The Musical Mind
If song has no purpose, why is it deep-wired in the brain?
Music means nothing to Isabelle Peretz's patients. The University of Montreal psychologist studies people who have suffered brain damage from a stroke or surgery and lost the ability to make sense of the simplest tune. To the most seriously affected, "Happy Birthday to You" is a meaningless jumble of notes, and a Mozart sonata sounds no better or worse when it is played off key.
Their plight seems bizarre. But the bigger mystery, scientists are coming to realize, is that music speaks so powerfully to the rest of us. It's found in every culture and has probably been with us as long as we have been fully human. Yet unlike other basic skills, such as language and toolmaking, it doesn't seem to help us survive and reproduce. It doesn't even mimic the real world, as some art and games do. As David Huron, a musicologist at Ohio State University, puts it, "Music is weird."
The more scientists learn, the weirder it seems, because this seemingly useless taste is deeply embedded in our brains, and maybe even in our genes. Some of the latest evidence comes from scientists in Germany, who have found that even in people with no training in music, the brain is capable of sophisticated musical analysis. The faint magnetic signals emitted as neurons fire show that the brain gives a little start of surprise when a passage of music takes an unexpected turn. Other researchers have recently mapped a broad network of brain regions that separately analyze pitch, melody, timing, and emotion.
Choosing dessert. It all shows that listening to music "is a very sophisticated thing to do," says Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. Some researchers argue that we do it simply because music, like wine or a rich dessert, tickles pleasure circuits that evolved for other, more useful purposes. "Auditory cheesecake," neuroscientist Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has called it. Other scientists think our musical brain evolved because it gave our ancestors some as-yet-unidentified evolutionary advantage. And still others theorize that music came along for the ride as we evolved the brain circuits needed to decipher speech or natural sounds.
Despite the competing theories, few would disagree with Zatorre when he says, "There's something about the brain that predisposes us to learn about music." He thinks our brains are prewired for the task, enabling us to learn music as fast and effortlessly as we learn to talk. Others go further and argue that a sophisticated ear for music may be inborn. Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto teaches babies 6 to 10 months of age to listen to snippets of music played over and over again and to react when they hear a change. Those experiments have shown that Everybaby is, if not a little Mozart, at least a natural music lover with abilities "incredibly similar to adults."
Like adults, babies perceive a tune as the same when it is shifted in key, yet if the pitch of a note or two is changed they instantly know something is wrong. The tunes that adults find most pleasing, in which successive notes differ in pitch by specific intervals--octaves and so-called perfect fifths, for example--are the ones that delight babies as well. Babies are much better at remembering tuneful snippets than less melodic tunes.
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