CHAPTER 3
Joy
or “Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut”
At one time or another, all of us are filled with a sense of giddy, unrestrainable joy. It could be the first sunny day after a long winter; the first glimpse of a recovering loved one we had thought near death; a three-year-old finding the teddy bear that had been missing for months underneath the bed. It can come for no reason at all, just waking up in the morning and feeling good. It can be the result of random chemical perturbations in the brain or external changes in fortune. It is a natural occurrence, an almost unconscious drive to celebrate. In Chapter 1, I mentioned poems and songs celebrating life’s little moments—the joy of biting into a garden-fresh tomato, of seeing your newborn take her first steps, of learning for the first time that that special someone loves you back. The natural reaction is to sing, jump, dance, shout—all things that are part of standard music-dance in all societies. Formulating these feelings into a coherent structure makes them into a song or a dance, but even without such form, they are music-dance.
Two great contemporary songwriters, Sting and Rodney Crowell, both feel that the very first songs humans sang must have been songs to express joy.
Sting dropped by to visit my laboratory when his band the Police were on tour in the summer of 2007. I told him about The World in Six Songs and he said that he’d like to trade ideas about the origins of music. We met up again that fall in Barcelona, where the Police world tour was continuing.
“I think the first song was just abstract fun with sound. You know, opening your mouth and going ‘Aaaaa Ooooo Aaaaa Eeeee Aye!’ And once you’ve developed that as a sense of play, or a sense of opening the trachea and breathing—putting stuff out in the atmosphere—then songs come from there. But they’re essentially fun; it’s fun to make those sounds. I’ve noticed that when I sing in concerts, just playing with vowels, there’s a shamanic element to sound. Magical—creating a mood of a numinous feeling of connection to everything.”
“Sound is different than sight,” I offered, “because when you see things, it feels like they’re out there, but when you hear them it feels like they’re in here.” I pointed to my head.
“Yes—sound joins the inner world to the outer world. What I do in the live Police show a lot is I use a couple of vowels with the audience …”
“Ee-oh-oh.”
“Yes, I use ‘ee-oh’ a lot. In Italian it means ‘me.’ I don’t know what that says about my psychology! But it’s something that the audience clearly gets off on. And it’s a simple vowel thing—it creates this bond, it creates this link between us all. And you can fill the whole stadium with it. I don’t know whether it’s meaningless or not, but it definitely has some sort of power—and it’s not personal power. The thing itself has a power, has a sense of connection. They’re probably the most effective songs, really.”
“You do that in ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,’ and in ‘De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.’”
“Yes, and you’ll hear me do it to night in ‘Walkin’ on the Moon’ and another song too. It’s powerful. People relate to it; they feel the joy and the magic. So getting back, I think that the first ‘song’ was a caveman just playing with sound and other people joined him and they liked it—it felt good. And he would have been moving—there can’t be any music without movement.”
“I think songs spring from the surrounding environment, and are archetypal,” Rodney told me. “I think the first song was probably the caveman equivalent of ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ If you go back to cavemen—if they were going to illustrate life using sound—the sun would be the first thing they’d want to sing about, and they’d sing about if joyfully …. You give music to what you feel in your senses, to your sensibilities, your perceptions; I would walk out on a day like today and the first thing I would notice was what the sun was doing. That would be my first song. Of course the Jimmie Davis song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ is about a person, but for a caveman, a song about the sun is really a song about Creation. The sun is this ball of fire; it’s light and heat and ultimately represents survival. What we do as songwriters, as creators, is to acknowledge our surroundings. We try to do with music what painters do with paint.”
Joy songs are found in every corner of human experience where we might look for them. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was an immigrant to the United States from Germany. Like many, she came to the U.S. to escape terrible tyranny and oppression, leaving a country where her parents were shot by soldiers right in front of her eyes as they sat in their living room. She told me when I was eight that she woke early every morning to sing “God Bless America.” She sang it for me every time I saw her, her voice trembling through her thick accent, her body shaking and overflowing with joy and thankfulness that she had been saved, that she had lived long enough to see her freedom and the freedom of six grandchildren.
