HARNESSED

…………………where did music and speech come from?

• Top Ten Science Book in 2011
  – New Scientist, Dec, 2011.

• “…read it with fascination. I’d be…surprised if his main ideas…aren’t on the right track.”
  – Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate, EDGE, Sept, 2011.

• “…this book might hold the key to one of humanity’s longstanding mysteries…”
  – Stanislas Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain.

• “…this remarkable book…promises to revolutionize thinking about what separates us from apes.”
  – Daniel Simons, author of The Invisible Gorilla.

• “…Harnessed is brilliant.”
  – Seth Horowitz, author of The Universal Sense.

• “…one of the most interesting and original books I’ve read in the past few years.”
  – Bill Benzon, author of Beethoven’s Anvil.

• “…opening up our ears and eyes to a whole new vision of humanity.”
  – David Rothenberg, author of Survival of the Beautiful.

• “…brilliantly challenges this view…that the human brain’s capacity for language [and music] is innate…”
  – Cynthia Knight, Library Journal, October, 2011.

• “…bound to arouse curiosity about the “missing links” that made language and music possible”
  – Julie Sedivy, Psychology Today, Dec, 2011.

• “…builds a compelling case, and his wry style of storytelling makes for an entertaining read.”
  – Discover Magazine, Sept, 2011.

• “Generating controversial theories is not new to this evolutionary neurobiologist.”
  – Frank Bures, Scientific American MIND, November, 2011.

• “Changizi develops this simple but striking premise to show how language and music have been able to harness our brains.”
  – Richard P. Grant, The Scientist, January, 2012.

• “Changizi’s book makes a lucid, elegant case for a simple hypothesis: “music sounds like humans moving and behaving (usually expressively).”
  – Zac Shaw, Mediapocalypse, June, 2012.

• “…profound evidence for how these two domains (language and music) separated us from our ancestors.”
  – Faenosphere, Dec, 2012.

• “…classrooms of undergraduates standing in awe of him.”
  – Daniel Levitin, Wall Street Journal, October, 2011.

• “…makes a persuasive case in this fascinating volume.”
  – Bob Holmes, New Scientist, Aug, 2011.

• “…how auditory cheesecake was made with mother nature’s milk.”
  – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, Aug, 2011.

• “…manages to accomplish the extraordinary.”
  – David DiSalvo, Forbes, Aug, 2011.

• “…systematic means of understanding much of the…ways language and music evolved.”
  – Richard Kade, Leonardo, Aug, 2011.

• “…reveals how and why language, speech and music exist.”
  – David Bradley Euroscientist, Sept, 2011.

My new book appeared in 2011, titled…

HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella, 2011)

Language and music are central to what it means to be human. But where did they come from? In Harnessed, cognitive scientist Changizi argues that language and music are in us not because we evolved for them, but, rather, because they evolved for us. Over history, language and music came to have the structure that our non-language and amusical brains could brilliantly absorb.

In particular, language and music came to have the structures of the sounds in nature, just the sorts of sounds our brain had evolved to process. It is this “nature-harnessing” that explains who we are today.

For speech, Changizi provides a barrage of evidence that speech across human languages mimics the fundamental sounds of physical events in the world. By mimicking the sounds that solid objects make when they hit, slide and ring, speech harnesses our ancient event-recognition powers that were never intended for language.

And, for music, Changizi lays out his case that music mimics another equally important category of sound in the world: the sounds of human movement. Just as we possess brains specially designed to recognize facial expressions, our brains evolved to recognize what people are doing in our midst from the sounds they make. Music harnesses that ancient brain capability, turning a human action recognition system into a music appreciation machine.

Written in Changizi’s personable, anecdotal style with helpful chapter summaries, Harnessed appeals to both the science enthusiast and the scientifically challenged reader, unveiling how, by mimicking natural events, cultural evolution molded languages and music to fit human brains.

——-

Here is a short overview…

If one of our non-speaking ancestors were found frozen in a glacier and revived, we imagine that he would find our world jarringly alien. 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 reawoken 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 be deep similarities? Could civilization have retained vestiges of nature, easing our ancestor’s transition?

