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

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  The anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined ritual as “acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information concerning their physiological, psychological, or sociological states either to themselves or to one or more of their [fellow] participants.”

  The display aspect is critical—rituals serve as a form of communication . Also critical is the inclusive nature of his definition, which explicitly allows for the display to be self-reflexive, to serve only the person engaged in the ritual. Thus, an individual washing her hands prior to preparing ceremonial food, or laying sticks at a fire altar, or even musicians executing a set of scales as a pre-concert warm-up—all signify to the doer that she is becoming ready (through this preparatory ritual) to advance to the next stage of a plan or operation.

  Rappaport defined religion as “sets of sacred beliefs held in common by groups of people and . . . the more or less standard actions (rituals) that are undertaken with respect to these beliefs.” He defines sacred as those beliefs that are unverifiable through normal physical means or through the normal five senses—the belief or faith in things that are not corporeal but that can influence the course of our lives.

  Religious ceremonies and practices almost always incorporate ritual behavior—repetitive motor actions: bowing seven times, making the sign of the cross, folding and unfolding your hands in a particular way. Anthropologists have identified certain features of human religious practices, believed to be universal, applying across disparate cultures, times, and places:1. Actions are divorced from their usual goals. We may wash parts of the body that are already clean, talk to others who are not evidently there, pass a piece of fruit from hand to hand in a circle (when clearly the goal is not to pass the fruit to someone, but just to engage in the act of passing), walk around a stone exactly four times, or perform actions that do not have an immediate tangible goal.

  2. The activity is typically undertaken in order to get something: more rain, more yams at harvest time, to heal a sick child, to appease the gods.

  3. The practices are typically considered compulsory. Community members consider it unsafe or unwise (or improper) not to perform them.

  4. Often no explanation is given about the form of the activity. That is, while all participants may understand the goal of the ritual (e.g., to influence the gods), typically no one provides an explanation of how these particular actions will yield the desired outcome.

  5. Participants engage in behaviors with more order, regularity, and uniformity than in their normal lives: They line up instead of walking or standing anywhere they please; they dance instead of moving; they greet one another with special signs, gestures, or words; they wear similar or special clothing or makeup.

  6. Objects are taken from the environment and infused with special meaning, sometimes by piling, ordering, stacking, or aligning them.

  7. The environment is restructured and delimited—a holy circle, a taboo area, a special place that only the elders or the pure can enter.

  8. There is a strong emotional drive to perform the activity, and anxiety is experienced if it is not performed (or if participants feel it hasn’t been done properly); individuals feel a sense of relief when it is completed.

  9. Actions, gestures, or words are repeated—perhaps three to ten times or more. The exact number is crucial to proper observance, and if the wrong number is used, the performer starts over.

  10. There is a strong emotional drive to perform the ritual in a particular way—the actions are somewhat rigidly interpreted and defined. Someone in the community—perhaps an elder—is known to perform each activity best, and others try to emulate that example.

  11. The rituals almost always involve music or rhythmic, pitch-intoned chanting.

  These features are found in the religious ceremonies of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Taoists, Buddhists, and Native Americans, as well as hundreds of ceremonies of preliterate and preindustrialized societies. And the story of ritual is intimately bound up with music—which almost always accompanies it—and with human nature. Whether you believe that man invented religion or received it from God is not the issue, and I don’t want to get distracted by that question here. The remarkable similarity of human religious rites to one another, and to certain animal rituals, can be invoked as evidence for either view. Several recent scientific studies have shown that there exist neural regions that might be called “God centers”: When they are electrically stimulated, people report having intense feelings of spirituality and communication with God. Some scientists argued overconfidently from these findings that religious belief must be “merely” a product of the brain, and that therefore humans must have invented God.

  I told all this to my good friend, Hayyim Kassorla, a learned and respected Orthodox rabbi, and without missing a beat he snapped back, “So what if there’s a center in the brain that makes people think of God? Why wouldn’t there be? Maybe God put it there to help us to understand and communicate with him.” My mother, an observant Jew, added, “The similarity of human religious practice across cultures is because God found that these practices work and so he gave them—with some variation—to all peoples.” The point is that we can consider the biological, evolutionary, and neural evidence for ritual behaviors without necessarily impinging on anyone’s personal beliefs about the origin of the universe or spirituality. We don’t need to resolve the physical/metaphysical question before proceeding with the evolutionary one.

  Ritual behavior is evidently innate and hardwired in humans. Most children enter a stage of development around age two, peaking around eight, in which they show phases of ritual behaviors: perfectionism, collecting, attachment to favorite objects, repetition of actions, and even a preoccupation with the ordering of things—a stage of “it has to be done this way” in which children may line up their toys or organize their environment in particular ways. Young girls hold tea parties for their real and imaginary friends. The table is set just so. The guests have to sit in assigned places. The hostess can become agitated when things are not organized or consistent with her own internal notion of the proper ritual order: “You sit here, he sits here. No! Mr. Rabbit gets his tea first!”

