The human ability to create and enjoy music has puzzled the finest minds since Aristotle. Even Charles Darwin was unable to explain how music evolved by natural selection, and he concluded that "music is the greatest mystery". However, a credible hypothesis to explain how music evolved in human culture has been proposed by Leonid Perlovsky of Harvard University and published online in Frontiers in Psychology on April 10th, 2013. Perlovsky proposes that music helps us to deal with cognitive dissonance, thereby allowing us to navigate a world teeming with contradictions.
Cognitive dissonance, much studied in social psychology, refers to situations we all regularly face when we experience conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviours. These conflicts produce discomfort that we feel compelled to reduce by changing our attitude, belief or behaviour. For example, you enjoy smoking (behaviour) but know it causes lung cancer (cognition); you reduce the discomfort of the consequent cognitive dissonance by falsely telling yourself the chances you will get cancer are infinitesimally small.
Cognitive dissonance often causes rejection of new knowledge that contradicts existing beliefs that people don’t want to surrender. For example, some religious people reject the theory of evolution in the face of massive scientific evidence. The discomfiting effects of the resulting cognitive dissonance are reduced by turning to a literal interpretation of the biblical story that God created all the biological species individually several thousand years ago.
The development of human culture depended on acquiring new knowledge, much of which contradicted existing knowledge, consequently producing cognitive dissonance. But, since people are naturally prone to ignore new contradictory information in order to ameliorate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, how did human culture ever develop? Perlovsky proposes that cultural development was enabled by music.
For example, when language, the pre-eminent marker of human culture, was emerging, the new words split the previously unified world into more and more distinct pieces, precipitating widespread cognitive dissonance. Music, on the other hand, unifies the world into a whole. The human psyche requires both the analytical fragmentation characteristic of new knowledge and the harmony of unity. Music enables the former by providing the latter. Perlovsky traces how music developed in line with great cultural changes – from the time of King David (1040-970BC) right up to today.
Perlovsky quotes various experiments to demonstrate music’s power to overcome cognitive dissonance, thereby helping us retain contradictory knowledge. For example, a group of four-year-olds were each given five popular toys and asked to rank them in order of preference. The teacher then said she had to leave the room, and while she was out they were not to play with the second-ranked toy. When she returned to the room she found that the children were entirely ignoring their formerly second-ranked toys. When confronted with the dissonance “I like this toy” and “I shouldn’t play with it”, the conflict was resolved by rejecting the initial preference for the toy. But when the teacher turned music on when leaving the room, the second-ranked toy retained its original value when she returned and reinitiated play. The contradictory knowledge didn’t lead the children to simply discard the toy.
Music speaks to our emotions. Love and death are huge universal themes in human culture, each steeped in contradictions. We long for spiritual eternity but know that our earthly lives are finite. We long to trust fully, but we know it is dangerous to trust because we can be betrayed or disappointed. It is no coincidence that so many popular songs deal with love and betrayal and that we turn to sad music in times of mourning.
When human language started to emerge from crude vocalisations, it divided into two branches, one low and the other high in emotion. The emotional branch evolved into music and the other into ordinary language, each chosen by natural selection. We incorporate emotions into all our decision-making. Music powerfully and uniquely conveys an array of nuanced emotions, helping us to reconcile our conflicted emotions when making choices. Music enhances our cognitive abilities. Cognitive dissonance was a concomitant of human cultural development. We created music, in part, to help us to tolerate and overcome it.
William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC. http:// understandingscience.ucc.ie