<< Friday Instant Quiz | Front Page | Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject? >>
Friday, November 27, 2009
Steven Mithen’s Brain on Music (Could be Yours)
Music was very important to Lévi-Strauss, both personally and as a source conceptual figuration in his writing. There is a long tradition arguing that music predates language in human history. I’ve placed myself in that tradition, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, and, more recently, so has cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithin, The Singing Neanderthals (my review of the book).
Now Mithen has summarized his views in a recent volume from the New York Academy of Scieces (h/t dlende at Neuroanthropologist). He also reports:
I find the interplay between inheritance and development of particular interest, partly for personal reasons. My research has argued that we have evolved as a musical species, and yet I am someone lacking in musical ability. My theories would predict that even my own adult and supposedly mature brain could still be manipulated to enhance its level of musical processing. So I undertook a pilot project to test this by working with the neuroscientist Professor Larry Parsons from Sheffield University and Pam Chilvers, a professional singing teacher. Not having participated in any music making for at least 35 years, I underwent a whole year of singing lessons and explored their impact on my own brain.6 Although the experiment was only a pilot study and lacked various control conditions, I did appear to be able to change my brain, increasing activity in Brodmann’s areas 22, 38 and 45, and decreasing activity in other areas. In effect, I began to release a potential musicality that had been placed there by millions of years of evolution, but was neglected and so remained dormant during my own life.
Abstract for Mithin’s article:
Steven Mithen, The Music Instinct: The Evolutionary Basis of Musicality, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1169, Issue The Neurosciences and Music III Disorders and Plasticity, Pages 3-12.
Published Online: 24 Jul 2009
Why does music pervade our lives and those of all known human beings living today and in the recent past? Why do we feel compelled to engage in musical activity, or at least simply enjoy listening to music even if we choose not to actively participate? I argue that this is because musicality—communication using variations in pitch, rhythm, dynamics and timbre, by a combination of the voice, body (as in dance), and material culture—was essential to the lives of our pre-linguistic hominin ancestors. As a consequence we have inherited a desire to engage with music, even if this has no adaptive benefit for us today as a species whose communication system is dominated by spoken language. In this article I provide a summary of the arguments to support this view.
DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)
10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04590
Table of Contents, Annals volume on The Neurosciences and Music III Disorders and Plasticity.