No one can argue against the enormous progress made in all these factors when it comes to various diseases. Medial science can look into brain functions with ever-increasing accuracy, allowing surgeons to do their work more finely and leading to drugs whose action is more localized and specific. However, where music is concerned, almost none of the deciding factors are in place.

• No brain function has gone awry.
• The brain functions that produce music are complex and mysteriously connected
• The actual transformation of noise signals into meaningful music cannot be observed physically.
• The mechanism whereby music arose in every society is not at all well known, since there is no evolutionary advantage to healthy brain function.

Is this just a matter of being behind the curve? If we were as concerned about music as we are about malignant brain tumors, would a heap of money and research yield better answers? Not if the whole model is fundamentally wrong. Music isn't the same as a brain tumor. It isn't even the same as pain being processed in the brain, even though both pain and music are subjective and both lead to complex behavior. The brain somehow produces music out of raw physical data (vibrations of air molecules); everybody agrees on that. But a piano also produces music, and yet it would be absurd to say that the two are equal. A piano is a dead machine working through fixed, predetermined processes. However much it may appear to be similar, the human brain is no such thing.

Music points to a truth that science isn't set up to accept: music is a function of the mind. The brain processes what the mind desires to hear. When a person likes or dislikes music, the mind makes that decision. When a composer like Beethoven gets inspired, his mind provides the inspiration, not his brain. How can one be so sure? The answer would fill a book, but let me divide it into two compartments.

1. Contradictions and flaws in the brain model:

• If the brain is hard-wired from childhood to hear Chinese music in China, Indian music in India, Japanese music in Japan, and so on, why do all these countries have symphony orchestras, entirely filled with native musicians, playing Western music? You can't call the brain hard-wired when connections can be changed at will. Determinism looks good in the schematics but breaks down in real life. By analogy, brain researchers are trying to tell us that house wiring can change from AC to DC current on its own.
• If a dozen interrelated areas of the brain combine to process music, as opposed to processing the sound of a buzz saw or wind in the trees, how does the raw input know where to go beforehand? The auditory center receives all the raw data in the same way, along the same channels from the inner ear. Yet the buzz saw noise gets shunted away from the musical processing. The data from a piano, on the other hand, goes straight into musical processing. This implies that the auditory center already knows which one is music, but it doesn't. That's a later function. Thus the mystery remains of how music is distinct from mere noise. We see where each one goes; we don't know why.
• The prefrontal lobe compares new music to a person's expectations from the past. This enables new music to surprise and delight us by defying our expectations. But there are times when new music creates opposite reactions in the same listener. I may not be in the mood for jazz one day and yet love it the next. I may be bored by Ella Fitzgerald only to discover that she's wonderful. In other words, musical response is indeterminate and subject to unpredictable changes. No mechanical system can explain this variability, and reducing it to randomness only pushes the problem deeper. The same brain cell can't be expected to produce one response and its exact opposite.

1. Positive reasons for understanding music as a product of mind, not brain:

• Music exposes why some human behavior makes no sense biologically or in terms of evolution. We love music because we love it, not because our ancestors made more and better babies if their genes carried a response to music. Searching for the evolutionary need for music puts the cart before the horse. Instead of requiring music to survive, we enjoy surviving thanks to music. Our minds delight in it. By any reasonable Darwinian perspective, human hearing should have favored the keenest possible sensitivity, so that our ancestors could hear a lion a hundred yards away instead of ten or five. Not getting eaten is a good way to survive. But we didn't evolve with that kind of acuity; instead we evolved the totally useless, totally joy-enhancing love of music.
• Music is personal, whimsical, and unpredictable. That's not a flaw that science needs to correct or explain. It's part of human nature. Enemy soldiers walked out of the trenches in World War I to sing Christmas carols together. Which is more human, that behavior, or fighting to the death in a senseless war? Both, actually. Human nature, like music, is inexplicable in its complexity.
• Music is self-generating. Something new is created out of nothing. New styles arise out of sheer inspiration. You cannot derive Beethoven from the data put into a computer from Mozart. There's a creative leap between the two. But let's say that one could build a super-computer and input every possible musical chord and phrase (there would be more of these than atoms in the universe, by the way), and let's program the computer to develop all possible musical styles. In time it would produce the music of Beethoven. But that's the very thing that invalidates the robot-brain model, because the composers of Mozart's day didn't spend a million hours tapping out random combinations until a new style emerged. Instead, Beethoven was born, a single musical mind who listened to the old style, creatively grew beyond it, and changed music forever.