  Spontaneously—without explicit instruction and without ever having heard of it from someone else—many children connect their ad hoc rituals to the supernatural or to magic, and they imagine effects the rituals might have on a variety of outcomes, from the weather to telekinesis to getting their way.

  Of course I didn’t engage in tea party rituals as a child since I was a boy—my ritual phase was more automotive and involved seat belts and the seat belt song. In 1961, when I was three, the Ad Council of America launched a program of public service messages on television about the importance of “buckling up for safety” with car seat belts. A catchy jingle exhorted us to tell our parents that there was a correct order, a sequence of events that must be respected: Before driving, buckle up your safety belt. I remember hearing that jingle and singing it all around the house. Seat belts were new in 1961 and most cars didn’t have them; my parents had learned to drive without them. Although our family car, a Simca, was equipped with them, my parents hadn’t gotten used to using them, and probably weren’t convinced of their effectiveness. (There hadn’t been any crash test dummy experiments done yet.) My mother tells me that whenever she and my father got in the car, I would sing the little jingle and get furious if they drove even a few feet without having buckled up. I was deep in my “correct order of things” phase.

  In children, rituals tend to be associated with anxiety states—fear of strangers, the unknown, attack by strangers or animals, and possible contamination. This leads to bedtime rituals such as checking for monsters, wanting to hear bedtime stories, or holding your special fuzzy blue blanket. The ritual adds a sense of order, constancy, and familiarity that psychologists believe counteracts the uncertainty and fear of the unknown dangers. Oxytocin—the trust-inducing hormone that is released during orgasm and communal singi
ng—has been found to be connected to the performance of ritual, suggesting a neurochemical basis for why rituals have a comforting effect.

  These behaviors are so widespread, and occur so regularly in childhood, that they no doubt have an evolutionary and genetic origin. A drive toward creating symmetry, toward lining up and ordering one’s environment, is present even in birds and some mammals. From an adaptation perspective, this order makes any intrusion by an outsider immediately and clearly visible. Those of our ancestors who found pleasure in hand washing or in creating symmetrical protective borders around their encampments may have been more successful at fending off both micro- and macroscopic threats to their health and safety, and passed on a desire to do so to us through the oxytocin system. Richard Dawkins’s observation is compelling: No one of us alive today had an ancestor who died in infancy. Every one of our ancestors lived long enough to pass on his or her genes to us. While we can’t say that every minute behavior of our ancestors was adaptive, none of them could have been grossly maladaptive, to the point of causing early death, or of making them fatally unattractive to a member of the opposite sex. The ubiquity of ritual behaviors does suggest they served, in some form, an important survival function.

  Some ritual behaviors become uncontrollable, and when that happens nowadays we diagnose it as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some researchers have speculated that impaired dopamine and GABA regulation—and the consequent abnormal control of the brain’s “habit circuits” in the basal ganglia—lead to OCD in both humans and animals. The basal ganglia store chunks or summaries of motor behavior, and when they are inadequately regulated, one only finds emotional satisfaction when they are allowed to run in a loop of repeated activity, over and over again.

  Rituals in animals and adult humans tend to be born from many of the same concerns as children’s rituals—purity, contamination, safety, but also mating. To claim that human rituals, even when encased within sacred religious systems, are uniquely human, is to ignore the rich repertoire of animal rituals that resemble them. As just one of many possible examples, consider the mating ritual of the Australian bowerbird (of the family Ptilono rhynchidae ). While it may strike us as elaborate and complex, it is in fact no more so than the mating rituals of hundreds of other species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and fish. Once a year, the male birds spend several days gathering brightly colored objects such as feathers, shells, and berries to create bowers, elaborately decorated structures, usually shaped like a pathway, a hut, or a small pole. After the bowers are completed, the males sing and dance, concluding a successful ritual by selecting a female to mate with (and the female typically chooses the male based on the quality of his bower and his singing and dancing).

  Compare this with an annual ritual of the villagers on Pentecost Island in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Each year young males take part in the ritual of nagahol, as part of a plea to the gods to ensure, among other things, a good yam crop. Young males construct tall, colorful, elaborately decorated poles up to seventy-five feet high and as all the villagers sing and dance, the males climb the poles and then jump off, held by a thin vine. If he concludes his dive successfully, a male is then considered an adult and can take a wife from among the spectators. As far as we know, there are no bowerbirds on Pentecost Island and never have been. Either a common neurobiological imperative underlies the ceremony, or it is a coincidence. Is nagahol part of a religion or is it an isolated ritual? At what point does ritual become religion? Sulawesi villagers engage in a rain dance that includes stylized imitation of the sound of rain, meant to induce it. Their dance and music and actions have a clear goal and intended effect. I leave the distinction between religion and ritual in the mind of the beholder (and the question of whether this belief constitutes a belief system or not is inessential to a discussion of the evolution of religious song).

