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"If the ability to appreciate music is ingrained in the human brain, could music making have evolved to help us survive and reproduce?" asks writer Josie Glausiusz in this six-page feature layout in one of the nation's most popular science-oriented magazines.
Discover, August 2001
"Is it akin to language and the ability to solve complicated problems, attributes that have enhanced human survival? Or is it just 'auditory cheesecake,'" as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has called it, "a phenomenon that pushes pleasure buttons without truly filling an evolutionary need?"
Glausiusz begins her search for answers in psychologist Sandra Trehub's University of Toronto lab, where murals and furnishings create the sense of a tropical rain forest. Thousands of babies and their mothers have passed through here to help the scientist search within the infant brain for the biological roots of music; Trehub observes parents singing to their babies and watches how the babies respond to those songs, and she has studied the history and universality of lullabies. Her findings? Mothers' singing mesmerizes babies, and lullabies sound the same the world over. She has even documented that a mother's singing decreases stress hormones in her child.
In another experiment, Trehub found that babies seem to have an innate appreciation for music. When an eight-month-old was exposed repeatedly to the sequence of notes arranged on the Western major scale (do re mi fa sol la ti do), the child seemed indifferent. But when an anomalous note - one that didn't belong in the scale - was included, he suddenly turned his head toward the speaker. The experiment was repeated successfully using non-Western musical scales as well.
The more closely the phenomenon of music is observed, the more universal it appears to be. As Glausiusz notes, "Sometime between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago, a Neanderthal living in a cave in what is now Slovenia fashioned a flute from the femur of a bear. Simpler instruments such as rattles and drums probably preceded it, and singing probably began even earlier - perhaps as long as 250,000 years ago.
"Why? Why has music spread to every country and every people in the world? Why is music used to rouse armies, praise God, and bury the dead?"
A prominent facet of the Discover article is the recent work of Barry Bittman, M.D., whose Mind-Body Wellness Center in Meadville, PA, discovered that a certain type of group drumming activity appears to mitigate stress and stimulate "natural killer" cells, one of the body's defenses against cancer and other diseases.
"Bittman believes that group drumming, through its camaraderie, support, exercise, and music making, signals the brain to lower the production of cortisol, a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal glands," Glausiusz summarizes. "Less cortisol has been associated with a heightened immune response and may help the body fight off infection." As she quotes Bittman, "I'm not saying I have a cure for cancer, but what I am saying is that we have a very important step in understanding a delightful, enjoyable, and fun way for people to reverse the stress response in a manner that leads us to positive biological changes."
At New York's Beth Abraham health center in the Bronx, home to the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, music therapist David Ramsey plays host to stroke patients who can no longer speak - but who can sing. "The patients, as soon as they see that they can sing, that they can communicate, they break into tears," says colleague Renato Rozental, a neuroscientist at New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "How is music doing this? I personally don't know." Rozental plans to use MRIs to study precisely what goes on in these patients' brains.
The article also looks at researchers like evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who has linked musical activity to increased sexual proclivity; Japanese psychologist Hajime Fukui, whose research suggests music may reduce sexual activity instead; and MIT's Steven Pinker, a comparative skeptic who thinks other researchers may be jumping to the conclusion that music is a biological adaptation.
"I think people who argue that music is an adaptation have confused the everyday meaning of the term - meaning something that is beneficial or salubrious - with the biological meaning of the term, which is something that causally increases the rate of reproduction or survival," he says.
Not every common trait is adaptive, Pinker tells Glausiusz, citing his favorite example: "Let's say someone asked, 'What's the adaptive value of cheesecake?' The answer is, 'There is none.' It's bad for you. But it is a by-product of other adaptations, namely a taste for sweets and fats, which were adaptive in an environment in which sweets and fats were rare. What we do with cheesecake is we start off with the fact that the brain is tickled by certain kinds of pleasure. We concentrate them, purify them, pack 'em together to give ourselves a big sensory wallop. We give ourselves pleasure by taking advantage of preexisting pleasure buttons." Pinker thinks the pleasure we take in music works the same way.
Other scientists are sticking to their guns, though, rebutting Pinker at a recent conference. Definitive proof will always be elusive, Trehub says; yet the evidence for music as a survival tool is all around us. "When you have something that's in every possible culture and in every historical period, you have to ask yourself: "Why?" she says. "If it's an accident, why did this accident happen everywhere?"
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