Although we were born into civilization rather than thawed 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 evolutionarily intended. One might, then, expect that civilization will have been shaped over time to possess signature features of nature, thereby squeezing every drop of evolution’s genius for use in the modern world.

Does civilization mimic nature? In his new book, HARNESSED, Mark Changizi argues that the most fundamental pillars of humankind are thoroughly infused with signs of the ancestral world. Those pillars are language and music. Cultural evolution over time has led to language and music designed as a simulacra of nature, so that they can be nearly effortlessly utilized by our ancient brains. Languages have evolved so that words look like natural objects when written and sound like natural events when spoken. And music has come to have the signature auditory patterns of people moving in one’s midst.

But if the key to our human specialness rests upon powers likely found in our non-linguistic hominid ancestors, then it suggests we are our non-linguistic hominid ancestors. Our thawed ancestors may do just fine here because our language would harness their brain as well. Rather than jumping into a freezer, our long-lost relative may choose instead to enter engineering school and invent the next generation of refrigerator. The origins of language and music may be attributable not to brains having evolved language or 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 for our brains, and because our brains were cut for nature, language and music mimicked nature. …transforming ape to man.

==

Some press on the book:

1. Blog Talk Radio:
   Interview on Harnessed.

2. Salt Lake Tribune:
   Interview on Harnessed.

3. Discover Mag:
   Review of HARNESSED.

4. KatiePhD:
   Strange Overtones.

5. Eureka:
   Press release for HARNESSED.

6. Wall Street Journal:
   Masters of Distraction.

7. New Scientist, Bob Holmes:
   The sounds of movement.

8. Science and Religion:
   What Is Nature-Harnessing?

9. Huff/AOL:
   Is Language Technology?

10. Forbes, David DiSalvo:
    Reviews HARNESSED.

11. WNYC, Soundcheck, John Schaefer:
    Music: Transforming Ape to Man.

12. WNYC, Soundcheck, John Schaefer:
    NPR Radio interview on HARNESSED.

13. MSNBC, Nidhi Subbaraman:
    CosmicLog on my HARNESSED.

14. TIME, Maia Szalavitz:
    Understanding Why Music Moves Us.

15. Hear It Now, Scott Prebys:
    NPR Radio interview on HARNESSED.

16. InnovationNewsDaily, Jeremy Hsu:
    The future of humans, and harnessing.

17. BrainPickings, Maria Popova:
    Discusses HARNESSED.

18. SciAm:
    Excerpt from HARNESSED.

19. WIRED, print:
    Harnessed, and how apes became human.

20. Late Night Live, Phillip Adams:
    Harnessed interview.

21. Wall Street Journal, Pia Catton:
    Dancing Out of the Dark

22. Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende:
    Culture Harnessing the Brain

23. Dr. Kiki:
    Theoretically Thinking

24. Internet Actu:
    Utiliser le cerveau pour le faire évoluer

Some pieces I have written relating to the upcoming book are collected here:

1. Freakonomics: Rise of the Apes via Miracle Grow
2. HUFF: Falling Skies and Harnessing
3. HUFF: Is Language a Technology
4. WIRED: The Secret Sauce in Language and Music
5. SEED: Humans, version 3.0
6. Neuroanthropology: What Speech Really Sounds Like
7. The Atlantic: Where Does Music Come From
8. Psychology Today: Why Humans Are So Smart…and Groovy
9. ChangiziBlog: The Moving Look of Music: What Your Visual System Thinks Music Is
10. ChangiziBlog: What Must a Theory of Music Explain?
11. ChangiziBlog: How To Put Art And Brain Together
12. ChangiziBlog: Why We Like 3D Movies — It’s Not Because of the 3D!
13. ChangiziBlog: What We Are, In the Eyes of Alien Probers
14. ChangiziBlog: Music Sounds Like Moving People
15. Scientific American: Why does music make us feel?
16. Psychology Today: Stephen Pinker’s Miracle of Language…and Writing?

Mark Changizi is Director of Human Cogntion at 2ai Labs, and the author of two previous books, The Vision Revolution (Benbella, 2009) and The Brain from 25000 Feet (Kluwer, 2003).