When she turned eighty, my mother and I bought her a little eighty-dollar electronic keyboard. She didn’t know how to play it, but we attached pieces of masking tape with numbers on them to show her the correct order of the notes for that song. Within six months she had learned to plink it out, and she played and sang “God Bless America” every morning until she died at ninety-six. She sang it as if her life depended on it. And maybe it did. She eventually learned how to play a rudimentary harmony. I wonder if having music prolonged her life; it certainly made what time she had more purposeful and meaningful. Neuroscientists have recently found that playing music can modulate levels of dopamine, the so-called feel-good hormone in the brain. The exact mechanism by which this happens is not well understood, but the secretion of feel-good chemicals in the brain in response to playing and listening to music points to an ancient and evolutionarily advantageous connection between music and mood. As I showed in Chapter 2, those of our ancestors who were able to communicate with music, and who enjoyed musical communication, may well have been at a distinct advantage in their ability to forge social bonds, diffuse tense social situations (that might otherwise have led to combat and death), and convey their emotional states to those around them. What we know for certain is that increases in dopamine lead to elevated mood and help to boost the immune system. The joy of playing music, the sound and sense of mastery, may well have played Grandma into her late nineties.
Her husband, my grandpa Max, bought a large conga drum on a trip to Cuba before I was born, and whenever he came over, he would sing songs to Grandma while beating his two hands on the skin of the drum. I know now that they had a difficult and stormy marriage, but all I remember of it is the look that came on her face when he sang to her and played that drum—a look of utter enchantment and forgiveness. He would sing—badly, by everyone else’s account—and she would melt, the lines in her brow relaxing until she would start to laugh, and gently stroke his hair. The ebullient joy he brought to his singing and drumming were infectous and disarming.
Joy songs today are found everywhere from the scat singing of Ella Fitzgerald to that of the Azerbaijani singer Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, from “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” to Ren & Stimpy extolling the virtues of their favorite toy, in “Log Blues”:1
What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs
Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack and fits on your back?
It’s Log, Log, Log!
It’s Log, Log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s Log, Log, it’s better than bad, it’s good!
Everyone wants a Log! You’re gonna love it, Log!
Come on and get your Log! Everyone needs a Log!
In fact, advertisers in the last thirty years have become the chief creators and purveyors of pure joy music, as they vie to have our good moods and positive neural chemistry associated with their products. Based on their jingles, we are meant to believe that pure, undiluted joy will come to those who eat Peter Paul candies (“Sometimes you feel like a nut—sometimes you don’t”), drink Pepsi (“It’s the Pepsi generation, comin’ at ya, goin’ strong/ Put yourself behind a Pepsi/If you’re living, you belong”), or drive a Chevrolet (“See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet!”). The company that manufactured the children’s toy Slinky turned a spring into a perennial children’s favorite, largely on the basis of their catchy song! (And it was this song that Ren & Stimpy were parodying when they tried to show that even a log could be a fun toy if given the right song.)
The prominance, if not dominance, of joy songs in the commercial sphere today points to a plausible role for them during evolutionary time frames. The group member who could make others feel good, either through grooming, sexual activity, providing more food, and so on, was one who became valued and could ascend to the position of group leader, in which case the community would work to meet his needs for him. Communication by sound allowed a potential leader to spread his influence around to many more at a time than could be done by one-on-one grooming.
Confucius reportedly said, “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” Two thousand years later, Nietzsche—who on most other matters couldn’t be farther removed from the ideas of Confucius—wrote “My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music.” Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to “witch doctors,” from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul (Samuel I, 16:1–23), and the ancient Greeks (in particular Zenocrates, Sarpander, and Arien) used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illnesses.2 Music-as-therapy was also employed by such geo graphically disparate cultures as the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Native Americans. Health benefits have been described whether patients sit and listen to music, improvise tunes, write songs, discuss lyrics, perform compositions, or actively participate in the production of music. Music is claimed to be beneficial for patients of any age, ethnic or religious background, or stage of illness.
Before getting too swept up in this, however, let’s look at the science behind it. Scientists are understandably skeptical of claims that are not properly substantiated, or of findings that don’t reveal the mechanism underlying the observation. For example, we know that singing releases endorphins (again, a “feel good” hormone) but why is not known, and this lack of a causal understanding makes many scientists uncomfortable about the connection between singing and endorphins. Could it be primarily an artifact of the breathing involved? If it is specific to singing, why would this be so?
