The evolution of music and human social capability

Abstract

Music is a core human experience and generative processes reflect cognitive capabilities. Music is often functional because it is something that can promote human well-being by facilitating human contact, human meaning, and human imagination of possibilities, tying it to our social instincts. Cognitive systems also underlie musical performance and sensibilities. Music is one of those things that we do spontaneously, reflecting brain machinery linked to communicative functions, enlarged and diversified across a broad array of human activities. Music cuts across diverse cognitive capabilities and resources, including numeracy, language, and space perception. In the same way, music intersects with cultural boundaries, facilitating our "social self" by linking our shared experiences and intentions. This paper focuses on the intersection between the neuroscience of music, and human social functioning to illustrate the importance of music to human behaviors.

Keywords: cognitive capability; communication; evolution; music; social capability.

Figure 1

Joint social action and music making; musical priming leads to an increase in the number of cooperative players (Kirschner and Tomasello, 2009, 2010).

Figure 2

Neocortex size and social cooperation (Dunbar and Shultz, 2007).

Figure 3

A depiction of a toolbox as a metaphor for diverse cephalic capacities (Schulkin, 2009).

Figure 4

Bone and ivory flute fragments from the Hohle Fels and Vogelherd caves in southwestern Germany (Conard et al., 2009).

Figure 5

Flint sound tool, known as a lithophone, from the Victorian Era (Blake and Cross, 2008).

Figure 6

Key features in the vocal capability of a chimpanzee (center) vs. a human (left, right) (Lieberman and McCarthy, 2007).

Figure 7

A neuroimaging scan revealing that even in silence the auditory cortex, pictured here in the posterior portion of the right superior temporal gyrus, is activated (Zatorre and Halpern, 2005).

Figure 8

The number of albums sold with the correlating activation of the nucleus accumbens (Berns and Moore, 2012).

Figure 9

Variations in Heschl's gyrus in the left and right hemispheres across three different groups (Schneider et al., 2002).

Figure 10

(Left) Interaction of the auditory and motor systems during musical performance, and (right) associated premotor region changes in trained vs. non-trained musicians (Zatorre et al., 2007).