The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  Although McNeill’s research focuses on the motoric aspects of synchronized movement, he too feels that music was the guiding and binding force behind organizing this cooperation. Work songs (“Whistle While You Work,” “Let’s Work Together,” “Hard Work”) do help to pass the time, and may well be a comfort to those singing them, but this is not their fundamental use—primarily, they exist to coordinate movement and cooperative undertakings, to imbue participants with a sense of shared purpose. Track lining songs are special cases of music that unified manual labor by their heavy rhythmic component (one-two-three-heave!). They combined the ancient uses of song with more modern, entertaining features, such as lyrics that often insulted things like the eyesight of the track liner or even the parentage of the crew foreman. Chain gang songs may also fall into this category (when the work being done required synchronous movement) or into the category of comfort, as they helped chained workers to pass the time and increase feelings of kinship with their fellow prisoners.

  Synchronized singing and dancing did more than just facilitate the building of large-scale civic structures. They helped build political structures as well. Frictions within a group could be smoothed out by promoting feelings of togetherness. Without explicitly requiring the prelinguistic version of an apology, the strong emotional bonds created by synchronized music-dance allowed both parties to save face and to set their differences aside.

  Evolution may have selected those individuals who could settle disputes in nonviolent ways such as music-dance. At a neural level, we now know that the hypothalamus, amygdala, motor cortex, and cerebellum are linked both to movement and to emotion. The basis for this linking goes to the heart of why our ancestors needed to move in the first place: to find food, to escape dangers, and to find mates. All three of these activities are necessary for life, and evolution created links between movement and motivation centers, as opposed to color vision or spatial cognition neural circuits, which are not as closely linked to motivation.

  What we call emotions are nothing more than complex neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. Emotion and motivation are thus intrinsically linked to each other, and to our motor centers. But the system can work in the other direction, because most neural pathways are bi-directional. In addition to emotions causing us to move, movement can make us feel emotional. To a neutral observer, synchronized dance appears to be the result of a close relationship between the participants. To the participants themselves, although it may not begin this way, it typically ends up engendering strong feelings of sympathy, caring, and affection. Petr Janata, a neuroscientist and musician, described the strength of these bonds this way: “There are times when I would rather make music and dance with my wife than make love with her—the former can be a more intimate or at least a different type of intimate connection.”

  Those who march, either in military units or college marching bands, report exhilaration from the activity. Although to an outsider marching drills may seem repetitive and boring, the participants often experience a kind of Zen state of focused attention, readiness, and excitement combined with an almost paradoxical sense of calm—a state called flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A principle of evolution is that in general, if something feels good, evolution must have made it so—evolution must have provided a reward mechanism for synchronized movement and music-making, in the same way that evolution provided mechanisms of reward when we eat and have sex.

  William McNeill recalls his days in the infantry: What I remember now, years afterwards, is that I rather liked strutting around, and so, I feel sure, did most of my fellows. Marching aimlessly about on the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed military postures, conscious only of keeping in step so as to make the next move correctly and in time somehow felt good. Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.

  In his insightful history of synchronized military drill, McNeill cites Maurice of Orange, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, and other sources about the effectiveness of marching and the sweeping changes it brought to the battlefield. Some evolutionary theorists might argue that these accounts are too recent (evolutionarily speaking) to be relevant to natural selection, for the good feelings that accompanied such exercises to have been shaped by natural selection. But where threats to life are concerned, natural selection can work its magic in just a few generations. Suppose there are some people who, by virtue of random mutation, enjoy eating dirt. An epidemic of a fatal virus sweeps the world, attacking hundreds of millions of people. It turns out that a particular compound, found only in dirt, kills the virus. Those people who eat dirt would survive and nearly everyone else could be wiped out within only one or two generations.

  What we call instinct in humans and animals is often nothing more than the product of natural selection at work. Consider house cats. Cats kick dirt or sand or whatever is nearby over their excrement. But it is unlikely that they understand the germ theory of disease and are covering their excrement to minimize contagion. Instead, some ancestral cats had a genetic mutation that triggered the release of certain reinforcing neurochemicals (let’s call them “happy juice”) when they kicked after excreting. The cats with this mutation were less likely to get sick or to spread disease to their offspring, facilitating this mutation’s rapid spread through the genome.

  By extension, humans who enjoyed singing, dancing, and marching together so much that they were drawn to it, attracted to it, and practiced it for thousands of hours were those who were the victors in any battles in which such drill conferred an advantage. The strong emotional, even neurochemical pleasure that resulted from synchronized movement may well have had a prehistoric antecedent. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have danced around the campfire before and after the hunt. By rehearsing their movements, they gained precision in their actions and were thus more likely to succeed. And taking down a large swift mammal with handheld tools likely required the coordinated movement of many accomplices. Modern army drill is probably an extension of this prehistoric behavior. Music traditionally has been characterized not only by sound but by action, and by interaction among makers of music-dance.