  Religion—whether God-given, man-made, or a gift of natural selection—can be seen as an important part of inclusive fitness. All higher animals have a “security-motivation” system that monitors environmental conditions and motivates them to act via emotional states if danger is imminent. The system monitors both external events in the world and internal states such as pain, fever, and nausea. The brain mechanisms underlying this can be broken down into three parts: (1) an appraisal system compares events being monitored to a list of things known to be dangerous (either known by experience, or innately); (2) an evaluation system determines the magnitude of the hazard; and (3) an action system causes the human or animal to execute a response that will reduce the danger, by moving, running, fighting, or any number of other strategies innate or learned.

  The display aspect of single rituals, or those sets of rituals that become bound into religious acts, allows common human fears and concerns to be given a broad social context in which they can be shared with the community and make better sense. Religion further lets us partition our fears into those that we and our community are going to worry about and those that we are not, and to take collective action toward addressing the former and systemically, in a formally sanctioned way, ignoring the latter. Depending on our belief system, we might decide as a community to pray for the health of a loved one, but not for dead relatives to come back to life; modern Christian rituals focus on Jesus not on Zeus or Thor, and we have society’s permission to ignore the latter two gods and any demands we fear they may have.

  When we pray for the health of a dying loved one, the termination of the prayer confers a great psychological advantage: It allows us to stop worrying. We breathe a sigh of relief and affirm that “it’s in God’s hands; her fate is decided.” This is clearly adaptive, because it propels us to get on with our lives and to stop ruminating about things that we can’t change, and to worry about those we can. Interestingly, however, the fear-security-motivation system was “built” thousands or tens of thousands of years ago and it is not responsive to those current threats that are most dangerous: This is why so many of us are afraid of spiders and snakes, which cause far fewer deaths than cars or cigarettes, which most of us are not afraid of.

  Another function of rituals is to change the state-of-the-world, thereby reducing ambiguity. Consider male puberty rites, which are part of most cultures. Unlike the onset of menses, which unambiguously signals the transition from girlhood to womanhood in females, no such biological marker exists for males. Male puberty rites remove the ambiguity about the young male’s role in society, whether he should act as a boy or a man. The rite turns more-or-less information into yes/no information: Before the rite he is a boy, after he is a man.

  A marriage ceremony turns a man and a woman into husband and wife. This parallels a prominent theory in psycholinguistics about human speech acts. Most of the time our utterances are simply speech acts that express opinions, make requests, provide information, or share our emotional state. There is a small class of utterances, however, that hold a special status as being able to change the state-of-the-world. This happens when a duly recognized official makes a declaration that has either legal or definitional consequences. An example is a minister saying “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” If he is officially recognized by the church or state, this simple sentence changes the status of the couple. Similar state-changing utterances include a judge announcing a verdict (the guilty or innocent proclamation dramatically changes the legal and practical state of the defendant), a government official deputizing a law enforcement officer, the chief justice inaugurating the President, or even a coroner pronouncing someone dead. (Note that in the latter case, even if the person isn’t dead at all, the proclamation by a duly authorized coroner changes the legal status of the victim, allowing for autopsy, burial, and other actions not otherwise allowed.)

  When people come together and want to inaugurate or celebrate a change of social status, such as a wedding or the installation of a leader, music is virtually always there. Music is also there at harvest celebrations and anniversaries of a birth, death, or important battle
. Commemoration seems to require music. The specificity of time and place is an interesting aspect of religion songs (and the subset of ritual songs I’m including) that sets them apart from the other five categories in this book. Everyone knows ritual songs can only be sung at the right time and place. But songs of joy, for example, can be sung anytime that songs can be sung; not in a library or in the middle of a play, for example, but if songs are otherwise permitted, there is no reason that you couldn’t sing a joy song, or a friendship song, or a knowledge song. Religion /ritual songs, on the other hand, and their associated religious /ritual events, carry very strict restrictions on time and place.

  Take for example, the Elgar composition “Pomp and Circumstance,” also known as “The Graduation March,” played at high school and college graduation ceremonies all across North America, as students file up to receive their diplomas (it is also New Zealand’s national anthem). The song has interesting musical qualities. It begins with a legato line of notes in close proximity to one another: The first fifteen notes are all stepwise and then the sixteenth note of the piece takes a large ascending leap of a perfect fourth immediately followed by a falling perfect fifth—a move that grabs our attention. “Pomp and Circumstance” is played with a stately pace, and the instrumentation gives it a sense of majesty, seriousness, and procession. So well known and uniquely associated with commencement, it is even used at some nursery school and kindergarten graduation ceremonies. But no one plays this piece at sporting events, or on a dinner date, or at a wedding.

  Even the most insensitive clod would recognize its misuse at the wrong time or place. If there was a high school assembly being conducted, an informational session perhaps, for students who were being held back a year in school due to poor academic performance, and the principal played “Pomp and Circumstance,” it would seem cruel. Or consider a Ph.D. oral exam. It would be unusual, but not unacceptable, for a student to start playing a tape recording of “Pomp and Circumstance” once the exam was over and the committee told him he had passed. But if the student played the same song before the exam, the committee would find it so presumptuous as to be offensive.