we spent nine months in a womb surrounded by our mother's heartbeat.
All mammals spend time in a womb surrounded by their mother's heartbeat - yet no other mammals make drums and music.
And while you may call it far-fetched, I am sorry, but those theories are no more farfetched than that God just "made it so".
The just-so stories that purport to offer naturalistic explanations of things like music are certainly no better than "God made it so". They're essentially a similar type of claim - only with no God involvement.
And at least these theories are being currently studied and tested, as have many before been.
No. You can't test just-so stories that are based on hypothetical Stone Age groupies and so on.
As for language and music, there are a great many studies done on their interaction and connectedness. Did you even look at the article on the correlations found in the study done at UT that I posted the other day? Many areas of the brain governing speech and music overlap, though some do not, and research is being done linking the two. THerapists are exploring the use of music in working with the linguistically brain damaged. And did you know stutterers can often sing without stuttering? The workings of our brains are phenomenally complex; we are a chemical soup that dishes up pleasure, depression, pain, love all depending on the firings of the neurons and the ingredients released. Why should music be any different in its ability to stimulate?
I consider that irrelevant to the question of why music is. Of course our brains are hard-wired for music. But establishing that doesn't purport to explain why. The fact that music involves various brain areas is descriptive not explanatory.
As for animals and music: monkeys, our closest genetic match, use rhythm by pounding on logs, either for community and boundary setting or because they like it
I'm sorry but I don't believe monkeys or chimpanzees actually beat out rhythms on logs, charming though the idea may be.
, and brain scans show that they are able to process music.
I'm sure if you make any audible sound, brains scans would show they heard it.
Brumar, you are dismissing everything I offer with no consideration at all and turning it into a really kind of odd refusal to consider music as a natural offshoot of language and biological development even with valid reasons for doing so.
I don't really see any really valid reasons. I think that simple-minded stories are too credulously accepted as explanations. All for the purpose of rejecting any possibility that a God that can affect the world might exist. The reason so many people feel intellectually threatened by such a possibility is puzzling.
The simplest explanation why we enjoy it is that it sets off sensory pleasure reactions, in the same way touch can our sensory triggers, or color stimulates our visual. We organize the visual into art, we organize the auditory into sound patterns. That seems so reasonable to me. But I guess it doesn't to you so I will end it here.
Of course it is reasonable as a description of what is going on with music - but not adequate as an explanation of why it came to be so. I am not disputing that music, art, beauty causes pleasure and does so neurally. But knowing that we're wired a certain way doesn't explain why we're wired the way we are. |
