On the surface, you might think that groups remember knowledge songs better because they spread out the memory burden among a greater number of people. But it’s not the case that ten singers each remember a different line—there is no prior agreement, no coordination of the learning or recall. Instead, due to a variety of differences among individuals (and these differences can be genetic, environmental, based on IQ, personal motivation, personal taste, and random factors) some people are going to remember some parts of a song better than they remember other parts. There may be nothing systematic about it, and the remembered parts could even change from day to day and week to week.
But something special happens when a group starts to sing together—something extraordinary from a cognitive (and dynamic complex systems) perspective, something you’ve probably experienced yourself in any place where people come together to sing: football games, church, campfires, or political rallies. On your own, you might get stuck after the first line of the song. Singing with a single friend, your companion might remember the first word of the second line and that keeps you going for another few words, but then neither of you can remember the third line just now. In a large group, no one has to be able to recollect the entire song. Just one person singing the first syllable of a word can trigger a recollection in another group member to bring the second syllable of that same word, which in turn can cue a group of people to that whole word and the next three words after it. Imagine this notion propagated through a large group of dozens or hundreds of people, and throughout every syllable of the song—a sort of group consciousness emerges in which no single member of the group can be said to know the song, but the group itself does.
Even in a non-emergent system, if someone misrecollects and offers a wrong syllable, musical note, or word, he will likely be overpowered by the greater number of people who correctly remember it. (This is a version of Oliver Selfridge’s famous connectionist pandemonium model of human perception.) The reason for this is that, although it is relatively likely that any part of the song will be misremembered at any given moment by any member of the group, it is relatively unlikely that all of the misrememberers will misremember it in the same way. The correct rememberers will tend to outnumber any of the various schools of misrememberers (and with a large group, it becomes increasingly unlikely that a substantial number of individuals will forget at exactly the same time and in the same way). In a dynamical system, every second new information is revealed and this influences the future development of the system. At least some of those who misremembered will correctly remember when given the right cue. This is the fundamental mechanism by which extraordinarily long stretches of textual information have been preserved, handed down, and communicated across hundreds or thousands of years. Errors do of course creep in, but the more tightly constrained the poetic/musical form of the song (such as we see in Homerian epics or even in the twelve-bar blues), the more likely the message will arrive intact, unaltered, and resistant to future distortions.
Nonlinear dynamical systems are thus characterized by (1) local propagation of information among individuals (a neighbor providing the right lyric) through a (2) nonlinear mechanism (individual and group memory and cognition in this case) involving (3) individual variability (e.g., heterogeneous song recollection). These three properties lead to (and are required for) the emergence of low and asynchronous occurrence of errors in the whole group despite the high probability of error observed in single individuals.
The existence of group memory and group singing may itself have been selected for by evolution, which may have favored those individuals who could bond into groups for the purpose of collective action. I believe that this group selection process and the survival and reproductive advantages conferred upon members of large groups (as opposed to lone individuals) is fundamental to how human societies were eventually formed. While synchronized singing positively affects the psychological state of individuals, synchronous occurrence of errors in singing has to be avoided at all costs. An individual must balance self-confidence in her singing compared to a willingness to align with her neighbors. This trade-off is itself nonlinear and dynamic, changing throughout the course of a performance (and it is found in many other dynamic systems, such as ecosystems).
The power of knowledge songs to encode and preserve information, to engage even young children in their recollection and transmission, points to an ancient evolutionary basis for them. Viewed from a larger context, knowledge songs can be seen as a special instance of art, and in particular, of the kind of art that seeks to inform. Art and science are seen by many as inhabiting opposite ends of a continuum, a line that runs from abstraction to specificity, or from romance to logic. I’ve spent my life in pursuit of knowledge in both domains, and surrounded by people who have pursued either or both. Many musicians I’ve known pursue their music in the kind of systematic, deliberate, studious fashion that could only be described as scientific: Frank Zappa, Sting, Michael Brook, and David Byrne for example. Others pursue it more intuitively, including Carlos Santana, Jerry Garcia, Billy Pierce, and Neil Young. This is not to say that the latter four haven’t worked at it, but their approach to the work strikes me as based more on feeling than on any sort of system. Bill Evans, my favorite pianist, sums up the latter approach:
“Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it [music]. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.”