As the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus reminds us, the brain has been shaped by evolution and adaptations that arose independently of one another to solve specific problems.3 Among other things, brain adaptations occurred in order to help us reach core goals of finding food, avoiding disease and predators, conserving energy, circumventing danger, seeking physical comfort (including homeostasis to protect our bodies and organs), encouraging reproduction, and ensuring the successful maturation of off-spring. To this list David Huron adds adaptations such as the ability to anticipate the future, solve puzzles, distinguish animate from inanimate objects, identify friends and enemies, and avoid being manipulated or deceived.4
The way in which the brain encourages us to pursue adaptive goals is that it has assembled a system of rewards and punishments through evolution. These rewards and punishments are affected through our emotions—what I defined in Chapter 2 as neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. In other words, emotions and motivation are two sides of the same evolutionary coin. We experience positive or negative emotions as a consequence of the particular neurochemical soup that is in our brains at any particular time, and these emotions cause us to act (or refrain from acting) in particular ways. Pain is one of nature’s ways of preventing us from doing things that are harmful; plea sure is a way to motivate us to undertake actions that will increase our adaptive fitness—reproducing, eating, sleeping, and so on. Recall Daniel Dennett’s argument that we don’t find babies cute because they are instrinsically cute; rather, we are the descendants of people who nurtured and protected their babies and were intrinsically rewarded (through cuteness detectors, let’s say) for doing so.5 If we find the smell of rotten food or feces disgusting, it is not because they really and truly smell bad (in any objective sense), but because those of our ancestors who had a genetic mutation that caused them to avoid these things (by co-opting their olfactory sense) were those who fared better in the genetics arms race to pass on their genes. When we find something pleasurable or displeasurable, it is often because tens of thousands of years of brain evolution have selected for those emotions; natural selection has favored them because they led to motivational states that served our ancestors well in the competition for resources, mates, and health.6
In “Heard It Through the Grapevine,” when Marvin Gaye sings:
People say believe half of what you see
Son, and none of what you hear
I can’t help but bein’ confused—if it’s true please tell me dear
he is expressing skepticism about his relationship, an evolutionarily adaptive trait if experienced under reasonable circumstances and in reasonable amounts, because it is maladaptive in the long run for a male to care for a female who might be mating with another man—in effect, the song’s protagonist might be tricked into sharing his resources with a child that is not his.
The emotional flip side of the song might well be “Suspicious Minds” (as recorded by Elvis Presley):7
Why can’t you see
What you’re doing to me
When you don’t believe a word I say?
We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds.
Too much suspicion erodes the foundation of trust necessary for most long-term human cooperative ventures. The crucial point of all this is that suspicion, trust, conciliation, and even love—indeed all emotions—are products of evolution by natural selection. David Huron sums it up eloquently: “The only emotions we experience are emotions that have arisen through natural selection as adaptations that enhance survival. Jealousy, embarrassment, hunger, disgust, ecstasy, suspicion, indignation, sympathy, itchiness, love—all are adaptations …. Nature doesn’t build mental devices whose purpose isn’t related to adaptive fitness.”8
How does music fit into the plea sure and fitness story? There is no debating that music can induce plea sure, and that those same chemicals help to boost the immune system. But the neuro-physiological machinery involved in plea sure is highly complex. Although there do exist discrete “plea sure centers” in the brain, dozens of neurotransmitters and brain regions contribute to feelings of plea sure.9 On the research side, while there are many reported cases of music having a positive, and sometimes extraordinarily powerful, effect on the ill, there have been few true experiments performed to document this. The sheer number of anecdotes is impressive, but does not constitute scientific proof, any more than the sheer number of reports of alien abductions constitutes proof of little green men conducting grisly experiments aboard metal saucers that hover above Kansas and Nebraska. (Why the alien abductions seem to happen with greater frequency in the Plains states is another mystery calling out for an explanation.)
Scientists are in the business of wanting proof for everything, and I find myself caught somewhere in the metaphorical middle on this issue. As a musician, I’m reminded on a daily basis of the utterly ineffable, indescribable powers of music. I’ve also witnessed the healing power of music firsthand. In old people’s homes and convalescent hospitals, when people have lost their memory due to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, or other degenerative brain trauma, music is one of the last things to go. Old people who are otherwise unable to remember the names of their spouse or children, or even what year it is, can be brought arrestingly back to focus by hearing the music of their youth—songs that they sing along with, tap their feet to, and can remember all the notes and lyrics of. I’ve seen patients who could barely move, people with Parkinson’s who couldn’t walk, who can suddenly walk, trot, dance, and skip as soon as I start playing Glenn Miller or Artie Shaw on the rest-home CD player. There are reported cases of children with Down syndrome who can’t tie their shoes unless the sequence is set to music.
This ineffable power of music shows up not just in listeners but also in creators of music. The great songwriters and improvisers talk about not so much creating music, but having it written through them, as though the music comes from outside their bodies and their heads, and they are merely the conduit for it. Many great musicians, particularly in Third World cultures, reach a state of total ecstasy, a trance state, while playing music, in which their minds and bodies seem to be possessed by other-wordly forces. I’ve also felt this, whether improvising onstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with Mel Tormé, or writing incidental music for the film Repo Man. In describing the writing of one of my favorite songs of hers (1990’s “What We Really Want”), Rosanne Cash told me “It felt like I had just stuck up my hand and caught the song like you’d catch a ball in a catcher’s mitt—like it was out there all along waiting for me to grab it.” Our scientific theories have to be able to reconcile this common experience and the strong intuition that music is—dare I say it?—magical.
