Music and Babies and Nietzsche improvs?

Hey folks, i just learned you can't forward to this list, so....

here's an article i found kinda interesting. Sent to me by a friend that
looks at everything.

Hope you like it,

GZ

DISCOVER Vol. 22 No. 8 (August 2001)

The Genetic Mystery of Music

Does a mother's lullaby give an infant a better chance for survival?
By Josie Glausiusz
Photography by Greg Miller

Music accompanies every human milestone, from baby-naming to marriage to
memorials for the dead. It's found among every people on Earth. Is it
hardwired into the brain or carried in our genes?
Model: Doug Lohmeyer/Gilla Roos Body Painting by Tara Meadows
Take a step toward the wall mural in psychologist Sandra Trehub's lab, and
you'll find yourself in a tropical rain forest, enveloped by a riot of
purple flowers, lush green ferns, oversize butterflies and bees. The only
thing missing is the cry of macaws. But take a step back, and you're likely
to hear other cries� those of babies. And then it all makes sense� the
forest, the Teletubbies, the toy trucks scattered on the floor, the
graceful mobiles hanging from the ceiling, the picture books and bright
posters. This is a lab where mothers and very small children feel
comfortable. It is also a lab with a very specific quest, a search within
the infant brain for the biological roots of music.

Thousands of babies have passed through this facility at the University of
Toronto at Mississauga in the past 25 years, and each one has departed with
a diploma attesting to his or her contribution to "the advancement of
science and the understanding of child development." Here Trehub has
observed parents singing to their babies and watched how the babies respond
to those songs (they are mesmerized). She has studied the history and
universality of lullabies (they sound the same the world over). She has
documented the power of a mother's singing (it decreases stress hormones in
her child). She also has found that babies seem to have an innate
appreciation for music.

In one study, for example, a pudgy-faced, redheaded 8-month-old sits on his
mother's lap in a soundproof booth, fascinated by the fluffy toy a smiling
lady is waving in his face. In the corner, an audio speaker spits out a
tinny little tune over and over� the sequence of notes arranged on the
Western major scale (do re mi fa sol la ti do) familiar to fans of The
Sound of Music. At first, the baby seems indifferent. Then an anomalous
note� one that doesn't belong in the scale� intrudes on the recording, and
he suddenly turns his head toward the speaker. He'll do this repeatedly
when the wrong note is played.

Some might argue that the baby has learned since birth to recognize notes
common to Western music. But a second experiment casts doubt on that
assertion. This time the tune played has an inherently musical structure,
yet it's built on an invented scale unfamiliar to Westerners. Nevertheless,
Trehub's infant subjects still pick out anomalous notes� even better than
adults do. "I'm convinced that there's a biological basis for the babies'
abilities," Trehub says. "Music making is so successful in managing the
baby's state and getting the baby to sleep that it makes the task of caring
for the baby easier. It takes the edge off this enormous burden."

A baby that's better cared for is more likely to survive to adulthood and
reproduce. And that gets to the crux of a debate that has galvanized
evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike. If the
ability to appreciate music is ingrained in the human brain, could music
making have evolved to help us survive and reproduce? Is it akin to
language and the ability to solve complicated problems, attributes that
have enhanced human survival? Or is it just "auditory cheesecake," as
cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has called it� a phenomenon that pushes pleasure buttons without
truly filling an evolutionary need?

No one has ever seen a need to build a robot equipped to appreciate music,
says Steven Pinker of MIT. This suggests that music, unlike eyesight, is
not essential for long-term human survival.
Sometime between 43,000 and 82,000 years ago, a Neanderthal living in a
cave in what is now Slovenia fashioned a flute from the femur of a bear.
Simpler instruments such as rattles and drums probably preceded it, and
singing probably began even earlier� perhaps as long as 250,000 years ago.

Why? Why has music spread to every country and every people in the world?
Why is music used to rouse armies, praise God, and bury the dead? Charles
Darwin, for one, thought music helped humans find mates. In his 1871 book,
The Descent of Man, he suggested that early men and women, unable to
express their love in words, "endeavored to charm each other with musical
notes and rhythm," as birds do. But proof is still lacking.

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New
Mexico, has looked at thousands of jazz, rock, and classical music albums
and noted the age and sex of the musicians. In every genre of music, he
says, men produce about 10 times as much as women, and their output peaks
at around age 30� near the time of their peak reproductive years. "Good
musicians, particularly good singers, attract sexual interest," Miller
says. "Successful male musicians are notoriously promiscuous and tend to
produce a lot of children� and that's how the genes for musical ability
tend to be passed on."

Still, there's no evidence that women are any less musically inclined than
men. Women in all cultures sing to their infants, Trehub points out, and
there is no hard evidence that talented musicians are particularly
prolific. In fact, Hajime Fukui, an evolutionary psychologist at Nara
University of Education in Japan, maintains that music reduces sexual
activity. In one study, Fukui gathered 35 male students and 35 female
students, measured their hormone levels, and then played them half an hour
of music of all types. Afterward, Fukui found, the men's testosterone
levels had gone down and the women's had gone up. Silence had no effect.

