Music and the Brain: A Systems Perspective
Jeffrey A. Miller
May 6, 2006
23rd Midwest Symposium on Family Systems Theory and Therapy
Evanston, Illinois

Those of you who know me may not be surprised at the topic I’ve chosen to research and present about today. Music has always been a driving force in my life, a passion that has both served me well and cost me dearly. I don’t mean the monetary expense of acquiring new, exciting keyboard instruments, loaded with the latest digital technology—that’s manageable. Nor am I particularly concerned about the time I’ve put into learning and listening to music. That’s all been for the good. The expense I’m referring to is that of my personal freedom. Simply put, I’ve been a slave to music for as far back as I can remember. I can hardly imagine a moment without a tune of some sort circulating in my head. If you promise not to break confidentiality—and I think I can trust a group of therapists—I’ll admit that I vividly recall trying to fight off a private, intra-cranial performance of “Blues in the Night ” during the eulogy at my mother’s funeral. By the way, in that moment the jazzy strains won out over my profound grief.

Before beginning my research for this paper I was thinking about how helpless I am in maintaining cognitive focus in the presence of a compelling melody. I even considered titling my paper “Confessions of a Music Junkie.” Now, having read through reams of science about music and its relationship with the brain, I know just how valid a caption this would be. And not just for me. On some level, it seems we’re all music junkies.

Music has widely been called the “universal language.” Noted anthropologist and ethnomusicologist John Blacking wrote that “every known human society has what trained musicologists would recognize as music.” And just how long has this been going on? How many generations of forebears have had to fight off their own versions of “Blues in the Night” when they were trying to direct their focus more appropriately? British psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith suggests that before the emergence of Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago, hominid and early human cognitive systems were probably capable of functioning “within the domains of social relations, language, ‘intuitive biology’ and ‘intuitive physics,’ along with some general intelligence.” However they “showed little sign of the flexibility required for representation redescription,” a necessary substrate for creating music. That flexibility, which according to British archaeologist Steven Mithen “… characterizes the modern human mind, becomes most evident in the archaeological record with the “cultural explosion” that occurred some 30,000 to 60,000 years ago. Kristin Leutwyler on ScientificAmerican.com cites recent discoveries in France and Slovenia of “surprisingly sophisticated, sweet-sounding flutes, made by our Neanderthal cousins…as much as 53,000 years ago.” Other musical tools, including percussive instruments and jaw harps have been identified as dating back over 35,000 years.

Before getting into the human-brain-music connection, my own interest goes to the question of whether music is a phenomenon known only to man. Patricia Gray who heads the Biomusic program at the National Academy of the Sciences “propose[s] that music came into this world long before the human race ever did.” She notes that “humpback [whale] composers employ many of the same tricks human songwriters do. In addition to using similar rhythms, humpbacks keep musical phrases to a few seconds, creating themes out of several phrases before singing the next one. Whale songs in general are no shorter than human ballads and no longer than symphony movements. Even though they can sing over a range of seven octaves, the whales typically sing in key, spreading adjacent notes no farther apart than a scale. They mix percussive and pure tones in pretty much the same ratios as human composers—and follow their ABA form, in which a theme is presented, elaborated on and then revisited in a slightly modified form. Perhaps most amazing, humpback whale songs include repeating refrains that rhyme.” Gray and her colleagues suggest that “whales may use rhymes for exactly the same reasons we do: as devices to help them remember. As a recent study showed, whale songs are often rather catchy. When a few humpbacks from the Indian Ocean strayed into the Pacific, some of the whales they met there quickly changed their tunes—singing the new whales’ songs within three short years….”

“The fact that whale and human music have so much in common, even though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for 60 million years… suggests that music may [indeed] predate humans—that rather than being the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene.” Though we will discuss some evolutionary aspects of bird songs in a subsequent section of this paper, some of them deserve brief mention here, since they clearly “…resemble musical compositions. [F]or example the canyon wren’s trill cascades down the musical scale like the opening of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, and the hermit thrush sings in the so-called pentatonic scale. It is perhaps because these birds pitch their songs to the same scale as Western music that people find them so attractive.”

