Why are we so responsive to MUSIC?

But you're the one comparing animal communication to music. I'm fairly sure I didn't.

What makes languages "equivalent"? Is Greek equivalent to English or Russian? Are they "on par"?
Although there are many examples of what could be termed "language", there are plenty of abstract examples, computer languages for instance. Then there is "formal language" which in the context of mathematics and logic is completely abstract, just strings of symbols with no intrinsic meaning at all.

Nonetheless, the strings are "messages", and contain (abstract) information. Hence, information is whatever you say it is, as long as it can be realised in a formal way. So there is written and spoken language (and information), mathematical and musical language, in fact an indefinite list of languages.
What constitutes a language? Some kind of transmission of information, which is formally encoded.
If the information conveys no meaning, that just means the receiver has no way to interpret messages in that language. But it's still language.

I agree that spending days singing and dancing does nothing to ward off predators or find food, while everyone is singing and dancing. Why bother to do it? Why have such practices survived this long? What happens after the singing and dancing? There must be some advantage to the tribe, surely?

If humans invest a lot of effort in some activity which is not adaptive, then evolution should have weeded out humans by now. Or at least the ones who "waste time" singing and dancing.

 

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Boy, Sylvan really bothers you. I only cited it because he says music continues to satisfy the religious-ritual need humans have as they did over 10,000 years ago, which I agree with. Beyond that I am agnostic about his work.

Trooper, at least you did some research and cited some folks, which is way better than most. In my last reply to arfa brane (post 79), I mention Steve Brown's three biological paradoxes about music. He, like Pinker, Dawkins, and many others, flounders about trying to explain the evolutionary benefits of music and/or religion. Pinker's auditory cheesecake is lame. In fact, if you read his book where he describes this, How the Mind Works, he does a great job of summarizing scientific knowledge about the brain and mind...until he gets to arts and religion. Then he falls off the deep end. So disappointing. Same with Dawkins. The fact is the biology of aesthetic arts and religion continues to be a conundrum. I could cite over and over this lament from academics, but I think you already know this. I've begun to explain the reason for this, but it requires thinking outside the box. It means realizing that despite all our great culture and technology, we are animals first and our vaunted consciousness--thinking, rationale, self-awareness--has more downside and drawbacks than benefit. It requires accepting that we are essentially the same creatures now as we were in the Pleistocene. It means considering that the expression of modern arts is just an elaboration of the original religious rituals. It's a lot for people to deal with, but the evidence is growing abundant and much more can be forthcoming when studies are designed to address the hypothesis, which goes like this: Intrinsic religion is a compensating mechanism for higher-order consciousness. Rituals are the behaviors of religion and activate emotions at the expense of noisy thinking, awareness consciousness. Emotions are the evolved physiological mechanisms that preserve homeostasis, survival, and ultimately, evolutionary success.

 

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Ah ha! Peddling your book…am I right?

http://rainmac.users.sonic.net/darwin/bookSummary.html


Before you jump into the evolution of music, shouldn't you look at the theories surrounding the evolution of the ear.

This might explain why hearing effects taste.

Sounds like a case of convergent evolution to me…no pun intended.

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The brain interprets music using its concept structure (the collected experience of a individual), creating psychological ties to sounds and voices to associate memories with the music. Music is about releasing dopamine by stimulating a sense organ.

 

Just the knowledge that comes from playing music live for over 40 years and observing it's effect on different audiences.

I ask again, are you a musician?

 

Music it is very organic and continually evolves into new states of expression. Just when you think all songs have been written, a new song angle or music branch appears. There is an element of randomness in the creation of new options, yet there is also order and structure.

Music connects people to a creative aspect of the personality firmware. The presentation of the music allows a way for the audience to reverse engineer the creative process, but at the unconscious level of the firmware. This allows spontaneous reactions in terms of feeling and movement.

The artists might have a feeling about a new song, as the unconscious data processing slowly becomes conscious. It may begin as the tip of the iceberg.This is slowly translated until the song is roughed in. Then there is more conscious polishing effort.

When they perform the song in full, the unconscious mind of the audience reverse engineers the creative process and everyone gets to feel it. We start to project what the artist felt and meant, but with their finished template in place so we can reproduce the experience in our unique way. The next artists, who learns from their peers, has a template. Their creative ability allows them to make use of that template but in a way that adds newness to template.

