you love (and hate, and even the ones you feel pretty neutral about) don't just make up the soundtrack to your life -- they actually help to shape it. In Why You Love Music, scientist and musician John Powell dives deep into decades of psychological and sociological studies in order to answer the question "Why does music affect us so profoundly?"

In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music--its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it--and the human brain.

Every day, we are beset by millions of sounds-ambient ones like the rumble of the train and the hum of air conditioner, as well as more pronounced sounds, such as human speech, music, and sirens. But how do we process what we hear every day? This book answers such revealing questions as- Why do we often fall asleep on train rides or in the car, and what does it have to do with hearing? What is it about the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard that makes us cringe? Why do city folks have trouble sleeping in the country, and vice versa?

Every Brain Needs Music draws on leading behavioral, cellular, and molecular neuroscience research as well as surveys of more than a hundred musical people. It provides new perspectives on learning to play, teaching, how to practice and perform, the ways we react to music, and why the brain benefits from musical experiences. Written for both musical and nonmusical people, including newcomers to brain science, this book is a lively and easy-to-read exploration of the neuroscience of music and its significance in our lives.