  Humans around the world report not just strong emotional bonding from synchronized, coordinated movement together, but feelings of a spiritual nature—a sense of there being a collective consciousness, the presence of a superior being, or an unseen world that is larger than what we immediately experience. The cognitive psychologist Jamshed Bharucha suggests an explanation for these feelings. The sense of group agency or collective consciousness that one feels when synchronized with others is more than an exhilarating feeling, he says. We feel this exhilaration, which comes from the neurochemical activity described above, and that leads the brain to seek a cause. Attribution—particularly causal attribution—is an automatic and compelling tendency of the brain. In fact, we can’t not attribute causes. As we sense a change in our emotional state, we look around to see what’s going on in the world that could explain our mood. In the case of group synchrony, we look around us and see all these other people dancing and singing with joy and excitement. In this way, the strange feeling (from the neurochemicals) becomes attributed to something beyond oneself. That’s why, in addition to the other advantages of group cohesion mentioned, religions make use of synchronization: It actually enhances the belief in a cause beyond oneself. So it’s more than just a good feeling; auditory and motor synchronization can lead to beliefs in forces that transcend the individual, such as societies.

  Music and coordinated movement were thus a way of creating meaningful social bonds for these four activities just reviewed: waging war, defending against attack, hunting prey, and forming work crews. A fifth and crucial use of music was for easing tensions within the l
arger social groups that were forming—group cohesion. Here, music can be traced back even before the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, to tens of thousands of years before with a common ancestor, Homo erectus. Around the time that Homo became bipedal and erect, they left the relatively safe cover of tree living to live on the savannah; the principal advantage was a greatly increased supply of food as Homo became hunters, but there were disadvantages as well to be weighed. As Mithen notes:Away from the cover of trees, safety can only be found in numbers. . . . There is, however, a cost: social tensions leading to conflicts can arise when large numbers have to live continuously in close proximity to one another.

  Easing these social tensions was not trivial. Among nonhuman primates, this is generally accomplished by grooming one another (picking nits and cleaning the hair of a friend); in fact, the closeness of a relationship between two primates can often be determined simply by the amount of time one spends grooming the other. But with the increased size of living groups—which was necessary for mutual protection—physical grooming of all one’s friends and allies becomes impossible. The Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed the vocal grooming hypothesis as the origin of vocal communication—the idea that hominids developed vocal communication (music or language) in order to indicate their cooperation and alliance with larger numbers of group members at once.

  All over the world and in disparate cultures, human singing is present in two broad styles or forms: strict synchrony and alternation. In strict synchrony, the singers lock their vocalizations in with one another, such as we do in songs like “Happy Birthday” or most national anthems. This requires the ability to anticipate what is coming next in the song (combining cognitive operations of memory in the hippocampus and prediction in the frontal lobes), and then to create what neuroscientists call a motor action plan—a specific set of instructions sent to the motor cortex to enable one to sing, drum, or otherwise move the body in time with what others are doing. Part of the evidence that prediction processes are involved when we synchronize our singing, hand clapping, or other musical gestures to those of a group is in the small, microtiming errors people make in trying to synchronize: Far more often than not, they are early in matching others’ musical behavior. This tells us that they’re not waiting to hear the next beat before they try to play it; rather, they’re anticipating when it will come and preparing a response before it happens. The coordination of activity in these three brain regions (hippocampus, motor cortex, and predictive centers in frontal lobes) would be dependent on the larger prefrontal cortex (than other hominids) that humans evolved.

  Alternation occurs when some members of the group deliberately don’t synchronize with others, singing either in a round (as when children sing “Row Row Row Your Boat” and some start at a different time than others) or when singing a “call and response” pattern such as in the children’s campfire song “Sippin’ Cider Through a Straw.” Call and response is often found in American gospel music, and is based on an ancient African tradition. Indeed, in sub-Saharan African cultures in particular, this style is considered emblematic of a democratic participation in the music. Call and response is also found in traditional Indian classical music (where it is called jugalbandi or sawaal-javaab in North Indian classical music), in Latin American music (where it is called coropregon) , and in European classical music (antiphony). Alternation in particular requires perspective taking (the first of the three components of the musical brain), and can be seen as an exercise for or predecessor to other more utilitarian cooperative activities. Those individuals who were better able to predict the behavior of others because they could “read their minds” would have had a competitive advantage within the group.

