Stephen Mithen: The Neanderthals—there’s no evidence that they had language. But they must have had a sophisticated form of communication. They were just like humans, they might would have had to have told other people how they’re feeling, they would have had to look after their children and nurture them. They had to have made plans for group hunting and general movement. So what sort of communications system did they have? Now I came to the conclusion which must have been based on high degrees of musicality. Because we can see traces of that in our nearest living relatives. This seems to be the only form of communication with that language that would have been complex to allow them to have function as a social group, and yet not gone that extra step to modern language. So I think they communicated by using sets of phrases, almost like musical phrases that would have had semantic meanings, phrases such as something that would translate into “Let us share meat,” “We’ll go hunting” or “How are you feeling?” but would have been expressed in musical tones, different types of pitches, different types of rhythms. They might have used these also to build a sense of group identity, very much how we use music today, especially for caring for infants, you know just like we do today with our youngest children before they got language, we sing to them and move them rhythmically . I’m sure the Neanderthals would have been doing exactly the same.

Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP: We are wired for speech, we are wired for spoken language, for expressing and understanding spoken language. That’s to say any human being who is exposed to language at a critical stage of development in their second or third year will acquire language without any explicit form of teaching. Comsky above others has spoken wonderfully about this, but basically exposure to language activates language parts of the brain. However we are not wired for written language in the same way. Written language only goes back five or seven thousand years. There is no built-in circuitry in the brain for written language. But a circuitry is developed through learning to write. A circuitry which may be somewhat different in different people. In other words what is already in the brain is recruited and pressed into a new use when one learns to write. So in this way is music like speech? Or is it like writing? I’m inclined to think, but here only one can speculate, that both of these are involved. I think there are certain aspects of music which do not have any equivalent in speech, in particular the pulse of music, the steady rhythm, and its synchronization with movement.  I think there is good reason for supposing for that is built in, and there are anatomical connections, which are strongly and almost exclusively developed in human beings.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin: In my book, The World In Six Songs: How the Music Brain Created Human Nature, what I’m arguing is that certain changes in the prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily speaking, created structures in the brain that allowed for art, and allowed for reflexive thinking, and allowed for music and science, all as part of the same structural changes in the brain.  The musical brain is also the scientific brain, the metaphorical brain, and the brain that was able to create societies, systems of courts and justice and systems of democratic principles, such as welfare, taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves. All this came from an ability to see ourselves objectively, to see ourselves as members of a society, to build societies in which people looked out after each other and took care of one another.

There is no other species that does this. I mean, we look at ant society, and bee society, which is highly structured, but it’s very different. They don’t have systems of courts, they don’t create art, they don’t try to reflect on their own existence.  I think all of these came from a single set of changes in prefrontal cortex that gave us music at the same time.

So what’s the big question driving music research now?  Is it, “What is the purpose of music?”

I’m not sure there’s a single big question driving music cognition research. I think most of us in the field came at it not from the standpoint of wanting to do music cognition, per se, but wanting to do cognition. How does the brain work? How does attention work?  How does memory work? How do we form new concepts, how do we put things into categories? And we use music as a way to get at those questions because it’s a converging approach, it’s another window into these operations.

It’s also a nice way to spend your time, in the laboratory. I think some of us also have bonafide questions about music, and its role in human culture and in human development.  I happen to think that music was necessary for the formation of human societies.

If you look at primates, they tend not to have living groups with more than eighteen males, because there’s too much competition, they can’t sustain themselves. But for at least five or six thousand years, human beings have lived in assemblies of hundreds of thousands, half a million people. Ancient Athens, ancient Rome were big, big cities. Why is it we can do it and primates can’t? One argument is that collective music making soothes some of the social tensions that would’ve created, splinter societies.

What about the Steven Pinker’s argument?  Tell me what it is, and your response to it.

Steven Pinker’s argument is that music was a spandrel or a co-opted adaptation. These are technical ways of talking about evolutionary biology, but the upshot is that language is what evolution selected for, and music sort of came along for the ride, later.

Once we had language, we figured out ways to trick the brain into making music. And he calls it “Auditory Cheesecake,” which is a well-known argument in evolutionary theory.

