In an excerpt from his new book, David Byrne explains why sometimes, he prefers hearing nothing.

The UCLA study proposed that our appreciation and feeling for music are deeply dependent on mirror neurons. When you watch, or even just hear, someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles required to play that instrument fire. Listening to a piano, we “feel” those hand and arm movements, and as any air guitarist will tell you, when you hear or see a scorching solo, you are “playing” it, too. Do you have to know how to play the piano to be able to mirror a piano player? Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University scanned the brains of people with and without music experience as they listened to Chopin. As you might guess, the mirror neuron system lit up in the musicians who were tested, but somewhat surprisingly, it flashed in non-musicians as well. So, playing air guitar isn’t as weird as it sometimes seems. The UCLA group contends that all of our means of communication—auditory, musical, linguistic, visual—have motor and muscular activities at their root. By reading and intuiting the intentions behind those motor activities, we connect with the underlying emotions. Our physical state and our emotional state are inseparable—by perceiving one, an observer can deduce the other.

People dance to music as well, and neurological mirroring might explain why hearing rhythmic music inspires us to move, and to move in very specific ways. Music, more than many of the arts, triggers a whole host of neurons. Multiple regions of the brain fire upon hearing music: muscular, auditory, visual, linguistic.

1. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (Dover, $3.50). This is Dickens at his funniest and most soulful, and the genius of the minor characters (Micawber, Uriah Heep, Peggoty, Betsey Trotwood) is both a dazzling pleasure and completely intimidating, if you’ve ever had any desire to write fiction.
2. Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (Penguin, $17). Harris’ brilliantly researched study of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1968, following a pivotal year in Hollywood history, is my favorite book about cinema. It’s enormous fun to read but also extremely accomplished: Harris understands the collaborative and random nature of the business better than anyone else I’ve come across.
3. Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (Oxford, $15). A misery memoir, perhaps the first, about the author’s coming-of-age in a strict evangelical Victorian household. Father and Son is perceptive, wise, occasionally comic, and heartbreaking — even if Gosse is now believed by biographers to have stretched the truth a bit. 
4. What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey (Oxford, $18). A brilliant and important little book — by an Oxford English professor, no less — about taste, high culture, objective artistic worth, and the absurd arguments made to prop the whole teetering edifice up. Carey has an extraordinary mind, and a wicked wit, and it’s hard to read this book and end up feeling the same about what you value and why.
5. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner, $17). Random Family follows two young Bronx, N.Y., women as they struggle over a decade with men, kids, drugs, poverty, and, very occasionally, money. It’s an astonishing, and astonishingly patient, piece of reportage; it’s also an important book about contemporary America, and it grips like a thriller.
6. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco, $26). Fountain’s achingly sympathetic, funny, and imaginative novel is a book about Iraq and the soldiers fighting there, and it’s set almost entirely within a Texas football stadium. It’s the best novel I’ve read this year.

In defense of writers, filmmakers, and composers who return to the same themes, settings, and motifs over and over and over again.

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It seems to me that this repetition—which is, at its best, a kind of productive thickening and entanglement of a central cluster of themes—comes from the same source as so much that is good and bad in art: obsession. One of the presiding book review clichés is that of the “artist in full control of her powers.” But this kind of formulation ignores the artists whose “powers” seem to be in control of them. There’s something enthralling, in other words, about a novelist who seems to be writing not so much individual and self-contained novels as successive installments in a single, ongoing, and compulsive work of art.

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Nor, of course, is the phenomenon unique to writers. This week, with the release of Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson will offer us another elegantly stylized film about youngsters from dysfunctional families being impassively precocious, and Bill Murray being Bill Murray. Philip Glass, who in some ways seems like the most extreme test case in any art form, has been getting by just fine for decades on a very small bag of musical tricks. It would be hard to argue that he’s the kind of artist who goes out on an aesthetic limb, but it would be much harder to argue that he’s not a distinctive and important composer.

How color forecasters really decide which hue will be the new black.