Neuro-Psycho-Physio Babble?

My friend sent me a link to this webpage which contains (I think) some
interesting, as well as some (I think) dubious, information and speculations:

http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2001/012201music/index.html

A short sampling of what awaits one at this webpage:

<<...distinctive patterns of neural activity within the auditory cortex and
other areas of the brain may imbue specificity to the processing of music.">>

<<...What they found—much to their surprise—was that Brodmann's areas 18
and 19 in the visual cortex lit up. These areas are better known as the
"mind's eye" because they are, in essence, our imagination's canvas. Any
make-believe picture begins there. Thus, Baron suggests that the brain may
create a symbolic image to help it decipher changes in pitch.>>

<<...As expected, dissonance made areas of the limbic system linked to
unpleasant emotions light up in the PET scans, whereas the consonant
melodies stimulated limbic structures associated with pleasure.>>

<<..."The fact that whale and human music have so much in common even
though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for 60 million years,"
they write, "suggests that music may predate humans—that rather than being
the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene.">>

<<...That same bird sings in the chromatic scale, which divides the octave
into 12 semitones, and the hermit thrush sings in the so-called pentatonic
scale.>>

<<..."Some researchers are finding that listening to familiar music
activates neural structures deep in the ancient primitive regions of the
brain, the cerebellar vermis," Levitin writes. "For music so profoundly to
affect this gateway to emotion, it must have some ancient and important
function.">>

<<...he suggests that music stimulates our drive to find patterns in the
environment. "Our brain is constantly trying to make order out of disorder,
and music is a fantastic pattern game for our higher cognitive centers," he
writes. "From our culture, we learn (even if unconsciously) about musical
structures, tones and other ways of understanding music as it unfolds over
time; and our brains are exercised by extracting different patterns and
groupings from music's performance.">>

Question: Do such conceptual speculations from "people in white-coats" as
found in this article deserve our "admiration", "refutations", or simply arouse our suspicions that reductionists will (attempt to, anyway)
eventually drown our "tacit knowledge" with "objectifications" and
"atomization" of our "creations"??? What *would* a whale think about all
this human "hubbub"?

Curiously, J Gill *~<|:)