On the research front, many of the studies on the effectiveness of music therapy were not performed according to rigorous scientific standards, and so their claims remain unproven. This situation parallels the unfortunate history of psychic research. One of the most crucial features of a rigorous experiment is the use of the comparison or control condition. In essence, we need to ask the following question: If there were no effect at all from the thing I’m studying, would this outcome have happened anyway? Too many music therapy experiments had inadequate controls, meaning that we aren’t shown what might have happened to the people in the experiment without music therapy.
Consider, for example, that out of twenty people who complain of headaches, a certain number are going to get better anyway if you just wait a few hours. If we play soothing classical music to twenty people with tension headaches and six of them say their headaches went away, we don’t know if some or all of those six headaches would have just gone away on their own. A control group in such an experiment should be similar in all respects to the people we’re studying, and get all the same treatment except for the one thing we’re interested in. If we give ten headache sufferers classical music and have them sit in a comfortable, sunlit room, and we give another ten headache sufferers no classical music but have them sit in an uncomfortable, darkened room, we have made the mistake of varying three parameters at once: We can’t determine which of those parameters had the effect.
In one published study on music therapy, a group of Korean researchers took stroke survivors and gave them an eight-week program of physical therapy that involved synchronized movements to music.10 The patients recovered a wider range of motion and flexibility compared to a control group. So far so good. But the control group had no therapy—no personal contact, no movement (with or without music), no one rooting for them or telling them that they would get better. We don’t know now whether the benefits to the first group came from the music, the movement, or simply the good feeling that came from knowing that a medical professional was looking out for and following their progress. Health improvements have been observed with far less.
I mentioned psychic research, and it is an irresistible subject. Some of the most interesting experiences I’ve had in my entire life were serving on review panels for scientists who had applied for funding to undertake research on psychic phenomena. I was asked to review their pi lot data, findings from preliminary experiments that they felt showed evidence of psychic phenomena. In every single case, a lack of careful scientific controls rendered the data uninterpretable. In one study I reviewed, the person who was “reading minds” could only answer questions correctly if the experimenter already knew the answer and was allowed to interact with the “mind reader.” If the experimenter was silenced, the effect went completely away. I don’t think that the pair were trying to hoodwink anyone, but a parsimonious explanation—and a review of the experimental transcripts—suggests strongly that the experimenter was providing subtle, if unconscious clues to the “mind reader.”
What I found so interesting was the tenacity with which people, even trained scientists, held onto their beliefs about the supernatural when confronted with evidence that the experiments were flawed. First, here’s an example of how probability theory pertains to psychic claims. Suppose you have a standard deck of fifty-two playing cards. A friend of yours tries to guess the suit (hearts, clubs, diamonds, or spades) of each card—you can either look at the card (and try to psychically transmit the information) or you can keep it turned down until after your friend guesses. Now without working through a formal mathematical/probabilistic treatment of the problem, it should be clear that if your friend only guesses and has no psychic ability at all, she will guess a few of the cards right. In fact, in the long run, she will tend to get 25 percent of them right.11 It is the function of probability and statistics to help specify just how many she would have to get right for us to know, with reasonable certainty, that she wasn’t guessing.
While reviewing one such experiment in Silicon Valley, California, a very complicated experiment with many different facets, I pointed out to the lead research scientist (who held a Ph.D. in physics) that the chances of guessing a right answer in his psychic experiment were one our of four and he agreed. I pointed out that his best subject, after testing twenty people, had only gotten one out of four correct. He agreed to that. I suggested that she might have been only guessing.
“No!” he insisted. “She told me that she was really concentrating.”
I asked what his explanation was that she got a meager 25 percent correct, the same number that would have been guessed by a machine generating random numbers.
“She showed her psychic powers on 25 percent of the trials—what more do you want?” he demanded. He was getting agitated now. He started to speak very slowly. “Psychic powers can come and go like anything else. Even Artur Rubinstein doesn’t play Beethoven perfectly every time he sits down at the piano.” He knew my weakness.
“She had her powers on those 25 percent of the trials. And on the other 75 percent of the trials, the ones she got wrong, those are the ones where she was guessing!” I held my ground. If she had been truly guessing on those 75 percent of the trials, she would have gotten 25 percent of them right. He would have none of that. He had now stood up from the table and was red in the face with fists clenched, and his knuckles were turning a kind of ghostly whitish yellow. He seemed to be trying to stare me down.
“I have an idea,” I said at last. “Why don’t you have your subjects tell you which trials they’re guessing on, and which they really, really know. If your subject can get 25 percent of the suits right and can say ahead of time, before she gets any feedback, that those and only those trials are the ones where she is using psychic power, then I think we might have something.”
