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

by Daniel J. Levitin

A third argument in favor of music’s primacy in human (and protohuman) evolution is that music evolved because it promoted cognitive development. 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. Because music is a complex activity, Trehub suggests that it may help prepare the developing infant for its mental life ahead. It shares many of the features of speech and it may form a way of “practicing” speech perception in a separate context. No human has ever learned language by memorization. Babies don’t simply memorize every word and sentence they’ve ever heard; rather, they learn rules and apply them in perceiving and generating new speech. One piece of evidence for this is empirical; the other is logical. The empirical evidence comes from what linguists call overextension: Children just learning the rules of language often apply them logically, but incorrectly. We see this most clearly in the case of irregular verb conjugations and irregular plurals in English. The developing brain is primed to make new neural connections and to prune away old ones that are not useful or accurate, and its mission is to instantiate rules insofar as possible. This is why ...