Books by Dale Purves

This book examines what seems to be the basic challenge in neuroscience today: understanding how experience generated by the human brain is related to the physical world we live in.

Why do human beings find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out the billions that are possible? Dale Purves shows that rethinking music theory in biological terms offers a new approach to centuries-long debates about the organization and impact of music.

And, with every new copy of the book, we offer a fully upgraded version of Sylvius 4 Online, which includes an interactive tutorial on human neuroanatomy as well as a magnetic resonance imaging atlas of the human brain.

This 1994 volume explores the hypothesis that neural activity generated by experience modulates the ongoing growth of the brain during maturation, thus sculpting in each of us a unique nervous system according to the events of our early life.