“We’ve done hundreds of experiments already using our existing method. We have all the data. Why should we go back to the experiments again just to satisfy one $@%* like you? I know that she has psychic powers, she knows it. Why can’t you admit it, Dan? Why do you have to be so negative all the time!”
The professional magician and skeptic James Randi has offered a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can prove the existence of psychic phenomena, anytime and anywhere, anyone who can read minds, predict the future, influence the toss of a coin, or divine what playing card is about to be turned up, without using magic. No one has even come forward to try to claim the prize, but the money is in a certified escrow account, there for the taking. A researcher must simply follow the protocols designed to distinguish flimflam from fact.
Which brings me to the healing power of music. There are mountains of data on the effectiveness of music on illness, but not all reliable or reputable. Trying to separate the good from the bad would be enough work to earn some enterprising young investigator a Ph.D. thesis. If I sound skeptical or negative, I do not mean to denigrate the many fine music therapists who are helping people. Indeed, the American Music Therapy Association is just as interested as I am in weeding out those who are fakers, exploiters, and just plain incompetent. By the association’s own definition, music therapy is the “evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional …” [emphasis mine]. Certified music therapy is used for pain and stress reduction, motivation, anger management, as an adjunct to physical therapy in the case of motor difficulties, and for a variety of other purposes.
In just the past three or four years, however, an emerging body of evidence is pointing scientists in new directions. There have only been a dozen or so careful, rigorous studies and so I don’t want to overstate the case, but they seem to point to what the ancient shamans already knew: music—and particularly joyful music—affects our health in fundamental ways. Listening to, and even more so singing or playing, music can alter brain chemistry associated with well-being, stress reduction, and immune system fortitude. In one study, people were simply given singing lessons and their blood chemistry was measured immediately afterward. Serum concentrations of oxytocin increased significantly.12, 13 Oxytocin is the hormone released during orgasm that causes us to feel good. When people have orgasms together and oxytocin is released in both, it causes them to feel strong bonds toward one another. “I feel good/I knew that I would/I got you.” You can see how this would be an evolutionary adaptation. Because the act of lovemaking (at least in the pre–birth control world) often led to pregnancy, it would be adaptive for the man and woman to feel a sense of connection, because that would increase the chances that the man would help raise the child, in turn significantly increasing the child’s chances of survival. Significantly, also, oxytocin has just been found to increase trust between people.14 Why oxytocin is released when people sing together is probably related evolutionarily to the social bonding function of music we saw in the previous chapter.15
Looking beyond mental health to physical health, immunoglobulin A (IgA) is an important antibody that is needed for fighting colds, flus, and other infections of the mucous system. Several recent studies show that IgA levels increased following various forms of music therapy.16 In another study, levels of melatonin, norepinephrine, and epinephrine increased during a four-week course of music therapy, and then returned to pretherapy levels after the music therapy ended.17 Melatonin (a naturally occuring hormone in the brain) helps to regulate the body’s natural sleep/waking cycle and has been shown effective in treating seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression.18 It is also putatively linked to the body’s immune system because some researchers believe that it increases cytokine production, which in turn signals T-cells to travel to the site of an infection.19 Both norepinephrine and epinephrine affect alertness and arousal, and activate reward centers in the brain. All this from a song.
Music listening also directly affects serotonin, the well-known neurotransmitter that is very closely associated with the regulation of mood. (Prozac and a number of other recent antidepressants act on the serotonin system and belong to the class of pharmaceuticals called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.) Seratonin levels were shown to increase in real time during listening to pleasant, but not unpleasant music.20 And different genres of music caused different neurochemical activity! Techno music increased levels of plasma norepinephrine (NE), growth hormone (GH), adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and β-endorphin (β-EP) concentrations, all chemicals closely associated with improvements in human immune function.21 Techno was also shown to increase cortisol levels (not good for the immune system, but outweighed perhaps by the other increases), while meditative music decreased cortisol and noradrenaline. In the same study, rock music was shown to cause decreases in prolactin (at least in this group of techno-loving listeners), a hormone associated with feeling good.22
We all suffer from stresses today that are very different from the stressors experienced by our ancestors, those very ancestors whose lifestyles caused the changes in DNA that we call evolution. When changes in lifestyle or environmental conditions created a subset of people who were better adapted to those early conditions, natural selection teaches us that those people were the ones who survived to pass on their DNA. This whole process can take a lot of time, thousands or tens of thousands of years. In other words, many parts of our DNA were selected for by evolution to cope with the world the way it was five thousand or even fifty thousand years ago. As biologist Robert Sapolesky points out, we are living in bodies and thinking with brains that were designed to solve problems that almost none of us has today.