Fukui believes that when early humans formed communities, they had to
develop ways to alleviate sexual tensions. "We may assume that their
solution was music," he says. If music lowered testosterone levels in men,
it made them less sexually active. If it increased testosterone in women,
it made them more aggressive and less social. The net result was less sex,
and less sexual tension. "National anthems, work songs, party music, and
war music all have the same effect," Fukui says. "They diminish fear,
relieve tension, and boost people's sense of solidarity. Music moves
people, throws them into a trancelike state, and paralyzes their ability to
think logically. We might think that we are the users of music. In fact, we
are not the puppeteers but the puppets of music."

In Sandra Trehub's lab, a clucking chicken or a shuffling puppy greets this
6-month-old baby when she turns her head toward unusual musical notes.
Music can also mitigate stress. In one recent study, neurologist Barry
Bittman of the Mind-Body Wellness Center in Meadville, Pennsylvania,
gathered a group of 10 people and had them beat hand drums for an hour
while a music "facilitator" conducted. Afterward, Bittman took blood
samples. The drummers, he found, had heightened levels of immune cells
called natural killer cells that seek out and destroy both cancer cells and
cells infected by viruses. A control group that read in silence experienced
no such upsurge.

Bittman believes that group drumming, through its camaraderie, support,
exercise, and music making, signals the brain to lower the production of
cortisol, a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal glands. Less cortisol
has been associated with a heightened immune response and may help the body
fight off infection. "I'm not saying I have a cure for cancer," Bittman
cautions. "But what I am saying is that we have a very important step in
understanding a delightful, enjoyable, and fun way for people to reverse
the stress response in a manner that leads us to positive biological
changes."

None of that impresses MIT's Steven Pinker. "I think people who argue that
music is an adaptation have confused the everyday meaning of the term�
meaning something that is beneficial or salubrious� with the biological
meaning of the term, which is something that causally increases the rate of
reproduction or survival," he says. "Now, it's not enough just to show that
something is correlated with reproduction. Wearing a linen suit or driving
a Porsche might help you find a sex partner, but that doesn't mean it's an
adaptation. What you need to do is show, on sheer engineering grounds and
in terms of cause and effect, that some particular trait would lead to an
adaptive outcome."

To prove that having two eyes is an adaptive trait, for instance, one first
has to use geometry to show that stereoscopic vision enables depth
perception. In turn, one can argue that animals that perceive depth are
better at foraging, escaping predators, and finding a mate. It's not enough
to point out that guitar heroes tend to be sexually successful, or that
making music helps foster social unity. One has to explain why "rhythmic
plinking sounds," as Pinker calls music, are sexually appealing or
conducive to bonding. If music is about sexuality, why do children and the
elderly care for it? And if it's all about bonding, why do people like to
listen to it alone?

Not every common trait is adaptive, Pinker adds, citing his favorite
example: "Let's say someone asked, what's the adaptive value of cheesecake?
The answer is, there is none. It's bad for you. But it is a by-product of
other adaptations, namely a taste for sweets and fats, which were adaptive
in an environment in which sweets and fats were rare." A chemist can prove
the adaptive value of sweets and fats by burning them� just as the body
does� and measuring the energy released. But cheesecake is a kind of
perversion of that process. "What we do with cheesecake is we start off
with the fact that the brain is tickled by certain kinds of pleasure. We
concentrate them, purify them, pack 'em together to give ourselves a big
sensory wallop. We give ourselves pleasure by taking advantage of
preexisting pleasure buttons."

Many parts of the brain participate in music making. Musical sounds are
processed in the auditory cortex (yellow). Pathways then carry music to
areas of the brain that perform (green), anticipate harmonic and melodic
changes (pink), feel and remember (orange), and read (blue).
Based on an illustration by Mark Jude Tramo, Science, Vol. 291, January 5,
2001.
By the same token, Pinker says, the pleasure we take in music has less to
do with its adaptive value than with the value of the pleasure buttons it
pushes. The words and rhythms in music take advantage of our propensity for
language. The melodies in music may just be elaborations of the simple
sounds we make to convey emotion� sighing, laughing, crying, and cooing. Or
they may resemble natural sounds (rushing water, birdsong) that were
important to human survival. "We know that the auditory system of the brain
has to make sense of all the sounds pouring into the ear at once," Pinker
says. "People listen hard to try to hear the animal call against the
background of the rustling leaves and the other human voices. Maybe music
gives you an artificial stimulus that's so easy to carve into components
that the brain thinks, 'Aha! I really understand what's going on in the
world.' Or maybe it's a combination of all of those."

Pinker agrees that lullabies could be adaptive: They may reinforce certain
natural soothing sounds that send a signal to relax. But he has
reservations. "If all music were mothers singing to babies, I would accept
that theory," he says. "But that's a fraction of all music. And it doesn't
explain why a 17-year-old listens to heavy metal."

