Is language universal?: Why did humans develop complex spoken languages--and even more complex musical tendencies? Evolutionary neuroscientist Mark Changizi examines those questions and others in his new book.
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Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of the new book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, by Mark Changizi. Copyright (c) 2011 by Mark Changizi.
If one of our last nonspeaking ancestors were found frozen in a glacier and revived, we imagine that he would find our world jarringly alien. His brain was built for nature, not for the freak-of-nature modern landscape we humans inhabit. The concrete, the cars, the clothes, the constant jabbering—it's enough to make a hominid jump into the nearest freezer and hope to be reawakened after the apocalypse.
But would modernity really seem so frightening to our guest? Although cities and savannas would appear to have little in common, might there actually be deep similarities? Could civilization have retained vestiges of nature, easing our ancestor's transition? And if so, why should it—why would civilization care about being a hospitable host to the freshly thawed really-really-great-uncle?
The answer is that, although we were born into civilization rather than melted into it, from an evolutionary point of view we're an uncivilized beast dropped into cultured society. We prefer nature as much as the next hominid, in the sense that our brains work best when their computationally sophisticated mechanisms can be applied as evolution intended. Living in modern civilization is not what our bodies and brains were selected to be good at.
Perhaps, then, civilization shaped itself for us, not for thawed-out time travelers. Perhaps civilization possesses signature features of nature in order to squeeze every drop of evolution's genius out of our brains for use in the modern world. Perhaps we're hospitable to our ancestor because we have been hospitable to ourselves.
Does civilization mimic nature? I believe so. And I won't merely suggest that civilization mimics nature by, for example, planting trees along the boulevards. Rather, I will make the case that some of the most fundamental pillars of humanity are thoroughly infused with signs of the ancestral world…and that, without this infusion of nature, the pillars would crumble, leaving us as very smart hominids (or "apes," as I say at times), but something considerably less than the humans we take ourselves to be today.
In particular, those fundamental pillars of humankind are (spoken) language and music. Language is at the heart of what makes us apes so special, and music is one of the principal examples of our uniquely human artistic side.
As you will see, the fact that speech and music sound like other aspects of the natural world is crucial to the story about how we apes got language and music. Speech and music culturally evolved over time to be simulacra of nature. Now that's a deep, ancient secret, one that has remained hidden despite language and music being right in front of our eyes and ears, and being obsessively studied by generations of scientists. And like any great secret code, it has great power—it is so powerful it turned clever apes into Earth-conquering humans. By mimicking nature, language and music could be effortlessly absorbed by our ancient brains, which did not evolve to process language and music. In this way, culture figured out how to trick nonlinguistic, nonmusical ape brains into becoming master communicators and music connoisseurs.
One consequence of this secret is that the brain of the long-lost, illiterate, and unmusical ancestor we unthaw is no different in its fundamental design from yours or mine. Our thawed ancestor might do just fine here, because our language and music would harness his brain as well. Rather than jumping into a freezer, our long-lost relative might instead choose to enter engineering school and invent the next-generation refrigerator.
The origins of language and music may be attributable, not to brains having evolved language and music instincts, but rather to language and music having culturally evolved brain instincts. Language and music shaped themselves over many thousands of years to be tailored to our brains, and because our brains were cut for nature, language and music mimicked nature…and transformed ape to man.
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6 Comments
Add CommentOr, perhaps the author has been in urban environments so long that he only imagines that language and music are in some way like nature. There's little else to remind one of 'nature', beyond city parks and the zoo - perhaps language and music are the most significant remnants of our rural cultural heritage still available in urban environments.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, the article states:
"For example, [could] you recall [a] figure [from] the start of the chapter—[a] person's head with a lock and key on it? Notice that you [could] recall it in terms referring to the objects—in fact, I just referred to [an] image using the terms person, head, lock, and key. If, instead, I were to ask you if you recall seeing the figure that had a half dozen "T" junctions and several "L" junctions, you would likely not know what I was talking about."
- do I just not know what he's talking about because the referenced figure is not included in the excerpt from the book?
With due care, since I haven't read the book, but only the excerpt here, I stumble across some problems with the author's outlook: The foremost is his understanding of "nature". The author seems to distinguish between "pristine nature" ("untouched by modern man", so to say, and equivalent to our ancestral "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (c) Tooby & Cosmides) and "modern city landscape" (cars, skyscrapers, coffeehouses). Yet, the concept of "pristine nature" (or "ancestral environment") are thoroughly modern concepts that would not make sense to our defrosted ancestor. So there is serious danger of circular reasoning in claiming that a technique of culture (language, music) mimics "nature" as defined by a cultural concept.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFurther dangerous ground to tread: While it is clear that language evolved to "match" the brain's capacities (cf. Terrence Deacon), the claim of "printed words mimicking visual objects" sounds trivial - printed words are visual objects designed to transport meaning. Also, the way the word "seeing" is used here is highly misleading if not flat-out wrong. Seeing is an activity or mode of experience of an organism such as a person. The brain itself doesn't see anything (it constructively processes visual information), and certainly the edge detectors (or spatial frequency analyzers) in V1 don't see anything.
As I said, I'm aware of the danger of being unfair, since I read only this short excerpt; unfortunately, it didn't motivate me too much to read the whole book...
i'm having a Noam Chomsky flashback. please make it stop.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe wind still blows through the trees, babies still cry, dogs still bark. We filter it out but it still sensed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm envious: can't filter the dogs. Or some other sounds- in fact- no dimmer switch, either.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo offense intended, but this article seems completely goofy, and not at all up to the intellectual standards that Scientific American typically puts forth. And, the author's statement within the last paragraph: "Pieces of meat inside you knew the secret, but weren't telling."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWTF??!!! Pieces of meat inside me??! What the heck is that all about? Musical ability is innate in the Human - just like a propensity towards mathematical ability, let's say; one's inclination to play music is something one is born with. My father was a professional musician in the Big Band Era, and he began playing the violin when he was just six years old. If a musical note is played sharp or flat, I can tell you that it is, and I just inherently know that. I don't think issue of "nature-mimicry" is the appropriate focus for either music or language. Kind of like the apples to oranges thing. What a Human shows an inclination towards in childhood, is their calling; and it should be fostered by the parent.