In ancestral time periods, if a lion approached us, we became stressed. Cortisol levels shot up. Our amygdala and basal ganglia set us running—or at least those of us who managed to survive. (Many of those early humans who, for one reason or another, didn’t run or otherwise escape the lion didn’t live to tell about it or to have children.) Running uses up glucose and helps us to “burn off” the cortisol our adrenal cortex produces. Today, though, when our boss yells at us, when we have a big exam that we haven’t prepared for, or when someone cuts us off while driving, our adrenal cortex still produces cortisol—the stress hormone—but we don’t have an opportunity to burn it off. Our legs and shoulders tense up to run in accordance with an ancient evolutionary formula, but … we sit there. Our shoulder muscles stay tense but we are not swinging our arms, and so there is no release.
All that cortisol temporarily interrupts our digestive system—a body in flight needs to allocate its energy to movement and agility, not digestion—and so today, following stress that doesn’t require literal fight or flight, we end up with stomachaches, gastroenteritis, ulcers. Increased cortisol is associated with decreases in production of IgA, and so our immune system takes a hit. (This is why people who are stressed are more likely to get sick.) In contemporary society, increased cortisol levels (and decreased IgA) have been found in experiments conducted during some of the most psychologically stressful situations humans face: students before exams, professional coaches during athletic events, and air traffic controllers during their duty cycle. Getting tense in the face of a threat was adaptive for our ancestors; it is maladaptive for us when those stressors are long-term, chronic, and don’t require an acute physical response.
So cortisol suppresses our immune system temporarily, marshaling all the resources it can for the task at hand (or at foot as the case may be). This may well be one of the reasons why we move our feet or snap our fingers when we hear music. To the extent that music activates our action system—motor sequences and our sympathetic nervous system—our hands and feet become the instruments of that activation. Through these movements we burn off excess energy that could otherwise be toxic. In a sort of neurochemical dance, music increases our alertness through modulation of norepinephrine and epinephrine and taps into our motor response system through cortisol production, all the while bolstering our immune system through musical modulation of IgA, serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and β-endorphin (β-EP). Some of the energy we feel during music playing and listening is then expended in the increased mental activity (the visual images that many people report accompanying musical activity, or other mental activity such as planning, ruminating, or simply aesthetic appreciation). Finger snapping, hand clapping, and foot tapping help us burn off the rest, unless of course we actually get up and dance, perhaps the most natural reaction, but one that has been socialized out of many Western adults.
But why does music—a collection of sounds—tap into all these chemical and activity centers of the brain? What might have been the evolutionary benefit? First, it is important to reframe the question as concerning music-dance—not as simply a collection of sounds we make or perceive, but as an integrated cross-modal experience of movement, synchrony, sound, and perceptual organization, and again, this is because music and dance were virtually inseparable across evolutionary time scales. Second, the musical brain didn’t evolve in isolation from other mental and physical attributes. In other words, early or protohumans didn’t suddenly end up with music-dance and no other cognitive strengths. The musical brain brought with it all the facets of human consciousness itself. In addition to social bonding, fundamental to the experience of early humans was communicating their emotional states to others—the expression of joy through music-dance.
Unrestrained joy usually accompanies a positive outlook. In situations where success isn’t assured, those with a positive outlook are more likely to achieve it than those with a defeatist attitude. Of course there is a delicate balance. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign (quoting the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whose words have also been used by the Catholic Church in offical writings), “Hope is not blind optimism.” An overoptimistic person is going to experience a large number of failures and find he has expended considerable energy for no rewards. On the other hand, the defeatist (or pessimist) is going to forgo activities that in many cases would have yielded a substantial positive payoff. The best adaptive strategy for hunting, foraging, or even mating has been shown to be the adoption of an attitude that is slightly over the halfway mark, on the optimistic (joyful) side of realistic. Music has a twofold role to play here, physical and mental. First, joyful music makes us feel better, it pumps us up, picks us up out of the doldrums. Second, joyful music can serve as a model—we look to the creator of that music as a mental inspiration and try to be like him or her.
The clearest case of the evolutionary advantage of optimism might be the caveman who is uncertain whether that glance he just received from a cavewoman was a “come hither” or a “get lost” look. The caveman who walked away may well have lost an opportunity gained by his rival who treated that ambiguous look as at least worth investigating. As a species, we have evolved a healthy distrust for people who are too optimistic—they may be deluded nutjobs—and we’ve evolved a reasonable attraction to people who are self-confident and optimistic—after all, they may know something we don’t, and things might just work out well for them. “I’d do well to hitch my wagon to his,” we think. The optimist thinks a brewing conflict might be solved by diplomacy. The pessimist thinks fighting is inevitable, and those thoughts may bring about his own destruction. Our brains evolved the responses to joyful music making that they did because joy can be a reliable indicator of a person’s mental and physical health.