People say, “Well, why do we like cheesecake? That’s not adaptive, too much cheesecake causes obesity, and can lead to diabetes and things like that. Cheesecake is not healthy.” But the fact is, over evolutionary time scales, you can’t talk about the age of manufactured foods, you know, with the last fifty years, a hundred years- evolutionary time scales are much longer than that. Tens of thousands of years ago our hunter gatherer ancestors had very few sources of fats and sweets, and it was an adaptive strategy, when they found them, to load up on them, to take some pleasure in storing them in their bodies.

Now, where can you just open the pantry, and there are obscene amounts of fats and sweets available, and you don’t have to work for it?  They’re everywhere, and it turns out they can lead to health problems that we didn’t anticipate. Our liking for cheesecake, Pinker and others argue, is a by product of this old evolutionary system that no longer works. He says the same thing is true of music — our liking for music is a by product of an old evolutionary system that’s selected for language.

I think Pinker’s argument is that there isn’t a gene, or set of genes, that sub-serve music.  We’ve somehow tricked the language system into giving us music. He may be right. There may not be a gene for music. There may be genes that serve components of music. And if they’re there, we have to wonder why they’re there- the genome is crowded. In fact, it’s getting more and more crowded each year. Five years ago we thought humans had thirty thousand genes, now we think there are only twenty-three thousand. I pick up journals every month and they’ve, they’ve lowered the number.  That’s not a lot of genes.

Even though most of the story is how genes interact with one another and whether they’re turned on or not, whether they’re expressed or not at a particular point in time. Gene expression is really the frontier of genetics research today. Still, twenty-three thousand genes- it isn’t a whole lot to go around, when you consider all the different ways that human differ from one another. And when you consider that we’ve got ninety-eight percent of our DNA in common with the chimpanzee, there just isn’t a whole lot left over for things like music, and painting, and language, politics, and art. You know, all the things that make us human.

And what do you think of that?

Well, it’s a reasonable argument.  I think the evidence, has to be considered and weighed by each person for themselves. My personal view, not just because I like music, but my personal view of the science of it, is that there’s more evidence on the side that music was first.

Such as?

Some of the evidence is the way in which music activates primitive structures in the brain, that language doesn’t. The fact that music seems to trigger certain neurochemical reactions- they can be taken evidence, either way. You know, heroin is maladaptive, in the long run, and yet people seem to like it once they try it. It’s tricking the pleasure center into thinking it’s got something good. So, the fact that we get this neurochemical happy juice, or burst, when we listen to music, you can say that, well, it’s, “It’s more like heroin, it’s an accident that music triggers these things.” Or, you can say, “It’s more like nutrition. It’s supposed to trigger those things.” That’s hard to weigh.

But when I look at the animal literature, and you look at birds and primates who have calls that are more musical than they are speech-like — that is they tend to have properties that more resemble human music than they do human speech — to me, anyway, that suggests that music was something that early hominids, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, probably had, and language came out of that. You can imagine, as Stephen Mithen does — and this is kind of a cartoon version of his argument — that you can imagine a conversation between Neanderthals that had music, but no speech. You’ve got these musical elements, and sort of speech-like elements. You’ve got prosody, rhythm, tempo, pitch changes-all this without words, right? All of this is being conveyed by what we conventionally think of as the elements of music.

Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin: I’m not sure if I would say the purpose of music was to build community, but it may have been a function of music. We may have discovered that music can help ease and defuse social tensions, and create social bonds. My idea is that in fact music functioned in six distinct ways, throughout the development of our species. That’s the world, that’s the six songs, in The World In Six Songs. Social bonding was just one of them. Another was to communicate knowledge.

Knowledge becomes embedded in music, and it’s more easily remembered. We can remember things set to song more easily, whether it’s how to build a canoe, or, you know, how to prepare a plant so that it won’t be poisonous.  Another one is comfort.  Mother’s soothing their infants, letting them know that they’re here, even when the infant can’t feel the touch of the mother, because she’s out cooking or gathering. From the auditory signal, the infant is comforted by the recurring sound of the mother’s voice. Or lovers comforting one another, or hunters just letting each other know that they’re out there, when they can’t see each other, under the cover of night, or the cover of trees.