  But understanding why it is music and not something else that causes these strong feelings of social bonding remains partly a mystery. Dunbar (and others who followed, including Dean Falk) made the case for why aural bonding would be more efficient than one-on-one physical bonding through grooming behaviors (or through sexual activity as is done by bonobos to promote bonding). Recall that evolution doesn’t invent new features from scratch; it doesn’t design from whole cloth. Rather, evolution uses structures already in place. Communicative calls and signals were already ubiquitous among the repertoires of nonhuman primates—certain sounds indicated particular types of dangers, the presence of food, and so on. Making such sounds in synchrony would be a clear indication that the group members were paying attention to each other and had a common interest. Among such group vocalizers, those that happened upon a way to induce feelings of happiness, safety, and security in their group mates would have an advantage—these early politicians could cause others to cooperate more with them because they were the source of good feelings.

  In a larger context, individuals with social skills would receive many benefits—they would know how and when to get help from others, whom to fight with, whom to trust, and whom to avoid. This emotional intelligence would have given them power over others. Today, in contemporary society, we regard music as a form of emotional communication—perhaps the best one we know. There is no reason to suspect that music functioned differently—although the music itself may have been very different—thousands of years ago. Early humans may have used music to broadcast their own emotional states to others, as well as for the (political) purposes of calming, energizing, organizing, and inspiring.

  An important aspect of group cohesion as induced by music-dance is that with larger and larger human living groups, smaller subgroups may form of individuals who feel that their interests are not aligned with those of the larger, dominant group. They may feel as though they lack the power or resources to break out on their own, but that the larger group is not serving their needs. At the dawn of human culture, such a group may have been the elderly, who felt that the social alliances of the young were displacing their own; or a small group of individuals who did not like the current leader and felt mistreated by him. Music has historically been one of the strongest forces binding together the disenfranchised, the alienated.

  The high school smokers mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are just one of many such assemblies. In high schools across America there are cliques of “in” students and of “out” students—students who feel marginalized, taunted, or tormented by the stronger, richer, or more popular kids. A common musical interest can provide solidarity for these smaller splinter groups, just as “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” does for the smokers. Gay students may turn to gay anthems such as Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The “we” that music binds together can refer to liberals (Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs”), conservatives (Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”), the young (the Who’s “My Generation”), the average guy (Primus’s “Poetry and Prose”), or the working man (Springsteen’s “Working on the Highway”). The free love and sex philosophy of the late sixties and early seventies was celebrated in songs such as Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With,” and those who rejected such notions might have turned to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” and today might be galvanized by Whitney Houston (“Saving All My Love for You”) or Jill Scott (“Celibacy Blues”). Cherish the Ladies are a group whose musical mission is to preserve traditional Irish jig music, reels, and airs and provide solidarity for people of Irish descent, especially those far from home; the fact that they all are women positions them as role models for young female musicians.

  My mathematics professor at M.I.T., Gian-Carlo Rota, also taught the graduate course in existentialism there in the 1970s and 1980s, and he used to give out buttons that read “Decadence Is Cozy.” The message is intriguing: People who do something together that is antisocial or somewhat off-center enjoy a bond. We hear it in the proto-punk classic “Dirty Water” by the Standells. “I’ll be down by the river Charles,” they sing, along with “lovers, buggers and thieves.” What they are saying is “They’re actually good people, these river-dwellers, people like us
.” Much of heavy metal music speaks to people on the fringes of society, the disaffected. Heavy metal lyrics are often a call of togetherness: we (heavy metal fans) are all misfits, but we are bound together in that. A generation was inspired to take drugs, or at least if they were already taking them to feel good about it, by songs such as “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane, with its call to “feed your head.” (Non-drug-users found solace in Paul Revere & the Raiders’ “Kicks” or John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.”)

  The sociologist Tricia Rose points out the role that black women rappers play in binding together other young black women, to give a voice to a segment of society that often correctly feels that their unique concerns are not being addressed. The rappers, Rose writes, “interpret and articulate the fears, pleasures, and promises of young black women whose voices have been relegated to the margins of public discourse.”

  Patriotic songs—such as the fictional Kazakhstan national anthem that promises the best potassium supply—are a natural extension of the power that music has to define the we. This is our country, our region, our group, our common interest, our football team, even our potassium. Although religious leaders have harnessed the power of music to bolster feelings of group solidarity and unity within their sects, their use of music should not be confused with the use of music for ceremonial openings to games and other public events, which is wholly different. Football fight songs and national anthems are essentially songs of social bonding; religion songs have their own character that may include social bonding, but this is not their primary characteristic.