Working now on my third book, called HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man. Here is the 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.
Mark Changizi is Professor of Cognitive Science at RPI, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella, 2009) and The Brain from 25000 Feet (Kluwer, 2003).
[See related pieces on music in ScienceDaily and Scientific American.]