Higher Earning Power as Adults is Music to Kids' Ears

NEW YORK -- Music may strike fire in the hearts of man, but does it also fill his pockets?
A recent study by Harris Interactive (HPOL: 3.79, -0.08, -2.06%) shows that 83% of people who make more than $150,000 a year had some type of musical training when they were young. According to the study, conducted in October of 2007, 86% of college graduates and 88% of people with postgraduate degrees had music lessons as children. That shows that being connected with music is important, said Regina Corso, director of the Harris Poll. (READ MORE)

Together Again in Different Time Zones

David Byrne and Brian Eno were the songwriter and producer on the most radical albums by Talking Heads, and they collaborated on a 1981 album, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” Now, 27 years later, they have reunited to make their second duo album, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.” It is being released digitally on Aug. 18 via everythingthathappens.com, a month later on major commercial download sites and, as soon as it can be manufactured and distributed, as a physical CD. (Read more)

How your brain calls the tune

Oliver Sacks, the thinking man's neurologist, talks to Robert Everett-Green about how music can enslave - and save - us

My mother's second husband was a professional flute player, who practised every day in a music room in the basement. For months after he moved out, my sisters, my mother and I would sometimes look at each other and say, "Do you hear it too?" We could still hear him practising.

I thought of our phantom flute player while reading Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks's new book about music and the brain. His chapter on musical hallucinations includes several clinical tales of people who hear persistent music from what they first imagine to be an external source, before realizing they're tuned to the mind's own radio.

"The original part of memory is the memory of actions and procedures and sequences, starting with crawling and walking," said Sacks, during a phone interview from his New York office. "This part of memory also includes musical and textual sequences." It seems to be involved in the way some tunes replay themselves in our minds even after we're tired of them. It may also account for the way that musical and textual memory tends to work best with long units of information - on whole phrases in sequence, rather than on individual notes and words.

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