CHAPTER 1

Music and the Brain

An Evolutionary Context

We are a species bound by evolution and diverse forms ofchange, both symbolic and social. Language and music areas much a part of our evolutionary development as the tool makingand the cognitive skills that we traditionally focus on when wethink about evolution.

As social animals, we are oriented toward sundry expressionsof our conspecifics that ground us in the social world, a world ofacceptance and rejection, approach and avoidance, that featuresobjects rich with significance and meaning. Music inherently procuresthe detection of intention and emotion, as well as whether toapproach or avoid.

Social behavior is a premium cognitive adaptation, reachinggreater depths in humans than in any other species. The orientationof the human child, for example, to a physical domain of objects,can appear quite similar in the performance of some tasks to thecommon chimpanzee or orangutan in the first few years of development.The understanding of objects in space, quantities, or drawinginferences is not that far apart. This is not so for problemsrequiring a vast array of social knowledge. What becomes quiteevident early on in ontogeny is the vastness of the social worldin which the human neonate is trying to gain a foothold for action.Music is social in nature; we inherently feel the social valueof reaching others through music or by moving others in songacross the broad social milieu.

In this chapter, I discuss how music fits into the evolution of ourcognitive capabilities, and how the auditory system, larynx, motorsystems, and cephalic expansion underlie the expression of musicand the evolution of social contact.

Cognitive Capabilities and Problem Solving

Theodosius Dobzhansky is often cited for his remarks regardinghow all things are linked to evolution. A biological perspective isthe cornerstone in understanding our capabilities, with our musicalability being just one of these, including our sense of space andtime, our ability to assess probabilities (the prediction of events),our numerosity, and, of course, our language abilities.

The specific adaptation for decoding facial responses, and themore general aptitudes such as applying numerical capabilities todiverse problems, pervade a biological understanding of cognitiveadaptation. Cognitive systems run the gamut across the nervoussystem. Cognition is not simply defined by a province of the neocorticaltissue, the most evolved tissue; cognitive systems are distributedacross neural systems that traverse the brain stem to theforebrain. As I have indicated, and will continue to note throughoutthis book, regions of the brain that underlie musical sensibilityand expression are also widely distributed.

Cognition rests at the heart of human understanding. Table 1.1,originally created by the evolutionary anthropologist Steven Mithen,highlights some of the core features of problem solving andhuman expression.

These are fairly diverse sets of cognitive predilections that underlieour evolution and figure into much of what we do. Cavepainting, tool making, and other skills, as well as our sense of enjoymentin what we do, are embedded in cognitive adaptation anda search to understand something about our surroundings: whatto expect, how to cope, how to transform, and so on. After all, ArtAs Experience, as Dewey understood, is in understanding, building,and representing affective content.

From simple tools to facile musical instruments, to elementarysymbols, all of these represent a small leap for humankind. Forexample, see the flutes depicted in figure 1.1. Diverse forms of artand probably music emerged in early Homo sapiens, and are evidentin remains that date back to at least 40,000 years ago.

Knowledge and a sense of aesthetics are entwined. They coalesceas heightened appraisals predominate in functional contexts; thenreprieves occur, long silences and meditative calms amidst thehustle and bustle of life. Reconsidering and musing take precedenceamid ephemeral moments of reflection and meditation; artifactstake shape and expand from narrow confines to extendedattraction from normal bodily expression. The body is expandedthrough meditation with a direction set in motion by an evolvingbrain.

One cognitive adaptation is the capacity for the basic discernmentof inanimate objects from animate objects. We have adaptedthis fundamental cognitive perception into a source of music, art,and religion. We represent animate objects, often giving them divine-likestatus, which infuses them with specific and transcendentalmeaning. This is part of a basic adaptation to discern useful objects.

Musical instruments ultimately derive from this expandedcognitive approach to objects. A key artifact is something that issometimes called a "sound tool" or "lithophone." The oldest dateback some 40,000 years ago from sites in Europe, Asia, and Africa.Sound tools are simple stones that resonate when struck, asshown figure 1.2.

While most of music is song, and song preceded musical instruments,the cognitive/motor cephalic capability for the inventionof tools is embedded in music and meaning, with social contactinherent in these events. After all, making objects, musical andotherwise, is a cephalic extension of the world beyond ourselves.The terrain changes, and we scaffold with the broadening array ofmusical meaning.

