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

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  Evolution endowed the musical brain with a perception-production link that most mammals lack. This motor-action-imitation system gives us the ability to take something in one sensory domain and figure out how to create it with another. We hear music, then sing it. Every song you know how to sing, every word you speak, you reproduce with your own voice based on something you originally heard. Humans (and only a few other species, such as parrots) are able to turn what we hear into what we reproduce vocally. In spite of the high intelligence of mammals, most do not have the capacity to imitate a sound they’ve heard (exceptions include humpback whales, walruses, and sea lions). This vocal learning ability is believed to have come from an evolutionary modification to the basal ganglia, causing a direct pathway between auditory input and motor output.

  What’s amazing is that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see for the first time the emergence of human culture reflected in the genome. The classic method of examining fossilized skulls continues to reveal new surprises as well. For example, fossil evidence indicates Brodmann area 44 (BA44)—a part of the frontal cortex that is important for auditory motor imitation via mirror neurons there—may well have been in place 2 million years ago, long before Homo sapiens (who didn’t emerge until about 200,000 years ago). In other words, the neural mechanisms for language were in place long before they were fully exploited. The FOXP2 gene, closely associated with human language, existed in Neanderthals; a form of it is also found in songbirds. A genetic variant in microcephalin (a part of the genome that encodes for brain development) has been identified. It emerged approximately 37,000 years ago—what we think of as the beginning of culturally modern humans. This coincides, not coincidentally, with the appearance in the archaeological record of artistic artifacts and bone flutes. A second variant of microcephalin arose around 5,800 years ago, corresponding with the first record of written language, the spread of agriculture, and the development of cities. Who knows what we will uncover about this story in the coming decade, but we now know that FOXP2, BA44, and microcephalin variants are part of the evolutionary changes that primed the creation of the musical brain.

  The human motor/action imitation system also evolved the ability to imitate with delay—in the absence of the original model. This underlies language, music, religion, painting, and the other arts. Only humans represent, symbolize, and signify things that are not there. (As with recursion, some animals can be trained to do this, indicating that the neural structures are in place, but have not yet been exploited.) With this follows the inevitable question: If I can think about things that are not here—my loved one off on an expedition, that tiger that attacked my friend—are there things not here that I haven’t thought about? Are there other worlds, are there entities, that exist outside my experience? This led, as we saw in Chapter 6, to a yearning for spiritual knowledge. It also leads to a yearning to form long-term bonds with loved ones, to gain assurances that they’ll stay with us and come back to us.

  Human consciousness, a product of representation and thus another feature of the musical brain, appears to be different from animal consciousness as well. As we saw in Chapter 6, animals live in a continuously unfolding present, with no ability (as far as we know) to reflect on the past or plan for the future. Some have argued that everything we humans do is done unconsciously, and that one of the roles of consciousness is to spin a story after the fact about what we did and why we did it. Patients whose two cerebral hemispheres have been surgically separated (for the treatment of intractable epilepsy) often exhibit this kind of post facto rationalization, supporting this notion, and the rationalization typically occurs when the right hemisphere causes the person to do something and the left hemisphere (the hemisphere with language) is left holding the explanatory bag.

  Many neuroscientists have been looking for the seat of consciousness in the brain, and I believe that they will never find it—not because consciousness doesn’t exist, but because it is not localizable. Just as we don’t expect to find “gravity” at a particular location in the middle of the earth, we shouldn’t expect to find consciousness at a particular place in the head. I take as an initial assumption the view expressed by my colleague, the McGill University physicist and philosopher Mario Bunge and by other contemporary philosophers, including Paul and Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett, that there are no immaterial, vitalistic, or supernatural processes involved in creating the experience we call consciousness; rather, it is a process that arises from the normal functioning of neurons in the human brain.

  When biological complexity arises from simpler forms in small steps, we call it evolution. When a wholly unexpected property—such as human consciousness—arises from a complex system, we call it emergence. Ant colonies exhibit an emergent intelligence, finding food, disposing of waste, feeding their queen—yet no ant can be said to “know” in any meaningful sense what it is doing or what the colony is doing. In this respect, ants can be thought of analogously to neurons in the human brain. There is no neuron in your brain that knows your name, and no other neuron that is even bothered by this fact. There is no neuron that knows how old you are, where you were born, what your favorite ice cream is, or whether you are too hot or too cold right now. Neurons just don’t work that way. Hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons need to come together to encapsulate, store, or provide information.

  An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and voilà! The system-as-a-whole demonstrates spontaneous intelligence. From the firings and interconnections of billions of neurons, we can look at life and our place in it, we can even think about the nature of our own thoughts. Thoughts emerge from brains, but the process remains mysterious. Emergence has even been invoked as the source of life itself. Consider the so-called primordial soup millions of years ago—a bubbling, boiling compost of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, proteins, and nucleic acids. The first single-cell organisms arose here, and biologists now believe that life arose as an emergent property of the complexity of those first molecular compounds.

