Sacks - Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain

W hat an odd thing it is to see an entire speciesbillions of peopleplaying with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call music. This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarkes novel Childhoods End. Curiosity brings them down to the Earths surface to attend a concert, they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his great ingenuitywhile still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on with them. They themselves, as a species, lack music.

We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. This thing called music, they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans, central to human life. Yet it has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world.

There are rare humans who, like the Overlords, may lack the neural apparatus for appreciating tones or melodies. But for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly musical. This propensity to musicthis musicophiliashows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species. It may be developed or shaped by the cultures we live in, by the circumstances of life, or by the particular gifts or weaknesses we have as individualsbut it lies so deep in human nature that one is tempted to think of it as innate, much as E. O. Wilson regards biophilia, our feeling for living things. (Perhaps musicophilia is a form of biophilia, since music itself feels almost like a living thing.)

While birdsong has obvious adaptive uses (in courtship, or aggression, or staking out territory, etc.), it is relatively fixed in structure and, to a large extent, hardwired into the avian nervous system (although there are a very few songbirds which seem to improvise, or sing duets). The origin of human music is less easy to understand. Darwin himself was evidently puzzled, as he wrote in The Descent of Man: As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed. And, in our own time, Steven Pinker has referred to music as auditory cheesecake, and asks: What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to making plinking noises? As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. While Pinker is very musical himself and would certainly feel his own life much impoverished by its absence, he does not believe that music, or any of the arts, are direct evolutionary adaptations. He proposes, in a 2007 article, that

many of the arts may have no adaptive function at all. They may be by-products of two other traits: motivational systems that give us pleasure when we experience signals that correlate with adaptive outcomes (safety, sex, esteem, information-rich environments), and the technological know-how to create purified and concentrated doses of these signals.

Pinker (and others) feel that our musical powerssome of them, at leastare made possible by using, or recruiting, or co-opting brain systems that have already developed for other purposes. This might go with the fact that there is no single music center in the human brain, but the involvement of a dozen scattered networks throughout the brain. Stephen Jay Gould, who was the first to face the vexed question of nonadaptive changes squarely, speaks of exaptations in this regard, rather than adaptationsand he singles out music as a clear example as such an exaptation. (William James probably had something similar in mind when he wrote of our susceptibility to music and other aspects of our higher aesthetic, moral and intellectual life as having entered the mind by the back stairs.)