Representing objects, dividing kinds by naming and trackingthem, is also fundamental to human evolution. Cognitive capacitiescontinued to expand as we explored new terrains and survivedin them. Thus, representation is not something that removes us fromobjects. Instead, the cognitive expansion into art and the knowingprocess of reflection and meditation provides ways of coming tounderstand the objects that matter and mean something to us.

Time and Timing

Time is not a thing. Despite the fact that we know something aboutthe neural systems that regulate the perception and organization oftime, this concept is still highly theoretical; it is a cardinal featureof our cognitive apparatus, with phylogenic roots in basic clockmechanisms. We have used our diverse cognitive resources to expandupon our grasp of time; we recognize simple concepts ofperiodicity and precise timing, as well as the timing of other eventsand, of course, the coordination of events.

Counting, numerosity, and keeping track of events are inherentlyrelated. Assigning numbers to objects inheres everywhereand in everything; numerosity may even be shared with other species,since it is so basic to cognitive capabilities. Numeration is alsoimportant in reasoning. Demythologized, reason is what we meanby cognitive systems: problem solving. Numbers are linked to thetiming of events, staging events in time, and tracking them intocoherence and adaptation. These are core capacities that underliemusical expression: the timing of events, keeping track of rhythmicimpulses built into the hardware of the brain. The manipulation ofnumbers in the abstract and in concrete space pervades our cognitivearchitecture. It is also inherent in our musical expression.

Calculating

Calculating, trigonometry, algebra, calculus, and diverse forms ofgeometry are embedded in capabilities for keeping track of eventsThis much is true of the Leibnitzian conception of the vast arrayof mathematic capabilities in which core notational systems thathave coherence and symbolic/logical/numerical expression predominatein us. The brain is not simply a calculating machine, butnumerosity certainly remains in our attempts at coherence, withcalculations permeating every part of our lives.

Some individuals are better than others at framing events in numerosity.Most people fall within a middle range, with the extremecurves representing the best and the worst. Musical capabilitiescan be graded along these same curves. As far as we know, however,this curve of abilities never matches exactly with numerosity.There is no one simple isomorphic relationship between math andmusic, or between a feel for numbers and a sense for time, at leastnot one that can be expressed explicitly. Cognitive capabilities arefor the most part unconscious.

Irving Berlin had little schooling, was unable to read music, andhad minimal skills in musical virtuosity. Yet, he could write songsthat came to define America in the early twentieth century. From"God Bless America" to "The Easter Parade," his were the songsthat linked vaudeville to the shining stages of Broadway. "TwoFinger Irving" could belt out these themes through simple songs.After all, song captures both the vast complexity of our worlds andits refined simplicity.

Perhaps Berlin was like the classic depiction of the slave whoknows geometry, as depicted by Plato in the Meno. When askedthe right questions, he was quite capable of expressing complexgeometrical knowledge. Ultimately, spatial computation is fundamental,and we know that it is expressed in all species studied.

Evolution

The human mind and its capability, including geometric ability andnumerosity, and more generally a capacity to grasp a wide array ofconcepts and their instantiation across diverse sensory expressions,are outstanding. The theory of evolution, a supposition profoundin its capture of links to nature, to adaptation, and to function, isnot as direct as one would expect. Natural selection, of which sexualselection and sexual dimorphism are derivatives, is not narrowand one-dimensional; it does not advocate reducing all human expressionto narrow biologicism or simple adaptationism.

Surely, not all of human behavior is an adaptation. However,core abilities are rooted in biological capability. Small changes growinto larger changes as speciation and habitat take precedence overshape, morphology, cephalic expression, and capability. Wondrousnature was described in the pen and eye of portrait painters with arealistic lens for nature.

Darwin was prepared to believe that musical expression, as aparticular universal human expression, is a feature of natural selection,linked to communicative function and sexual selection.Perhaps it is tentatively tied in origins to basic functions, but surelyone wants to be respectful of these simple origins without beingreduced to them.

Evolutionary trends are not necessarily consistent, as Darwinhad suggested and had penned in one of his rather unaesthetic drawings.Evolutionary trends may be more like fits and starts, punctuatedby sudden changes.

Some of the key events and core features of our evolution overthe last 300,000 years are depicted in table 1.2, in terms of keydiscoveries of modern human evolution.

One view of evolution is the hypothesis that language andspeech emerged some 50,000–100,000 years ago, and artistic representationcan be traced back to 30,000–40,000 years ago.