Our keynote speaker Jaak Panksepp writes of harboring a “naïve hope that common laboratory mammals might enjoy our music,” but laments that, “…up to now we have never been able to obtain compelling evidence for that thesis, nor, to our knowledge, has anyone else.” Not being bounded by the rigors of the scientific method, I would like to offer up some anecdotal moments I’ve witnessed that at least perpetuate the question of how other mammals relate to “our” music. The first involves my now-departed dog Dusty, who was in attendance at a chamber music concert given in our home several years back. At the end of the first piece, as the audience applauded, Dusty began barking and ran from the upper level of our main room to the lower level where the musicians were seated. She wandered among them, looking into their faces before resuming her place upstairs. Did she in some manner “appreciate” the music, and to what degree did she understand the musicians’ roles in producing it? Then there’s Lifo the German Shepherd who howls selectively to the sung strains of “Happy Birthday.” What is his emotional connection with this specific song? And at what point in observing the emotional responses we share with other mammals do we begin to anthropomorphize? I leave these as unanswered questions.

Putting the question of other animals’ affinity for music aside pending further research, there is an increasing body of evidence that we human beings, at least, are physically designed for music. Nathan Kogan cites “rigorous experimental work on the musical perception of human infants.” The findings indicate that “prior to one year of age, infants have almost all of the skills of musical perception present in musically unsophisticated adults.” Kogan takes this as an indication that music is a “domain-specific and innate human competence.” According to Hanus Papousek, musical elements are evident very early in the “processes of communicative development, and their use precedes that of pre-linguistic phonetic elements. These elements are particularly evident in infant-directed speech and appear as ‘strongly accentuated [verbalizations], intonational contours, stress and rhythmicity.’”

In her article, The Nature of Music, Isabelle Peretz, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Montreal presents evidence that “the human brain is equipped with neural circuitries that deal exclusively with music,” an indication that it is specialized for this purpose. This “circuitry is not only independent of language processing, but also of [intonation], the melody of language.”

Panksepp, while not excluding the possibility of neural circuitry devoted to music, suggests that “emotional circuits,” along with their “neural resonances” are “widely distributed in the brain, resembling a tree-like structure, with roots and trunk-lines in subcortical areas, and branches interacting with wide canopies in cortical regions. “In other words, [he holds], there may be no restricted brain ‘module’ that is devoted simply to musical appreciation. Our love of music is most likely to emerge from the interplay of many brain areas, even though, as for all other basic psycho-behavioral processes, there are also bound to be [some] systems and neurochemistries of first-order importance.” Panksepp emphasized that “The study of the role of neurochemical systems that encode affect within the brain on musical experiences has [sic] barely begun.”

Rather than attempting to describe the intricate structural and dynamic mechanisms the brain employs in processing music—a topic for a longer paper—I think it of greater value to this gathering to entertain some more basic questions, such as: “Why does the brain even concern itself with music?” And “Aren’t the arts more a luxury than a necessity, inventions of society rather than evolution?” Then finally, “Does music answer some basic biological need? And if so, what?”

As in all areas of inquiry, there is more than one line of thought (and presently some hot debate) about how and why our capacity for appreciating music has evolved and what it has meant to our species.

At the most elemental level, it would appear that “The processing of sounds is important for most mammals, for example in evaluating whether a noise stems from a predator. However, due to the evolution of language, auditory signals are particularly vital for humans, especially in the realm of the play and exploratory behaviors so central to our development.” As Norwegian biologist Bjorn Grinde concludes, “…it is to be expected that the human brain is designed to offer particularly strong rewards for attending to sounds.”
Harvard linguist Steven Pinker points out “…links … between music and at least five different domains or aspects of human experience that he suggests are directly concerned with survival and so are likely to have had adaptive value-in human evolution. These are language, auditory scene analysis, habitat selectional skills, emotion, and motor control.” But Pinker sees music as a technology that is “parasitic” on these domains and not “an innate and adaptive predisposition” unto itself. Without denying the value of music to the species, he dubs it “auditory cheesecake,” a “technology …humans have invented and that we employ because it’s pleasurable,” not because it is functional to survival.

Ian Cross, Director of the Centre for Music & Science at Cambridge University in the UK, takes a diametrically opposite stand: “Our musicality, [he states], is grounded in human biology as expressed in the evolution and development of our cognitive capacities and of our social and environmental interactions…it is a product of, and a process in, our individual development… and the evolution of our species."

Geoffrey Miller, professor of Human Evolutionary Behavioral Science at the University of New Mexico, adds additional fuel to the evolutionary fire. In his book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, he advocates the view that musical ability could influence mate choice. As he points out, “most of the advanced acoustic signals in nature are courtship signals; a statement that applies to birds and whales, as well as to gibbons, the most ‘musical’ of the apes. It is easy to imagine that competence as to singing, or following a rhythm, may have improved the chance in a human courtship situation.” Just think of the Medieval troubadours or their contemporary rock star counterparts, who are immensely competent at augmenting the world’s population. “The mate selection theory would [also] help explain why love is the most popular theme for songs.”