I’ve come to see art and science as occupying two ends of a continuum that wraps around on itself like a circle, so that the two meet at a common point. Both art and science involve perspective-taking, representation, and rearrangement—the three foundational ingredients of the musical brain. When these three are combined, we get metaphor (letting one object or concept stand for another) and abstraction (letting a hierarchically larger concept stand for subordinate elements). Both art and science rely on metaphor and abstraction because they take sensory, sensual, and perceptual observations and distill them to an essence. In both, we can get more meaning out of a single piece of information than if that information were delivered in its raw, literal form. Art and science are about extracting and abstracting world knowledge in a form that makes it more readily understandable and memorable—what they share is a sense of overview and unifying themes, decisions about which facts-of-the-world are relevant and which are not. Art and science are not able to represent everything; instead they entail (require) difficult choices about what is the most important.
Science is a not the simple reporting of facts—that’s only the preliminary step in any scientific investigation. Real science, the kind that offers a parsimonious and predictive understanding of how the world works, involves taking those facts and generalizing global principles from them; abstraction is required for this, as is creativity, rationality, intuition, and a sensitivity to form, similar to what is required in the creation of long-lasting art. It may be self-evident that music requires these things, less so perhaps that you can’t have science without the musical brain.
A single painting of a sunset tells us how the sunset felt to the artist and can convey those feelings forever. A mathematical model of the movement of the solar system (including the material constitution of the sun, and local environmental conditions) allows us to predict whether a given sunset will be spectacular, run-of-the-mill, or completely obscured by clouds. Both can inform our behavior and serve our memories, both grab us at the nexus of feeling and thought, emotion and interpretation, brain and heart.
Knowledge is emotion. Some people say that science just is, that it is merely a collection of facts and measurements that exist outside of the realm of emotion and caring. But I disagree. Of the millions (perhaps infinity) of possible facts about the world we memorize, document, and pass on to others, we select those that we think are important, and this is an emotional judgment. We are m
otivated to care about some and not others, and as we saw earlier, emotion and motivation are two sides of the same neurochemical coin. It is true that the mere fact that 2 + 2 = 4, or that hydrogen is the lightest element we know of, is without emotional content. But the fact that we know these things, have gone to the trouble to learn them, reflects interests, priorities, motivation—in short, reflects emotion. Scientists are motivated by intense curiosity and a desire to interpret and represent reality in terms of higher truths—to take collections of observations and formulate them into a coherent whole that we call a theory. Of course artists do the same thing, taking their observations and trying to formulate them into a coherent whole that we call the painting, the symphony, the song, the sculpture, the ballet, and so on. Knowledge songs are perhaps the crowning triumph of art, science, culture, and mind, encoding important life lessons in an artistic form that is ideally adapted to the structure and function of the human brain. We need to know. And we need to sing about it.
Science, like nature,
Must also be tamed
With a view towards its preservation.
Given the same
State of integrity,
It will surely serve us well.
Art as expression,
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations.
Given the same
State of integrity,
It will surely help us along.
The most endangered species,
The honest man,
Will still survive annihilation.
Forming a world
State of integrity,
Sensitive, open and strong.
(From “Natural Science” by Rush)
I’ve been dropping the new science and kicking the new knowledge
An M.C. to a degree that you can’t get in college
. . .
It’s the sound of science
(From “Sounds of Science” by the Beastie Boys)
Thanks for the ride. Big Science. Hallelujah.
Big Science. Yodelay-hee-hoo.
(From “Big Science” by Laurie Anderson)
CHAPTER 6
Religion or “People Get Ready”
When I was four years old, my grandfather took me to Kearny Street in the heart of San Francisco’s China-town. My “cousins” Ping and Mae—the technicians who developed the X-rays in his radiology office—met us there. As he usually did, Ping lifted me up onto his shoulders and walked me around as I held onto his forehead, my hands sometimes excitedly slipping over his eyes and blocking his view. And what there was to see! Dancers in pink and purple costumes ran up and down the street, firecrackers exploded, floats decked out in fresh and plastic flowers carried waving local dignitaries, and traditional Chinese music came bursting out of loudspeakers, bullhorns, instruments, and mouths everywhere we went. The whole crowd was smiling, laughing, jumping, celebrating as free-spirited, barely coordinated parts of a single organism. I had never seen so many happy people in one place at one time. And it was infectious. When Ping lowered me to the ground, Grandpa and I danced in place, and he swung me around in circles, my feet lifted off the ground by the swirling centrifugal force. Mae gave me a whistle to blow and a pin to wear on my T-shirt. At home and at synagogue, we sang songs on Friday nights and we had even sung something a couple of months earlier at Jewish New Year, but those songs were solemn affairs, slow and tedious, nothing like the Chinese songs. Ceremonies didn’t have to be somber!
