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Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder
“Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on
the peoples of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they
find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves loving
one another.” But there is something beyond humanistic ideology in this
elemental truth — something woven into the very structure and sensorium of our
bodies; as the great neurologist Oliver Sacks observed, “music can pierce the
heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
