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Regretably unless you're from Canada won't be able to watch this ..

But its an amazing documentary on the whole subject ..

W5 : W-FIVE Presents: The Musical Brain

Music has always been part of the human experience. Now scientists are using it as a gateway to the mysteries of the mind.

Part One: Why are certain songs so important to us, does music make us smarter, and why do we feel like dancing when we hear a beat? When Sting agreed to have his musical brain scanned, he and Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist, embarked on journey of discovery.

Part Two: Long before we can see, we can hear. A fetus responds to the sounds of its mother's world at 20 weeks and scientists now believe hearing music in the womb stimulates the growth of long-term memory. Some of an infant's earliest memories are likely musical memories.

Part Three: From heartbeat to drumbeat, music has literally swept people into action since the beginning of time, but only recently have scientists realized why music yields such enormous power over human behaviour.

Part Four: Months after beginning his journey, Sting gets to learn about the intricacies of his brain and what he finds out doesn't surprise him. Music to him is visual architecture and he responds poorly to predictability. In fact musicians are always playing around with the feature of musical predictability.

Part Five: What are the characteristics of a popular piece of music? Michael McCready analyzed more than 3 million hit songs from the past 300 years and found the biggest hits conformed to recurring patterns in musical variables.

Part Six: The voyage of discovery into Stings musical brain has revealed two different ways of seeing the world. For scientists a brain scan is a kind of certainty, but it will never replace the inspiration of a an artist, who despite all the facts prefers to speak the language of the spirit and the heart.

Something that stood out for me in Part One and as it relates to Avatar and such:

“Through out recorded history, music has been a part of every culture ... and many scientists think music played an essential role in human evolution.

“Music would have been used for the transmission and preservation of knowledge. Before there was writing, a way to encode words so that they would be better remembered. Music would have been used by our ancestors to comfort one another, to form social bonds. We now know that singing together, for example releases the hormone Oxytocin, this engenders the feelings of trust and bonding.”

In primitive societies where trust and bonding are vital elements for village life, the words for music and motion are one and the same. It’s a connection that every musician understands.