Amidst some presumably unusual and unstable environments, acognitive expansion, or a change in brain development, facilitatedtool use and social cooperative behaviors that proved fateful forour development. Table 1.3 outlines some cognitive cultural featuresin diverse Homo species related to a common modern ancestor;social features, essential for group formation, are pervasive.

Again, we know now that diverse forms of hominids competedand perhaps interbred during the same time period. Homo sapienseventually came to dominate the landscape as other humanlikeprimates became extinct. Some of these hominids, including ourown direct ancestors, must have expressed musical sensibilities atsome point.

The literature is brimming with a vast array of theories regardingbrain size and evolution. Depicted in table 1.4 is a summary ofdiverse studies regarding the relationship between neural weightand evolution. We can discern that perhaps from Homo erectusto Homo sapiens, music may have been a feature of our own primateline based on cephalic weight. See table 1.4 for a comparisonacross species, that lived either millions of years ago (mya) or thousandsof years ago (kya), of respective encephalization quotients(EQ). Encephalization quotients are used to measure the expectedcognitive capabilities of a species, using the ratio E_a/E_e, where E_arepresents the brain mass of the given species, and E_e is the expectedbrain size for that species based on a "standard" species ofthe same taxon. EQ represents the deviation in actual brain sizefrom the expected brain size for that species.

Figure 1.3 depicts an endocast of the frontal region of a putativeHomo around 2 million years ago, compared to the frontal planesof (a) chimpanzee, (b) orangutan, (c) gorilla, and (d) modern human.Additional neocortex, particularly that of the auditorycortex, facilitated the conditions for greater social/communicative/instrumental functions, including that of music.

In the process of evolution, what exploded in our species wasthe visual system. Commanding the greater part of the neocortex,this expanded visual system reflects our dependence upon sight. Itallows us to coordinate with others in joint social behaviors and towarn against constant danger.

The degree of cortical expansion is directly correlated with vision.This is most clearly seen when considering the expansion ofvision in comparison to non-vision. Vision is critical to keepingtrack of and working with others.

But it is hearing, not vision, that is fundamental for music, andso we turn our attention to audition.

Hearing and Vocal Expression

Auditory sensibility and anatomy underlie hearing and vocalization.Harmony, being an evolving feature, is bound to pitch perceptionand generation as a fundamental trait. The auditory system,like all sensory systems, traverses the whole of the brain, fromthe peripheral cochlea to the auditory cortex as depicted in figure1.4. As we shall see, musical training impacts the auditorysystem, in addition to other cortical regions, in diverse ways.

During musical training, various regions of the brain are recruitedacross the range of auditory cephalic competence for timing,pitch, and timbre. The cephalic system comes prepared to learnabout music, just as it comes prepared to learn about shapes,tastes, and objects.

Language and tone of voice are early social bonds. In combinationwith other sensory systems pregnant with cephalic function,they form social contact for the neonate in the larger social world.Tones and song have long been noted to be important adaptive factorsin the facilitation of early social attachment. A sense of tonalstructure may be stimulated by exposure to music during early development,in which expectations for tone and musical structureemerge.

Hearing as Seeing, Seeing Through Hearing

I remarked earlier that we often associate heightened musicalitywith blindness. This may be more than a mythological perception.My colleague at Georgetown, Josef Rauschecker, has suggestedthat Hebbian "synaptic efficacy" is clearly operative in blind individuals.In other words, the brain compensates for the loss inone system by the expansion of another, a common theme perhapsthroughout cephalic adaptation. Regions of the occipital lobeare activated by sounds in blind individuals. Indeed, sighted individualsdeprived of visual stimuli, even after a few days, beginto express greater activation to non-visual stimuli in the occipitallobe (e.g., audition and touch). What is interesting to note, and inconcert with enhanced cephalic compensation, is the finding thatabsolute pitch competence is greater in blind musicians. Regionsof the superior temporal lobe seem to integrate both auditory andvisual information. Sounds and songs are the semiotic vehicle forsocial contact, social alliances, and social avoidance, the sources ofacoustically rich fields of information.

It is also noteworthy that even children who are blind frombirth still understand something about spatial objects and concepts.The sensory systems are replete with cognitive resources,emboldening the organization of action vital for the formation ofsocial contact and social aversion.

Importantly, in congenitally blind individuals, there is an expandedauditory cortical system (and no doubt other sensory systems)to compensate for the decrease in sight. In blind subjects,regions of the occipital region, which are activated by only visualstimuli in sighted persons, are activated by audition and therebyexpanded to auditory function.