Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man

Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to After all, there are whole portions of the brain devoted to human speech.
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Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi

Others believe we didn't evolve such instincts, but, instead, evolved super-powerful general-purpose software, the kind of algorithms artificial intelligence researchers would like to find. With these in hand, we could handle inventions like language and music even though we're not designed for them.

I think this is all wrong. I don't believe there's anything qualitatively distinguishing us from the other apes: We're just apes, with "more of the same. What accounts for the qualitative difference, then, in that we have language and music but not them? It's because of culture, and cultural evolution. Once culture got up and running which was helped by our having quantitatively smarter brains and being so social , culture was the new selection process in town, and it could create "smart things" much more quickly than natural selection ever could.

In particular, it could shape writing, speech and music in such a way that our ancient illiterate, non-language and amusical brains could process them. Culture shaped these special powers for us, and its trick was to shape them like aspects of nature that our brains already knew how to brilliantly process. I call it "nature-harnessing. Does the way apes interact with humans give insight into how we were able to develop language and music?

I don't see any obvious implications following from the manner in which apes interact with humans, other than reminding us of how social we each are. And sociality at that level was surely one but not the only crucial ingredient needed to get cultural evolution up and running. I note that my view on language origins is the only one that can justify the plot of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," where the apes get a quantitative brain boost from a fictional Alzheimer drug.

If language is an instinct or comes from humans having specially-designed general-purpose AI-like software, then a Miracle-Grow-like, grow-more-neurons medicine would never suffice. But a grow-more-neurons approach "would" suffice if cultural evolution and nature-harnessing is the culprit, because then only a quantitative brain difference is needed.

Give the apes our intelligence, and they may be able to tap into our language, because it may harness their brains equally well. For speech in particular, I make the case in Harnessed that speech has culturally evolved to sound like solid-object events, the most common kind of event that occurs in our terrestrial world. All apes — not just us — have specialized auditory mechanisms for recognizing solid-object events, and so human speech may fit chimpanzee auditory systems just as well as our own.

For music, on the other hand, I make the case that it has culturally evolved to sound like humans moving and carrying out behaviors. Some aspects of human movement sounds are found in other apes regularities concerned with the Doppler shift and loudness due to distance , but some aspects of human behavior sounds are special to humans, especially due to our bipedal gait. Human music may therefore not entirely translate to the ears of other apes.

Do you have an inherent passion for music that made you want to investigate the subjects you discuss in the book? For the last 15 or so years I've delved mostly into classical. I play the piano on most days, as well as guitar and a bit of violin. But "everyone" loves music, which is one of the most amazing things about it, and something any theory of music needs to make sense of. Why are people so willing to listen to music, often at nearly every waking moment? That kind of love of music comes as no surprise, however, if music sounds to your auditory system like a person moving expressively in your midst.

Music is an auditory movie, a dynamic portrait of a person evocatively moving around you, and through his or her behavior you can infer a wordless story. Why does some music excite us, and other music soothes us? 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.

See a Problem?

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? 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.

Do Language and Music Mimic Nature?

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. Under the radar If language and music mimic nature, why isn't this obvious to everyone? Why should this have remained a secret?

It's not as if we have no idea what nature is like. We're not living on the International Space Station, and even those who are on the Space Station weren't raised up there!


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We know what nature looks and sounds like, having seen and heard countless examples of it. So, given our abundant experiences of nature, why haven't we noticed the signature of nature written I propose all over language and music? The answer is that, ironically, our experiences with nature don't help us consciously comprehend what nature in fact looks and sounds like.


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  • Do Language and Music Mimic Nature? - Scientific American.

    • What we are aware of is already an assembled interpretation of the actual data our senses and brains process. This is true of you whether you are a couch potato extraordinaire or a grizzled expedition guide just returned from Madagascar and leaving in the morning for Tasmania. For example, I am currently in a coffee shop—a setting you'll hear about again and again—and when I look up from the piece of paper I'm writing on, I see people, tables, mugs, and chairs. That is, I am consciously aware of seeing these objects. But my brain sees much more than just the objects.

    My early visual system involved in the first array of visual computations performed on the visual input from the retina sees the individual contours, and does not see the combinations of contours. My intermediate-level visual areas see simple combinations of several contours—for instance, object corners such as "L" or "Y" junctions—but don't see the contours, and don't see the objects.

    It is my highest-level visual areas that see the objects themselves, and I am conscious of my perception of these objects. My conscious self is, however, rarely aware of the lower hierarchical levels of visual structure. 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. And if I were to ask you if you recall the figure that had about 40 contours, and I then went on and described the geometry of each contour individually, you would likely avoid me at cocktail parties. Not only do you your conscious self not see the lower-level visual structures in the image, you probably won't find it easy to talk or think about them.

    Unless you have studied computational vision i. Thus, we may think we know what a chair looks like, but in a more extended sense, we have little idea, especially about all those lower-level features. And although parts of our brain do know what a chair looks like at these lower levels, they're not given a mouthpiece into our conscious internal speech stream.

    It is our inability to truly grasp what the lower-level visual features are in images that explains why most of us are hopeless at drawing what we see.