Human rituals around the world have many elements in common, suggesting either a common origin to them all or a common biological heritage. Some are joyful and some serious, some disciplined and others performed with structured abandon. When we break down these activities into their elements, we see a remarkable continuity with activities in the animal kingdom, strongly suggesting that evolution had a hand in guiding us toward the particular ways in which we express ourselves through movement and sound. The common conception that humans possess abilities that make us uniquely human—language is often trotted out as a crowning achievement, with religion and music not far behind—is sharply contradicted by some of the newest research in neurobiology. Animals are indeed capable of many of the things that only ten years ago we thought were our species’ sole inheritance, the abilities falling along a continuum rather than appearing abruptly in Homo sapiens. What is different is our species’ ability to discuss and plan these activities with self-conscious awareness of them, and to bind them in time and location to particular beliefs. Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system. When the Edwin Hawkins Singers sing “Oh Happy Day,” they celebrate the day Jesus “washed away sin” with some of the most joyful and uplifting emotion ever recorded. No animals celebrate a particular date, a birth, or commemorate a decisive battle—to do so requires brain structures that they may possess but do not use the way we do.
The continuity of behaviors from animals to us bears scrutiny. Ants and elephants bury their dead. Humans mourn theirs, and typically with elaborate ritual—sometimes solemnly, sometimes joyfully, almost always accompanied by music. Neanderthals were burying their dead long before Homo sapiens walked the earth, but the archaeological record suggests that their burials were an accidentally adopted behavior for hygienic reasons—like cats covering their feces; no traces of ornaments, jewelry, or other accoutrements accompany Neanderthal burial sites, whereas these are almost always present in human graves. Humans built on this existing physical action of burial to imbue it with a cultural and spiritual component. Ceremony, as a uniquely human invention, commemorates important events. These can be events of our human life cycle such as birth, marriage, and death, or events in our environmental life cycle such as the seasons, the rains, daybreak, and nightfall. Rituals tie us to the event itself, and to the cycle of history in which many similar events have previously occurred and will continue to occur. They are a form of externalized, social memory, and when marked by music, they become even more firmly instantiated in both our personal and collective memory. The songs, sung at the same time and place every year (in the case of seasonal or holiday songs), or at gatherings commemorating similar events (funerals, weddings, births), bind these events together in a common theme, in a common set of beliefs about the nature of life. The music acts as a powerful retrieval cue for these memories precisely because it is associated with these and only these times and places.
The evolutionary changes that furnished humans with the musical brain—an enlarged prefrontal cortex, and all the myriad bilateral connections with cortical and subcortical areas—formed a crucial step in social development of our species. With these evolutionary changes came self-consciousness (an aspect of perspective taking), which brought with it spiritual yearnings and the ability to consider that there might be things more important than one’s own life. I believe a particular kind of music—songs associated with religion, ritual, and belief—served a necessary function in creating early human social systems and societies. Music helped to infuse ritual practices with meaning, to make them memorable, and to share them with our friends, family, and living groups, facilitating a social order. This yearning for meaning lies at the foundation of what makes us human.
Like music, religion is found in all human societies (and for both, people disagree as to whether they have an evolutionary or a supernatural basis). In spite of great differences in beliefs and practices and in geographical location, no known human culture lacks religion. This strongly suggests that religion is more than a meme—information transmitted to people through culture—and may have an evolutionary basis. Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, taught us a century ago that anything that is universal to human culture is likely to contribute to human survival. Modern biologists extend this notion to animal behavior, looking for links across species as a way of understanding the evolution of the brain. Behaviors that we consider quintessentia
lly human don’t just fall out of the sky from nowhere, but are distributed along a continuum of behaviors that are remarkably similar to those we see in animals (and so presumably contributed to animal survival). It may not be possible to cleanly distinguish ritual from religion, and perhaps the distinction is not as important as understanding the continuous nature of how they relate to one another, of how rituals became bound up into religion in the first place.
Rituals involve repetitive movement. Many animals show ritualized behavior, such as dogs circling a few times before lying down, birds swaying from one leg to another, or raccoons washing their faces after a meal. What separates these from human rituals is a cognitive component, human self-consciousness: We are aware (most of the time) of our behaviors, and we assign them a higher purpose and sense of meaning. We wash our hands because of germs. We light candles to mark an event. We talk about our rituals and sing about them. What sets religious practices apart is that they are sets of rituals, bound to a common narrative or worldview. That is, rituals exist in a part-whole relationship to religious practice.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 18