When we watch plays or TV shows, the writers try to create plausible human experiences, like that generated naturally in each of us. We can relate because again this is something the firmware can reverse engineer. The connection is both learning and creative at the same time; randomness leading to order. The difference between the artist and audience is the ability to translate the induction.

Most people prefer to be part of the herd and will not wish to do anything that can cause separation. Translation of creativity can put you at odds since it will be unique. Music allows one to cheat conformity within the microcosm of the minds. Or the outward expression of the template creativity may involve movement or dance, which is semi-conformity based on acceptable moves for that song. This may be as far outside the box many will travel. But for others, way out there is cool, if it helps lead others outside the box via unconscious reverse engineering empathy.

 

Now this is an awesome opportunity to dig into the science. I wasn't aware of Patel, but I took a look. Not sure about your interpretation of his work, but I only took a quick peek. He says, "There are good reasons to believe that the brain treats spoken and musical sound systems differently." (Music, Language, and the Brain, p. 72) He cites Peretz & Coltheart, 2003, who state that, "“A growing number of studies are based on the premise that music is a cognitively unique and evolutionary distinct faculty. Musical abilities are now studied as part of a distinct mental module with its own procedures and knowledge bases that are associated with dedicated and separate neural substrates.”
“Support for the existence of a music-processing module can be found in reports of selective impairments in music recognition abilities after brain damage.” Scanning that part of the book reveals to me that Patel is trying to hold the line against this kind of thinking by suggesting a lot of shared functions between language and music. I detect an active agenda. If you're more familiar with his thinking, perhaps you can help explain it to me.

Now it may be that music modules developed with other parts of the brain that evolved for other functions--they didn't evolve in a vacuum after all--but they seem to be music-dedicated now. To me this means they are evolved, genetically distinct structures, which, of course, begs the question of how and why music is adaptive.

For what it's worth. The only way it is likely to get published is if I do it myself. What's more important to me is that the idea gets out there and scientifically critiqued. As is said and I've said ad nauseum, no one really knows why religion and arts evolved and are adaptive. I believe I have an answer. I'm still waiting for refutation based on empirical evidence, as opposed to opinion, which there's plenty of in these types of forums.

Why?

 

As I said early, I hadn’t given it much thought before, but I do find it interesting. However, as you know, group selection isn’t widely accepted. Who knows,though, group selection (aka multi-level selection) might have its 15 minutes with Edward O. Wilson’s new book “The Social Conquest of Earth”. And of course, there's a little influence there because Patel studied under Wilson, who taught him the neurobiology of auditory communication.

I also enjoyed Joseph Henrich’s and Scott Atran's paper on, “The Evolution of Religion -pdf: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Display, and Group Competition Generate deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions”. But right now, I’m trying to finish a book on the evolution of monogamy.

You can get an idea about what Patel thinks by simply searching. Here's a podcast. I don’t know if he still feels this way, but instead of the adaptation vs. byproduct thingy, he said that he thought that music was a biologically powerful invention, or a transformative technology of the mind.

Here’s the actual bird that got him all excited, which led him to believe that the cockatoo could have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours. He contacted the owners and set up an experiment. He sped up and slowed the beat, and that damn bird had rhythm. Who's says white birds can't dance.

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Oh, and the evolution of hearing...if I was passionate and writing a book, I’d want to understand everything there is to know about it.

Cheers!

 

Yeah, I have a problem with group selection, too, which is that it's used top-down rather than bottom-up. It seems to me that's it's invoked to solve those nagging human behaviors like arts and religion without having a substantial basis in general biology. How group selection should be developed is for biologists like E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson, the other big 'multi-level' selectionist, to build group selection evidence from a variety of social animals across phyla and class. That hasn't happened. If it's good enough for Darwinian evolution in general, it should be good enough for group selection. Any hypothesis applied to humans first without being generalized to other species is bogus in my book.

Yes, Atran is deep into his commitment to byproduct and commitment theory of religion. Byproduct theory suffers the same problem as group selection, but it's even worse. They try to create and apply a theory, the byproduct, to explain incongruous human behaviors that has no real-world evidence whatsoever. It all seems to be based on SJ Gould's The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm, which explains byproducts with architectural examples and only the barest, weakest biological examples. Yet like the Emperor's New Clothes, many people who should know better have glommed on to byproduct theory. It's truly amazing.

Thanks for the Patel-EO Wilson connection. That helps explain Patel's agenda a bit. I read Patel's introduction to Music, Language, and the Brain, and he was very straightforward saying there are both differences and similarities between music and language. He chooses to focus on the similarities. I choose to focus on the differences in as much as it verifies the genetic aspect of music, which is necessary for my theory of religion.

