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This essay is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the evolutionary puzzle of music. Section 3 explains why neuroscience research suggests that music is an invention rather than a biological adaptation. Section 4 provides examples of the biological power of music. Section 5 suggests why music can have lasting effects on nonmusical brain functions. Section 6 provides a non-genetic explanation for why music is so pervasive in human culture. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance of a Darwinian perspective for the modern biological study of human music.

It is worth clarifying some points regarding TTM theory’s claim that music can shape brain function. It is obvious that engaging in any humanly-invented activity (e.g., kite flying) changes the brain within individual lifetimes, because learning and memory are instantiated by changes in neural networks, e.g., in the pattern of synaptic connections between neurons. Thus, TTM theory does not simply claim that musical behaviors change the brain. (This is trivially true: even learning a simple tune involves changing brain networks in some way in order to store the memory of the tune.) Nor does TTM theory simply claim that learning music results in lasting structural changes to the brain. (This claim would hardly be novel, given the growing evidence of experience-dependent changes in brain structure caused by learning a musical instrument, e.g., Hyde et al., 2009.) Rather, TTM theory claims that music is a human invention that can have lasting effects on such nonmusical brain functions as language, attention, and executive function, and is concerned with explaining the biological mechanisms underlying these effects.

The qualification of “lasting” effects is important, because this distinguishes TTM theory from theories concerned with the short-term effects of music on other cognitive abilities (e.g., Thompson et al., 2001). That is, TTM theory is concerned with musically driven neurobiological changes that impact other brain functions over the course of months or years, not over the course of a few minutes. In this regard, TTM theory has some parallels to neurobiological theories of reading, another human invention with salient impact on the brain within individual lifetimes (Dehaene and Cohen, 2007). Indeed, reading can be considered another transformative technology of the mind, because it is a human invention built from existing brain systems (such as those supporting visuospatial cognition and language) that impacts a variety of mental abilities (Mar et al., 2008; Patel, 2008:400; Dehaene, 2009).

Of course, music is much older and far more widespread than reading and appeals to humans from infancy. Also, unlike reading skills, basic musical abilities develop without any special instruction (Bigand and Poulin-Charronatt, 2006). These facts make the claim that music is a human invention seem odd. Yet other theories view ancient and universal human communication systems as inventions. For example, Tomasello (2008) has proposed that language originated as an invention based on communicative interactions between primates who had a special socio-cognitive ability for sharing actions and goals with others (“shared intentionality”; see also Lee et al., 2009). In common with such “language as invention” theories, TTM theory proposes that a complex and universal human trait can originate as an invention rather than as a biological adaptation. However, to my knowledge, all “language as invention” theories leave open the possibility that language, once invented, led to co-evolutionary changes in the brain that were aimed at supporting the acquisition of language (cf. Deacon, 1997). Indeed, the idea that our brains have been modified over evolutionary time to support the acquisition of language is favored by at least ten converging lines of evidence (Patel, 2008:358-366). TTM theory, in contrast, posits that there has been no evolutionary modification of our brains specifically aimed at facilitating musical abilities. Instead, music is viewed as a technology that is learned anew by each new generation of human minds. This view is congenial to the tremendous diversity of musical practices that have been described by ethnomusicologists (e.g., Titon, 1996; Nettl and Stone, 1998) and to the seemingly endless growth and development of music as a human art form (Ross, 2007). It is important to note, however, that TTM theory does not amount to the claim that humans are musical blank slates. Since music is theorized as building on preexisting brain functions (such as language and auditory scene analysis The process by which the human auditory system organizes sound into perceptually meaningful elements or sources (Bregman, 1990). ), processing predispositions relevant to these other functions are likely to be reflected in the structure and processing of human music (cf. Reynolds, 2005; Dehaene and Cohen, 2007).

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Source:  OpenStax, Emerging disciplines: shaping new fields of scholarly inquiry in and beyond the humanities. OpenStax CNX. May 13, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11201/1.1
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