biology

The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The World in Six Songs rather than just read about it. In short: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2008.

Key takeaways

The World in Six Songs belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The World in Six Songs to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The World in Six Songs from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature is a popular science book written by the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin, first published by Dutton Penguin in the U.S. and Canada in 2008. It was updated and released in paperback by Plume in 2009 and translated into six languages. Levitin's second New York Times bestseller, following the publication of This Is Your Brain on Music, received praise from a wide variety of readers including Sir George Martin, Sting, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Adam Gopnik. The Los Angeles Times called it "masterful". The New York Times wrote: "A lively, ambitious new book whose combined elements can induce feelings of enlightenment and euphoria. Will leave you awestruck." The Times wrote "Levitin is such an enthusiastic anthropologist, such an exuberant song and dance man, such a natural-born associative thinker, that you gotta love the guy." It was named one of the best books of 2008 by the Boston Herald and by Seed Magazine. The World in Six Songs combines science and art to reveal how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. This book leans more heavily on anthropology and evolutionary biology than did This Is Your Brain On Music, which skewed more toward findings in psychoacoustics and neuroscience. Levitin identifies six fundamental song functions or types (friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love) then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these six song types function in our brains to preserve the emotional and literal history of our lives and species. Levitin illuminates, through songs, how music has been instrumental in the evolution of language, thought and culture. Musical examples ranging from Beethoven to The Beatles, Busta Rhymes to Bach, are used to support the book's propositions. The book includes scientific research from the author's music cognition lab at McGill University, his experiences in the music business, and interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. It is a work of literary nonfiction.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The World in Six Songs

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The World in Six Songs claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The World in Six Songs before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The World in Six Songs ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The World in Six Songs

In research: The World in Six Songs appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The World in Six Songs in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The World in Six Songs is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2000s memoirs, 2008 English-language non-fiction books, 2008 non-fiction books, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The World in Six Songs outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The World in Six Songs in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The World in Six Songs means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The World in Six Songs out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The World in Six Songs in simple terms?

Why does The World in Six Songs matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The World in Six Songs?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The World in Six Songs.