There is soooo much to read and follow. Being mortal, I must be selective and attend to those topics that are most germane. I'm also researching the evolutionary fitness of other rituals--dance/movement, visual art, mythology and prayer--and there's much less biology about them than music.

 

No they don't. Mass behavior, schooling, is not socially structured on any but basic levels - a herd of bison is only a bit more socially structured than a school of minnows or a forest of trees.

Humans form tribal alliances, even, beyond the unique complexity and size of the tribes themselves.

And these bondings have great value in survival, reproduction, Darwinian terms, for the individuals within them. The pack howling of canids forms the pack - the territorial defense, the hunt, the rest, depend on that formation. But each wolf in it benefits.

It's trivial compared with humans - not even in the ballpark. A playground of ten year old children organizing a game of kickball is doing something more complex than an orca can dream of.

Humans are really quite extraordinary, when you look at them carefully.

 

Here is a theory I had many years ago. It seems appropriate to the topic at hand. If you look at the brain, there are two bulk features, which are the cerebral matter in yellow and the cerebellum which is shown below in purple. The cerebellum looks like a little brain.

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The function of the cerebellum is connected to movement. The cerebellum helps fine tune delicate movement. Without the cerebellum, movement would be awkward and robotic. Music and dance are both things that are performed and both require very delicate body control to be done well. It takes practice to form the needed cerebellum pathways. Practicing movement and music set up configuations in these pathways.

If you look at the neurons within the cerebellum, they are very similar to those within the cerebral matter, but they are smaller with less branching. It is similar to a retro-cerebral with fewer synaptic connections.

The theory was, the delicate control of movement within the cerebellum and the pathways needed to make the structured music and dance within primitive cultures became emulated within the cerebral matter. Movement dexterity preceeded mental dexterity. Music is known to increase intelligence due to the emulation.

I visualized the patterns within the cerebellum associated with music and dance (opposing muscles emulate into cause and effect) and set the foundation on which the human mind learned to move via thought.

For example, even before language one could use the voice like a recorder instrument, which requires dexerity of the vocal cords. Later the cerebral emulation makes use of the patterns for language.

Im modern times A jingle or chant can sound appealing and be catchy while making little sense; partial emulation. It takes a while for the emulation to be detailed in an meaning or fully transfer to the cerebral.

 

Thank you for the excellent clarification. My original question was why would humans need religion to promote eusociality when there are millions of years of evolved mechanisms in other species, pack, herd, or otherwise? I assert that the social bonding of religious ritual is a secondary effect and that religion has a more incipient role, which is to inhibit consciousness and promote emotions.

Believe me, I wish it were true, but the evidence doesn't support it. We continue to be a species that mostly protects the in-group and vilifies the out-group. Prosocial behaviors are rooted in emotions, not thinking or logic. That's why it's so easy to arouse the masses to attack the foreigners, the 'other', in the name of defense and patriotism. Yes, humans have culture, which requires a certain separation from instinct, but the great forebrain does not override instinct; it only elaborates on it. A flurry of popular books in recent years all propound a similar theme--that we remain under the sway of our inherited behavioral systems.
Predictably Irrational
The Art of Choosing
Emotional Intelligence
A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
Strangers to Ourselves: discovering the adaptive unconscious
Emotional Brain: the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life
Why we believe what we believe: uncovering our biological need for meaning
and many more of similar bent.

 

Hey Troop, that had me in stitches. What a ham. And goose-stepping and head-banging the mohawk in what looks to be an improvisational style. Someone needs to wire this bird with tiny accelerometers and turn him into the first avian DJ. Imagine giving him the choice of which sounds to make.

We tend to anthropomorphize stuff like this, but who cares, it's way to crazy-funny to ignore. What struck me was the bird's apparent sense of pleasure. He's clearly anticipating the beat, by getting his claws to land dead on like that. No telling how any times he's heard it, and how he's actually processing sound with the images of people dancing. It's just uncanny. I also caught a bar where there was a break in the drum repetition and he did an eighth-note sequence that was dead on. That blew my mind, even though I realize the bird is probably doing playback in his head anyway.

I can't say for sure he likes it, just that he's not indifferent like a cat, or morose like the grouch next door that tells you to turn it down because it's rattling his dentures, or whatever. (With due respect to the dentally impaired.

