The power of music and the plasticity of the brain go together very strikingly, especially in young people.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Darwin speculated that “music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph” and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.