In his groundbreaking book Sweet Anticipation, David Huron spells out how the musical brain might have helped to prepare humans for survival.23 To what he has already written, I would add that it also served to relieve stress through the release of the very same neurochemicals that helped to ensure survival in hazardous, ancient environments. The ideas are important enough that I think they’re worth repeating here in some detail. Huron’s thesis is built around a five-step process that he calls ITPRA. I present here a four-stage version of his model, which I think is more parsimonious.
The core idea is that music gives the brain opportunities to explore, exercise, play with, and train those mental, physical, and social muscles necessary for the maintanance and formation of society as we know it. It offers a safe forum in which we can practice and hone skills that are vital through the life span. In my stripped down version (with apologies to David Huron), TRIP stands for Tension, Reaction, Imagination, and Prediction.
Imagine, David invites us, that we witness a lion attack. The next time we see a lion, we will understandably experience Tension. (If we didn’t, we might act complacently and end up as his lunch.) The tension begins a cascade of electrochemical processes in our brain and spinal cord, causing us to React. If that reaction allows us to survive, we may then spend some of our time Imagining—recalling the event in our mind’s eye (and ear) and planning appropriate reactions in the event of a future attack. Part of this process might entail imagining what future confrontations might look like, how we might Predict a possible attack under different situations.
Now learning about the world by narrowly escaping from lions, rattlesnakes, or angry neighboring tribespeople is not the most efficient way to acquire survival information. Indeed, the topic of Chapter 5 is how particular kinds of songs—knowledge songs—can encode and embed such essential information in a way that is easily remembered and transmitted across time. But before there can be knowledge songs, there must be music, or at least the cognitive foundations for it, an adaptive motivation for the musical brain to come into existence in the first place. This is where music meets TRIP. What if we humans had a way that we could invoke tension in a safe, nonthreatening context, react to it, imagine new forms of tension and our reactions to those, and prepare a repertoire of responses, all from the safety of the campsite, from the safety of our minds? Music doesn’t have to be the only adaptation that provides this; it only needs to be a plausible adaptation, even one among many possible, for this theory of its origins to hold.
Music theorists since Aristoxenes and Aristotle, through Leonard Meyer, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Narmour, and Robert Gjerdingen, have talked about tension as being one of the core properties of music. Virtually all theories of music assume that musical tension changes during the course of the piece, involving increases and decreases in a cyclic dance of tension and release. In a paper published a few years ago in the journal Music Perception, my students Bradley Vines (now a research scientist at UC Davis) and Regina Nuzzo (now a professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC) and I described this property of music in terms of physics—Newtonian mechanics specifically.24 We compared music to a coiled spring like the one you might have attached to your garage door. Pull or push the spring and it tries to come back to its resting position.
Musicians and composers are speaking metaphorically of course when they talk about tension and release in music. But across many studies, the meta phor seems to have consistency of meaning, even among non-musicians and across very different cultures. We seem hardwired to “get” the relationship, however metaphorical, between musical tension and the tension that we feel in physical objects (like springs), in the body (as in muscles), and in social situations (as at high school dances). These common life experiences among humans cause a convergence of meaning for “tension” and “release” across individuals when referring to music. The cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard reminds us that the human mind co-evolved with the physical world in such a way that it has incorporated certain physical laws. No human infant is surprised when objects fall downward—gravity has become incorporated into the hardwiring of the human brain from birth. Indeed, infants as young as a few weeks show surprise when objects are experimentally manipulated to “fall” up, or when one billiard ball hits another and the second does not move appropriately.
In general, tension tends to built up during music to a peak, after which the tension is released and subsides, often rapidly.25 This is what gives us that “aahhhhh” feeling at the end of a piece of music. Symphonies (from the standard-practice period of classical music), perhaps more so than other musical forms we enjoy today, are particularly formulated to create this sense of dynamism, of tension and ultimate, rewarding release in the last few moments. In performances of Indian classical music, the performer teases the listener by circling just above and below a stable tone, delaying the resolution as long as possible.26 When the resolution comes, members of the audience shake their heads and say, “Vah-vah!” Like life, music speeds up and slows down, it breathes, it has peaks and valleys of emotion, it engages our attention more or less strongly, it holds us then lets us go, and then picks us up again.