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)

I feel like Class Aves made so many breakthoughs in their evolutionary ascent (pun intended

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) that there probably is some correspondence to the way mammals are wired for sound. I would guess that our ancestors got reinforcement from hearing bird song, that it denotes a thriving habitat, better for survival, maybe buffalo wings, etc. In any case, I have no doubt that through some common ancestry with birds, at the point they branched off, and/or through the history of human encounters with them, our brains acquired the remarkable ability to recognize and mimic them. Primitive flutes and whistles must have given early humans that same sense of imitation.

You also mentioned the importance of hearing. It's obviously the most basic of factors in composition, performance and appreciation of music. It turns out that we distinguish spectral content at different levels. For example, in bowing a violin the harmonics each have their own rise times, that is, they don't rise in amplitude exactly in parallel, and this in itself helps us distinguish the peculiarities of the bowing sound--an effect dealing with acoustic interactions like resonance. Then there's a huge library of such sound events which we store away and are able to recall and recognize. But these sound events take place in a fraction of a second. And it has to do with spectral content, which is remarkably complex. (Akin to recognizing successive chains of mountain ranges, and "knowing where we are.")

That same bowing of the violin, even on the same note, can be varied by the performer, such that that initial rise times of the spectral envelopes takes on a different continuum of "mountain ranges". Yet we hear the same pitch, the same instrument. Only now we also detect from the signature some kind of idea, emotion or meaning--something more on par with the way vocal intonation of speech conveys that added kind of information.

I'm connecting this to the bird, because if you take bird song and slow it down without altering the pitch, then maybe dropping it an octave or two, you will hear a rich texture of sound patterns that almost sound alien. One thing I've noticed (because I did this out of curiosity) is that birds seem to be doing something like radar. They pulse, and they sweep frequency. (Again, on maybe 16x time zoom.) I have heard echoes in these renditions that make me wonder if they are somehow painting their environment in the manner of sonar. Something as dry as that would take all the artful fun out of it, but it wouldn't be too surprising from the biological standpoint if it turned out to be universal.

This speaks to a level of hearing that takes place at lightning speed, which perhaps all hearing species possess. I would guess that it's too taxing to occupy the conscious mind in real time and so it necessarily is allocated to the subliminal functions. It probably has windows of around 20 ms, somewhere around the rate we are known to not detect the flashing of video frames.

Stuff like this is way too specific to biology and acoustics to rely on the ideas of acculturation and superficial features of music like style.

This was what I got out of the cockatoo. To each his own, I guess, but I think there are layers of complexity to this question that haven't even been touched on in this thread, which are probably more at the core of what it means to hear, then to listen, then listen with interest, and then to actually start grooving like the zany bird appears to be doing.

Thanks for your links. This one is just flat hilarious.

 

Thanks. No one here thinks I'm funny, except for you…and of course, me.

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I think we all want to glom onto anything that will explain why people are religious. I think it’s a combination of factors, though. You have external influence, and then the individual religious experiences, and the the causes thereof. Okay, I was aware of all the other psychoactive substances, except for seer's sage….hmm…new to me. BTW, sufi whirling…not a fan. Who comes up with this shit anyway?

Genetic aspects? Are you talking about musical ability connected to genes, the God gene, or what?

I don’t know. It’s a little confusing and all the literature is so damn subjective. Like you said, there’s a lot out there. There's Daniel Levitin's work and then you have Jerry Fodor, who Dennett thinks misrepresents Gould and Lewontin’s spandrel argument. Dennett said that far from suggesting an alternative to adaptationism, the very concept of a spandrel depends on there being adaptations. I am not a scientist, but I think that inhibiting, or altering consciousness is the only universal link between music and religion. It’s something we all seem to enjoy. Why? Because it feels good. It’s pretty safe to assume that serotonin and dopamine are involved in both religion and music...but hell, lots of things increase the levels of our feel good chemicals.

There’s a lot being done with that evo-devo and there's important information gained from research using diverse species in the evolutionary biology of hearing. A good example is human echolocation. Twenty years ago, a college advisor told Diane Kelly that anatomy was a dead science, but by using comparative biology, she discovered something previously unknown.

Sorry, I just wanted to toss in that last one. Interesting, eh?...

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Well, anywho...I love music, especially the blues, and I loved this guy’s music.