  Most scientists and philosophers agree that human consciousness is qualitatively different from animal consciousness—we have a unique type of self-consciousness, and an ability to contemplate our own existence. Consciousness is not a thing to be separated out from the normal workings of our brain, the comings and goings of thoughts, perceptions, and mental states. As essayist Adam Gopnik says, “consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of the machinery.”

  Some of our appreciation of music is not conscious, but rather, forms part of our subconscious awareness of the world. For example, as David Huron and Ian Cross argue, human music functions as an honest signal, as we saw in Chapter 5. This is a concept from biology that relates to the extent to which a communicative signal from one organism to another can be faked. There might be reasons for an organism to convey untruthful information—this is essentially what chameleons do when they change color to blend in with the background to avoid predators, or what possums do when they play dead. Primates may wish to deceive one another for a number of reasons, including hoarding food or trying to rise in a complex social hierarchy. If music is an honest signal, a person who is singing would be less able to fake emotions. Put another way, we believe a message that comes to us through song more than one that comes through speech. For reasons that aren’t fully understood, we seem to be exquisitely sensitive to the emotional state of singers. This may be related to unconscious cues of stress that are conveyed through the vocal cords when a singer is lying, but this is a topic that requires further investigation.

  The honest signal hypothesis is particularly relevant for love, and may explain why love songs move us so. When someone tells us they love us, we may have our doubts. When they sing it, all our doubts seem to melt away. This may be an evolutionary and biological inheritance, something that is beyond our powers of rational control or conscious influence—sin
ging matters. This could account for why people become furious when they find that singers are lip-syncing. It may also explain our fascination with the private lives of rock singers (much more so than other band members): If they are not living the life they profess in their songs, our truth detectors go wild.

  The connection between truth and love is obvious—when we love, we make ourselves vulnerable (and there are many songs that reflect this naked emotional state). Real love requires an almost irrational trust and faith in another person. We never really know if our partner has been faithful, has been stealing money from us, or has an ulterior motive. As Will Smith’s character says in the movie Hitch, love is like jumping off a cliff. These concerns take time, sometimes years, to assuage, and relationships would never make it that long if we didn’t suspend suspicion temporarily and take the risk of letting the other person into our lives and hearts. Different people resort to different mechanisms, some psychological, some practical, to bridge this gulf of trust. Some refuse to make themselves completely vulnerable to their partner, exchanging safety for lack of intimacy. Some—who are otherwise very well protected in all other dealings, in business and friendships—throw caution to the wind over and over in their love lives. Each new love is a new beginning; “the only love worth having is one that is complete and total,” we say to ourselves. Others insist on prenuptial agreements. “I’ve never seen a prenup I couldn’t break,” a lawyer once told me, “so why bother in the first place?”

  Love requires that we give our partner the benefit of the doubt. Lipstick on the collar or missing condoms are a warning sign, but most “signs” are more ambiguous: staying late at the office, a partner who doesn’t answer his hotel room phone at midnight. (Did the hotel ring the wrong room? Did he turn the phone off? Is he in the shower? Is he with another woman?) Every month dozens of signs could point to our lover’s dishonesty, infidelity, or even simpler violations of the relationship contract such as not revealing her true income or true feelings. Love, it has been said, requires a certain amount of self-delusion. Animals don’t have this problem because the animal brain doesn’t ruminate, try to fit pieces together like a detective, try to figure out is she right for me? The animal brain bonds on a combination of instinct and pheromones. The role of instinct and pheromones in human mating decisions is also very strong, but it seems to hang in an uneasy balance with rationality, or at least self-delusion and justification masquerading as rationality. This is one of the reasons that the song “I’ll Get You Back ” by Juliana Raye (brilliantly produced by former ELO frontman Jeff Lynne) is so bitingly ironic and funny: When you ran away from me you never looked to see

  I was right behind you running just as speedily

  Slow down, would you tell me where you’re going

  ’Cause I need to know if you’ll be back in time for supper

  I cooked your favorite

  The vocal is delivered with a kind of upbeat, twisted, clueless delusion. Her boyfriend is running out of the house—not walking but running—and she chases after him to find out when he’s coming home for dinner. And oh, by the way, she yells after him, “I COOKED YOUR FAVORITE!”

  In the second verse she tells us that she knows about all the affairs he has had, but she doesn’t care, as long as he practices safe sex. Launching into the singsongy, nursery-rhyme chorus, she sings:I will get you, I will get you, I will get you back

  I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back

  I’ll get you back!

  As the last note of “back” reaches a pitched crescendo, the highest note of the song, the evil quiver in her voice forces us to confront the ambiguity in the chorus: Does she mean that she is going to “win him back” or that she is going to “get back at him” by some awful retaliation? The second meaning is invoked more strongly as we learn of a heart-stopping violation of trust right along with the singer in the last verse:Sister Mary always had the kindest words to say

  She said when she looked at you her doubts would melt away

  I swear, Sister Mary’s baby looks a lot like you, you know

  Oh! Say, it isn’t so!