Not surprisingly, Pinker's views have made him something of a whipping boy
in certain musicological circles. At a recent conference on the biological
foundations of music at Rockefeller University in New York City, speaker
after speaker rose to denounce the analysis in Pinker's most recent book,
How the Mind Works. Pinker has long championed the evolutionary roots of
language, Trehub says, although "we don't have any more evidence that links
language in any direct way to survival; all we have is the belief that it's
likely to promote survival." Definitive proof will always be elusive, she
says; yet the evidence for music as a survival tool is all around us. "When
you have something that's in every possible culture and in every historical
period, you have to ask yourself: Why? If it's an accident, why did this
accident happen everywhere?"

Even if music isn't rooted in evolution, there is something about its sheer
power to heal and revive the human spirit that seems to set it apart from
other arts. In one of his scholarly studies on music and the brain,
neurologist Oliver Sacks noted that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
continued to improvise at the piano long after he had been rendered mute,
demented, and partially paralyzed by tertiary syphilis. Sacks has also
testified to the uncanny gift that music has for drawing people out of
comas and catatonic states.

No place better demonstrates this power than New York's Beth Abraham health
center in the Bronx, home to the Institute for Music and Neurologic
Function. Here, twice a week, music therapist David Ramsey plays host to
stroke patients who can no longer speak. But they can sing.

One Wednesday morning in the middle of winter, Bertha, a 67-year-old
patient with thick glasses and thinning gray hair, sits silently in a
wheelchair with a yellow blanket over her knees. Ramsey, a sprightly man of
seemingly infinite patience, strides in and says hello. Bertha only smiles
faintly: A left-hemisphere stroke has left her all but paralyzed. Beside
her sits Keith, a Nigerian-born former university professor in his fifties
who until recently refused to leave his room. When Ramsey greeted him,
Keith tried to respond, but his words were slurred and indistinct. He, too,
has suffered a left-brain stroke.

"Music: companion of joy, balm for sorrow," wrote the painter Vermeer. At
Beth Abraham in the Bronx, the balm of music therapy coaxes even stroke
victims like these to sing.
There's a sadness to the scene that is all too familiar, one that's
repeated every day in hospital rooms and nursing home corridors across the
country. But when Ramsey picks up his guitar, the room transforms. "Hello.
How are you today," Keith and Bertha sing, as the first three chords ring
out. Their voices are quavering and tentative at first but seem to gather
strength with every measure. "I am feeling fine, thank you. It's good to
see you again." Soon they've launched into a repertoire of familiar tunes
with a gusto that seems to belie the miserable weather outside. "O what a
beautiful morning! O what a beautiful day!" Over on a bench along the wall,
two bearded visiting professors and a shy young student pick up maracas and
start to sing along: "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me
happy when skies are gray."

Watching them sing� this man and woman so recently incapable of speech�
it's hard not to believe there's something in music that runs deeper than
speech, something that reaches places mere language can't get to. "The
patients, as soon as they see that they can sing, that they can
communicate, they break into tears," says Renato Rozental, a neuroscientist
at New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "How is music doing
this? I personally don't know."

Rozental plans to use MRIs to study precisely what goes on in these
patients' brains. It's believed that healthy areas of the brain compensate
for injured parts, enabling the patients to sing. But he knows his work
will offer only crude answers. "There are a lot of myths and dreams about
music," he says. "The point is that it works." And here even Pinker is
willing to concede: "I suspect that music still is a mystery, and we
shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that we understand it. I think it
genuinely is an unsolved problem, which is all the more reason not to
accept glib explanations without making sure they really cut the mustard,
in terms of science."

Animal Music
The Thai Elephant Orchestra recently issued its debut CD. Played on
traditional Thai instruments� slit drums, gongs, and large xylophonelike
renats� the elephants' symphony, which is accompanied by the animals'
haunting calls, sounds a little like the clatter of church bells ringing.
The question is obvious: Are the elephants making music, or is it just
noise? One can't tell for sure, yet many animals sing songs with patterns
remarkably similar to those found in human music.

The sounds made by humpback whales, for instance, follow a familiar human
form: a statement of theme, an embellishment, and then a return to a
slightly modified version of the original theme. The intervals between
notes resemble those found in human musical scales, and humpback songs
contain repeated, rhyming refrains.

Birds use a plethora of well-known musical forms. The canyon wren's trill
cascades down the musical scale just like the opening of Chopin's
"Revolutionary" �tude. The songs of the wood thrush accurately follow the
traditional Western musical scale. Male palm cockatoos in northern
Australia court females by using twigs shaped into drumsticks to bang on
hollow logs.

Such evidence suggests that humans did not invent music: It may predate us
by tens of millions of years, and it may stimulate deep, primitive parts of
the brain� the source, perhaps, of its deep, emotional pull. "Sound
production has been part of animal repertoires forever and ever," says
Jelle Atema, a flute-playing marine biologist who studies animal signaling
at the Boston University Marine Program. "If that represents music for
those animals, then we are the latecomers."