This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

The Beatles’ “For No One”

next song on the album Revolver starts a whole step down

for example on their song “Chain Lightning.”

Both Petr and I were surprised to see that it was nearly impossible to tell from the data whether people were listening to or imagining music.

Surveys have revealed that it is rarely an entire song that gets stuck, but rather a piece of the song that is typically less than or equal in duration to the capacity of auditory short-term (“echoic”) memory: about 15 to 30 seconds.

Quite apart from the melody, the specific pitches and rhythms, some songs simply have an overall sound, a sonic color.

Sting is not the prototypical member, he is merely the best known and the most crucial member, not the same thing.

to talk about a prototypical member doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the spirit of what a prototype is—the central tendency, the average, the seen or unseen object that is most typical of the category.

Sting is not typical of the Police in the sense of being any kind of average; he is rather atypical in that he is so muc...

But as soon as we hear a song that we haven’t heard since a particular time in our lives, the floodgates of memory open and we’re immersed in memories. The song has acted as a unique cue, a key unlocking all the experiences associated with the memory for the song, its time and place.

Pinker argued that language is an adaptation and music is its spandrel. Among the cognitive operations that humans perform, music is the least interesting to study because it is merely a by-product, he went on, an evolutionary accident piggybacking on language.

Humans, then, discovered that cheesecake just happens to push pleasure buttons for fat and sugar, Pinker explained, and music is simply a pleasure-seeking behavior that exploits one or more existing pleasure channels that evolved to reinforce an adaptive behavior, presumably linguistic communication.

I happen to think that Pinker is wrong, but I’ll let the evidence speak for itself. Let me back up first a hundred and fifty years to Charles Darwin.

Many human-specific behaviors (such as conversation, music production, artistic ability, and humor) may have evolved principally to advertise intelligence during courtship.

Music making, because it involves an array of physical and mental skills, would be an overt display of health, and to the extent that someone had time to develop his musicianship, the argument goes, it would indicate resource wealth.

Far more nineteen-year-olds are starting bands and trying to get their hands on new music than are forty-year-olds, even though the forty-year-olds have had more time to develop their musicianship and preferences. “Music evolved and continues to function as a courtship display, mostly broadcast by young males to attract females,” Miller argues.

If music is a nonadaptive pleasure-seeking behavior—the auditory cheesecake argument—we would expect it not to last very long in evolutionary time.

First, if music was nonadaptive, then music lovers should be at some evolutionary or survival disadvantage. Second, music shouldn’t have been around very long. Any activity that has low adaptive value is unlikely to be practiced for very long in the species’s history, or to occupy a significant portion of an individual’s time and energy.

All the available evidence is that music can’t be merely auditory cheesecake; it has been around a very long time in our species.

Music predates agriculture in the history of our species. We can say, conservatively, that there is no tangible evidence that language preceded music. In fact, the physical evidence suggests the contrary. Music is no doubt older than the fifty-thousand-year-old bone flute, because flutes were unlikely the first instruments.

The archaeological record shows an uninterrupted record of music making everywhere we find humans, and in every era. And, of course, singing most probably predated flutes as well.

“Genetic mutations that enhance one’s likelihood to live long enough to reproduce become adaptations.”

The arguments against music as an adaptation consider music only as disembodied sound, and moreover, as performed by an expert class for an audience. But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of “experts” performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unknown throughout our history as a species.

And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

Children often show the reaction that is true to our nature: Even at classical music concerts they sway and shout and generally participate when they feel like it. We have to train them to behave “civilized.”

Darwin proposed the sexual-selection hypothesis, which has been advanced more recently by Miller and others. Additional possibilities have been argued as well. One is social bonding and cohesion. Collective music making may encourage social cohesions—humans are social animals, and music may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts such as turn-taking behaviors.

Although some people with ASD play music, and some of them have reached a high level of technical proficiency, they do not report being emotionally moved by music. Rather, the preliminary and largely anecdotal evidence is that they are attracted to the structure of music.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Singing and instrumental activities might have helped our species to refine motor skills, paving the way for the development of the exquisitely fine muscle control required for vocal or signed speech.

But considering ancient music’s character does account for why so many of us are literally moved by rhythm; by almost all accounts the music of our distant ancestors was heavily rhythmic.

Rhythm stirs our bodies. Tonality and melody stir our brains. The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum (the motor control, primitive little brain) and our cerebral cortex (the most evolved, most human part of our brain).

Contemporary “classical” music is practiced mostly in universities; it is regrettably listened to by almost no one compared to popular music; much of it deconstructs harmony, melody, and rhythm, rendering them all but unrecognizable; in its least accessible form it is a purely intellectual exercise, and save for the rare avant-garde ballet company, no one dances to it either.

Music’s function in sexual selection thus has an analogue in other species.

Music’s evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans (meeting the biologists’ criterion of being widespread in a species); it has been around a long time (refuting the notion that it is merely audio cheesecake); it involves specialized brain structures, including dedicated memory systems that can remain functional when other memory systems fail (when a physical brain system develops across all humans, we assume that it has an evolutionary basis); and it is analogous to music making in other species.

The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song—rhythm, melody, contour—cause music to stick in our heads. That is the reason that many ancient myths, epics, and even the Old Testament were set to music in preparation for being passed down by oral tradition across the generations.