  I will get you, I will get you, I will get you back

  I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back, I’ll get you back

  I’ll get you back!

  But something in the delivery tells us that she still wants him, that she still hopes somehow to win back this man who has mistreated her so. That all will be forgiven in the name of love. She got it bad, and that ain’t good. Love does require this kind of devotion, even blind commitment, although typically not such self-delusion. The Australian band Mental as Anything played with this same theme in their lyric “If you leave me, can I come too?”

  There are love songs to reflect four stages of love: I want you, I got you, I miss you, and it’s-over-and-I’m-heartbroken. Love songs reflect the different kinds of love as well: the Romeo-and-Juliet love (I’d kill myself for this person); the more mature love of being together for decades and looking back; and the love of ideals, such as of country. The dominant theme of popular music for the last fifty years seems to be love in all these forms. Songs written by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Lennon and McCartney, Dylan, Mitchell, Cohen, Wainwright. And the songs performed by Diana Ross, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Mariah Carey . . . Some love songs celebrate the earliest stages of romantic love:Oh yeah I’ll tell you something, I think you’ll understand

  When I say that something, I want to hold your hand

  I want to hold your hand, I want to hold your hand

  and they capture the giddy, lighter-than-air feeling of first loves and crushes:And when I touch you I feel happy inside

  It’s such a feeling that my love, I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide!

  Songs reflect the fear we have of becoming vulnerable to another person, and to love’s capriciousness—an implicit acknowledgment that the wonderful feelings can apparently end at any time and without warning. Some songs express pure denial (such as “I’m Not in Love” by 10CC):I’m not in love, so don’t forget it

  It’s just a silly phase I’m going through

  And just because I call you up

  Don’t get me wrong, don’t think you’ve got it made

  I’m not in love, no-no

  I keep your picture upon the wall

  It hides a nasty stain that’s lyin’ there

  So don’t you ask me to give it back

  I know you know it doesn’t mean that much to me

  I’m not in love, no-no

  On the opposite side of things, this vulnerability is sometimes intentionally cultivated, David Byrne notes. Rather than denying our feelings and vulnerability, we sometimes say to our love interest, “I am yours” (Stephen Stills in “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”) or “Take all of me . . . I’m no good without you” (Marks and Simons), or as Irving Berlin writes in “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” from the musical Holiday Inn: It’s not my watch you’re holding, it’s my heart.

  It’s not the note I sent you that you quickly burned.

  It’s not the book I lent you that you never returned.

  As sung by Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, and others, the song reminds us of the helpless condition love can put us in, underscored by the repetition of the song’s title, “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” as the lyric continues:The heart with which so willingly I part.

  It’s yours to take to keep or break,

  But please, before you start, be careful, it’s my heart.

  “But what really makes that song,” David says, “are the harmonies. Love song lyrics can be the corniest thing in the world. The harmonies add tension that keeps the lyrics from seeming too corny. Too often, love song lyrics can’t stand on their own two feet apart from the melody and the harmonies. Another great love song is Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You.’ Those lyrics are great—they tell a whole little story, a mini novel inside a three-minute song.”


  “I think some the greatest love songs of the twentieth century were those written by Hugo Wolf,” Stanford composer Jonathan Berger says. Wolf wrote hundreds of songs at the turn of the twentieth century. They are so complex harmonically as to be virtually unsingable, but they raise the interplay of melody, harmony, and lyrics to a very high level.

  “Tonality is dissolving as he is writing,” Berger continues, “and he’s at that cusp where everything he writes is tonal, but he doesn’t use tonality in terms of ‘Let’s get to the dominant and get over with it.’ Instead, he uses tonality in a very symbolic way. For example, he has a song called ‘The Forsaken Maiden.’ She’s waking up in the morning and in the song she starts singing this love song. And, over the course of the song, realizes that she’s been forgotten, and forsaken, and left. So it’s this process of dream to awakeness, of having the love and losing the love, and the melody and the harmony are constantly playing with this ‘Am I dreaming, am I awake? How aware am I?’ The music defines everything in the text. In other words, the song itself, the way it is composed, becomes representative of love itself.”

  Many of popular music’s most memorable and emotional songs deal with the sexual, lustful side of love. “As soon as music first emerges in cavemen and it has rhythm,” Rodney Crowell says, “you have the sense of sex in it, because what is the most obvious human activity that has a rhythmic component? One of the earliest songs must have been a song about sex.” One of the oldest songs that we know of is in fact one with a sexually charged lyric; dating back six thousand years, it is part of the extraordinarily graphic poems and songs written by Inanna, queen of Sumeria, about her beloved Dumuzi.