-
Add a gift card to your order!
-
Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
Price $29.95Hardcover
Special Order
Nina Kraus
Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome NINA KRAUS—the Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Communication Sciences, and Otolaryngology at Northwestern University—for a discussion of her book Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World. She will be joined in conversation by ANIRUDDH PATEL, the acclaimed author of Music, Language, and the Brain.
Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind, Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on—we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes—and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word—or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.
Our hearing brain, Kraus tells us, is vast. It interacts with what we know, with our emotions, with how we think, with our movements, and with our other senses. Auditory neurons make calculations at one-thousandth of a second; hearing is the speediest of our senses. Sound plays an unrecognized role in both healthy and hurting brains. Kraus explores the power of music for healing as well as the destructive power of noise on the nervous system. She traces what happens in the brain when we speak another language, have a language disorder, experience rhythm, listen to birdsong, or suffer a concussion. Kraus shows how our engagement with sound leaves a fundamental imprint on who we are. The sounds of our lives shape our brains, for better and for worse, and help us build the sonic world we live in.