You can think of that stretched garage-door spring as containing potential energy—it wants to move; physicists also call this stored energy. When it starts to return to its original position, it is showing kinetic energy, the energy of movement. Similarly in music, composers and musicians create both potential and kinetic musical energy through a variety of means, principally involving pitch, duration, and timbre changes. But the “springiness” of music tension comes from our brains not from a physical object. No musical note is intrinsically or inherently “tense,” rather, tension comes from expectations that our brains create based on stylistic norms for music, statistical properties of music, and the notes that we have just previously heard in the musical piece we’re listening to. When we hear a note we didn’t expect, or one that violates standard musical probabilities even in a small way, this is like pulling on the musical tension spring; our brains want the music to return to a more stable position. When we hear the first two notes of the chorus in “Over the Rainbow”—that big octave leap—it feels like someone has pulled a spring in our musical brains.27 The third note simply has to come down in pitch, and of course it does. In fact, the entire chorus of the song can be seen as an intricate and fabulous journey of trying to come to a relaxing resting point from that initial two-note tension. Joni Mitchell stretches the melodic spring several times in her song “Help Me,” and spends the rest of the song allowing that spring to come nearly home, and—as in “Over the Rainbow”—not fully resolving the tension until the end of the song.
The tension in music motivates us to imagine musical scenarios that will come next—to form predictions. When our predictions come true, we feel rewarded and pat ourselves on the back. But we can learn even more when our predictions are not true, if events unfold in a way that is logical but is simply not one we would have thought of before ourselves. When a caveman friend showed another an easier way to find food, the second caveman recognized the value of learning, of expanding his repertoire of “right answers” as adaptive solutions to the problem of acquiring nourishment. Learning new things should feel good in our brains because it is usually adaptive.
Huron argues that music appropriates all of these four TRIP processes (plus another called “appraisal” that I’ve left out). He dissects the Beatles’ song “She Loves You” to illustrate this.28 One of the most clichéd chord sequences in fifties pop music and doo-wop is what musicians call a I-vi-IV-V progression (in the key of G: G Major, E minor, C Major, D Major; sometimes a ii chord is substituted for the IV, that is, A minor, which has two-thirds of the notes in common with C Major). In the first section of the chorus, Huron notes, Lennon and McCartney throw in a C minor where we are expecting to hear a C Major. There is only one note different between a C minor and a C Major chord (E flat instead of E natural), but even non-musicians detect this instantly. The C minor doesn’t last very long and then we are brought to the expected D Major—listeners reappraise the entire sequence, subconsciously of course, and realize that there exists a plausible alternative to the overlearned sequence they expected to hear. The listener, with the composers’ help, has learned something new about the world.
If we think of musical sequences metaphorically as road maps, the point is clear. Caveman Og only knows one way to get to the watering hole and he follows that route every day. One day the route is blocked by a boulder that has fallen right in the middle. Fortunately, Og remembers what his friend Gluzunk showed him—a side trail that also goes to the watering hole. There is not only one way to get from point A to point B. Those of our ancestors who delighted in compiling information such as this—whether in the real world or metaphorically, artistically, musically— were those who were more prepared in the case of contingencies that interfered with attaining their goals.
The process of music listening thus involves tension, our reactions to that tension, our imagining and prediction of where the music is going to go next. All this can be seen as a preparatory activity for the sort of abstract thinking about the world that finding food, shelter, and mates—and escaping dangers—requires. For this to work, our ancestors had to enjoy playing this game of TRIP; they had to enjoy making predictions and then seeing if they were met or not. Remember that emotions (linked to motivation) are the way that our brains reward and punish us for actions that affect our fitness. By random mutation, some of our ancestors may have gotten a squirt of that feel-good hormone dopamine whenever they made successful predictions in the theater of their minds. This would cause them to want to do it again—to spend more time in thought, more time imagining scenarios, turning them over in their minds, playing the game of prediction and resolution over and over again. To the extent that such mental exercises conferred an advantage in the real world, in a relatively short amount of time this adaptation would permeate the population. To paraphrase Dennett, we don’t sing and dance and get songs stuck in our heads because they are intrinsically attractive, memorable, or aesthetically beautiful. Rather, we have the relationship with music we do because those of our ancestors who found it enjoyable to be musical were those who were successful at passing on their genes.
Fundamentally, we have joy songs because moving around, dancing, exercising our bodies and minds is something that was adaptive in evolutionary history. Stretching, jumping, and using sound to communicate felt good because our brains—through natural selection—developed rewards for those behaviors. Joy songs today give us a jolt of good brain chemistry as a biological echo of the importance they held over thousands of years of evolution. “I define joy,” Oprah Winfrey says, “as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace—a connection to what matters.”29 By being able to celebrate our good feelings, sense of well-being, and positive emotions, we were better equipped to share our emotional states with others, a key ingredient in being able to form societies and cooperative groups.