Another one would be joy. Just waking up in the morning and feeling really great, and wanting to move your body and sing, and you just, you know, make nonsense syllables as you move around, and I think, you know, there would have been some evolutionary reward for moving your body, for staying limber and flexing it, and music helps us to synchronize our body movements. It’s important to realize that you can’t make music without moving some part of your body. You either have to hit something or scrape something, or at least vibrate your vocal chords. Or you blow into something.

Love is another one. I think that people use music to express love to one another, as the Native American Indians did, as Pete Seeger told me, there would be a special song that a young man would compose for a young Native American woman, and that would be their song. And it would be what would bind them together. And he couldn’t sing it to anybody else, and she wouldn’t sing it to anybody else. That was their song, and we still talk about “our song”, in our culture. It has an interesting origin.

So there’s love, comfort, joy, friendship or social bonding knowledge, and the final one is religion. I think it’s a separate category of how people used music to think beyond themselves, beyond their own existence, to create a notion that there was something larger than themselves. Now, whether we believe in God today or not is beside the point.  We’re talking about tens of thousands of years of evolution, where people either believed in God, or Gods, or, or some higher power, or, some entity, that was larger than they were, larger than their own concerns, and larger than their own family group. Something they would appeal to, to rescue them in times of trouble.  And music has always been there for that.

But, all those uses of music, or purposes of music, are certainly part of daily life; are  an integral part of our existence, which is somewhat different from the way we may think of music today, going to a concert hall and sitting there and listening.

There has been this interesting evolutionary trend or cultural trend, anyway, in the last five hundred years, that, at least in Western society, we’ve set up a situation where most of us don’t make music everyday, and we don’t participate when other people are making music. We pay money, and then the experts entertain us. In fact, we’re told in school, sometimes, “Oh, don’t sing, leave the singing to the other kids. You just stand there and mouth the words and pretend that you’re singing with us, because you don’t sing well enough.”

Now, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The first concert halls weren’t built until five hundred years ago, in Europe.  The idea that you would go and pay a class of experts to play for you, and that you would sit quietly with your hands folded in your lap, that’s actually foreign to us, evolutionarily speaking. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. — I love a good concert as much as anyone, and I admire great musicians and love hearing them do what they do.  But, if we’re talking purely historically, anthropologically, this is something that’s foreign to our species.

How does music, its power to change the brain, have implications in the field of medicine, and also in education?

There’s been, in parallel to the more basic science side of things, there’s been a kind of practical side of music research: trying to figure out if music can make you smarter, or if learning an instrument has ancillary cognitive benefits. And there have been some rough starts in this arena, over the last fifteen years. But the emerging evidence, from carefully controlled studies, is that learning to play an instrument — not just passively listening, but learning to play an instrument early on — can actually confer some cognitive advantages.

It seems from early evidence thatif you learn to play an instrument early, you learn to read at an earlier age, you learn to read more quickly, you’re better at math, you’re better at a variety of scholastic topics, and we’re not exactly sure why this is, but it seems as though learning to play an instrument trains attentional networks in the interior Cingulate gyrus, in a way that maybe other things would do, too. Learning a second language learning to multitask, maybe crossword puzzles. I mean, nobody’s saying that music does it uniquely. But we’re saying that music does seem to do it.

And music uses many different parts of the brain, right?

Yeah.  Music uses many different parts of the brain, so that might be part of the story, too.

And this way that music can affect the brain also has implications for medicine?

There are a number of medical implications for this kind of work in the large picture of things we just don’t understand that much about the normal healthy brain, and how it functions, and how things are wired up. So any information we can get, either using music as a window or athletics, or playing chess- any of that’s helpful. But one of our goals is, that through understanding how music activates different areas of the brain, we’ll be able to map the brain, and be better equipped to come up with programs to help people that are victims of stroke, tumor, lesions, Alzheimer’s Disease, things of that nature.

The other thing that’s interesting is that when you go into old age homes, you find that one of the last things to go is music. Somebody may no longer remember the names of their spouse or family members, and yet, still be able to remember lyrics to songs they knew when they were fourteen.  Music insinuates itself into memory in a special way. This can be a way to reach out to somebody who is otherwise cut off, emotionally or cognitively, from the people around them.