Spoiler

Kalai has a new song, “Freedom Fighter”, coming out sometime in July. You can preview it on Glenn Beck. It starts at about (1:20) in the video. "A blend of folk, blues, and rock but self-described as "urban vintage."

http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/06/07/create-our-movements-soundtrack/

He doesn't understand why people are so irked by God, a dude that they don't believe in. He said he's been writing more spiritual stuff but he didn't for a long time because he thought people were too anti-god.

Obviously, it's not "God"...the dude, who irks me. As Bertrand Russell said, we speak of faith when we substitute emotion for evidence. It’s difficult to remember that we’re not always dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. I love music, even spiritual music. Why, because I too, am human, a creature of emotion.

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The love and appreciation of music is universal. It's an aspect of human culture selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human. Kalai expresses a great deal of sadness in his music. He feels that sadness is not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s being cultivated.

So, why do we seek the experience of a negative emotion as in a sad piece of music?

Kendall Walton said that sadness is not negative in itself. Rather, the life situation that causes it, e.g. the death of a loved one, is negative. “Thus, though we would not seek out the death of a loved one, given the death we ‘welcome’ the sorrow.” Music gives the listener the possibility of self-experience through real emotions, without the consequences of real-life circumstances, just as any art and play does.

It's late...Goodnight.

 

Thanks for pointing out the Finnish study for a genetic correlation to musical ability. That's an excellent start. The God gene is very preliminary evidence and can't be given too much significance yet, but again, a start. So sure, any and all of it. You mentioned Patel. From post 88, I cite his nod to Peretz & Coltheart, 2003, who state that, "“A growing number of studies are based on the premise that music is a cognitively unique and evolutionary distinct faculty. Musical abilities are now studied as part of a distinct mental module with its own procedures and knowledge bases that are associated with dedicated and separate neural substrates.”
“Support for the existence of a music-processing module can be found in reports of selective impairments in music recognition abilities after brain damage.” When you have brain modules dedicated to processing music, that's also a very good indication of a genetic basis to music. Those modules are formed under genetic instructions.

and the link between dance, art, mythology and religion as well.

Anything that interrupts the flow of awareness, thinking consciousness...there's thousands of ways. The Sundance Ceremony depicted in the movie, Man Called Horse, suffices as well. Pain (self-flagellation), sadness, it all works.

It's not just about good emotions; it's all emotions. Emotions are adaptations that evolved to improve fitness. Grieving is a difficult but necessary emotional complex. That's why sad music, sad mythologies--Shakespeare's tragedies, sad art--Picasso's Guernica, they are all compelling because they stimulate emotions, which quiets the conscious noise and brings us closer to our adaptive self.

 

There remains the observation that humans need a bonding mechanism that works efficiently on the scale - in size, time, duration, space, complexity, flexibility, etc - that humans benefit from forming bonded, socially complex groups.

Music does this now. It does this for all humans planetwide, and has for as far back in time as we can trace. Nothing else does. So that would make a good candidate factor for explaining it.

This explanation dovetails neatly with our physiology, as well - the breathholding ability, the fine motor control of vocalization, the manipulating hands. We are and apparently were, from very long ago, capable, physically, of music at the appropriate bonding scale. So the capability was there to be borrowed, and the evolutionary benefit (or "need") was there to be met.

Religion seems to me parasitic on music, abducting its power of group bonding for institutional purposes - in many cultures it even monopolizes control of music, so that (for example) the only venue in which "decent" or "family values" people commonly sing together is in church.

Suggestive observation: Many, possibly most, hymn tunes in the Western Christian churches are borrowed - uncredited - tunes formerly sung in bars and around fires and the like. We see churches hiring away the best classical musicians, employing the good choir singers. In more modern times, we see churches taking in jazz from whorehouses, rock and roll from parties and bars and arenas. The church then discourages the other venues, grips the bonding credit for itself.

 

[video=youtube;SePL2w5f6dE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SePL2w5f6dE&feature=player_embedded[/video]

 

So reading the papers about this guy who shot up the Sikh temple, we run across an example:

apparently he was much involved in a musical scene or subgroup my newspaper calls "hate rock", which is sort of expected, - but an interview with a researcher into the subculture of white supremicism and neo-Nazis and "skinheads" so labeled had him observing in passing that concerts and musical events are not only the main organizing events of white supremicist culture, but these concerts and CD sales and so forth are likely the single most important source of money for these guys.

One might reasonably say that they are essentially bonding via the music, forming into a group or bonded tribe of some kind via the music, in advance of doing anything as a group or collectively resisting mishap and hostility. And this is natural among humans.