According to Panksepp et.al., “if we did not possess the kinds of social-emotional brains that we do, human music would probably be little more than cognitively interesting sequences of sounds and, at worst, irritating cacophonies.” He points to sound as “an excellent way to …help synchronize and regulate emotions so as to sustain social harmony.” “Most of us listen to music for the emotional richness it adds to our lives,” he continues. “We rapidly become attached to the music that moves us, yielding, we suspect, bonds that may have underlying neurobiological similarities to the love and social devotion that people often feel for each other.”

Panksepp has conducted experiments with “chills,” the spine-tingling self-rewards many of us experience in response to music. “When music causes one of these ‘skin orgasms,’ [as Scientific American terms them], the self-reward mechanisms of the limbic system—the brain’s emotional core—are active, as is the case when experiencing sexual arousal, eating or taking cocaine. But not all music evokes the chill sensation—the “ideal stimulus,” says Panksepp, is “…a sustained note of grief sung by a soprano or played on a violin (capable of piercing the “soul’ so to speak), or a solo instrument, like a trumpet or cello, emerging suddenly from a softer orchestral background.” Panksepp entertains “…the possibility that chills arise substantially from feelings triggered by sad music that contains acoustic properties similar to the separation call of young animals, the primal cry of despair to signal caretakers to exhibit social care and attention. Perhaps, he continues, “…musically evoked chills represent a natural resonance of our brain separation-distress systems which helps mediate the emotional impact of social loss.”

Panksepp’s work indicates that “in part, musically induced chills may derive their affective impact from primitive homeostatic thermal responses, aroused by the perception of separation, that provided motivation urgency for social-reunion responses. In other words, when we’re lost, we feel cold, not simply physically, but also perhaps neuro-symbolically as a consequence of the social loss. This hypothesis is also based on the assumption that the evolutionary roots of social motivation may be linked to thermoregulatory systems in subcortical regions of the brain. Thus, the sound of someone in distress, especially if it is our child, may make us feel cold, sending shivers down our spine. This may be one of nature’s ways to promote reunion; the experience of separation may evoke thermoregulatory discomfort which can be alleviated by the social “warmth” of coming together again. In this context, it is worth noting that happy music played to the left ear, (preferentially stimulating the right hemisphere) tends to increase body temperature, while negatively-valenced music has the opposite effect.

Panksepp also emphasizes that “emotions can trigger brief ‘fevers’ and there may be relations of musically-evoked “chills” to shifts in thermoregulatory set-points whereby shivers and vasoconstrictions are evoked in order to raise core-temperature.

In experiments with young domestic chicks, Panksepp found that music could “…effectively reduce the separation calls [they] exhibit when they are briefly isolated from social companionship.” He and his colleagues found “…that music can…produce some simple fixed-action patterns in chicks, the most noticeable being a lateral head-flicking response, yawning, and slight increase in feather ruffling. Quite remarkably, these are exactly the types of fixed-action patterns that are evoked by infusions of oxytocin into the chick brain, or of the ancestral neuropeptide vasotocin, both of which are among the most powerful ways to reduce separation distress in birds. From this concordance, [notes Panksepp], we would hypothesize that music may arouse that neuropeptide system, one of the best established social-emotional systems of the vertebrate brain.”

As I began this paper I hoped to find some information that would help reconcile my personal passion for music with my studies of Bowen theory. What I didn’t mention early on is that I come from a musical family, particularly on my mother’s side—my
Grandfather was a professional piano player. The fondest early memories I hold are of Sundays in my grandparents’ home, with the entire family singing around the piano. When I was three and a half, my mother and father divorced. When I was five, she, my, new stepfather and I moved to Texas, leaving my extended family in New York. I have always thought that, for me, immersing myself in music was my means of holding on to my family. And now my research tells me I have my neuropeptides’ appreciation of music to thank for their role in managing that cutoff.

My research also reveals many more ways in which music benefits those who find it so pleasurable—so irresistible. Were time not limited, I’d relate how it can help trigger memories trapped in unreachable parts of a dementia patient’s brain, synchronize movement and walking in Parkinson’s patients, relieve physical pain, alleviate depression, stimulate spatial-temporal cognition and bring people together to work and fight for survival.

Perhaps on another occasion. But to conclude today’s presentation … wait a minute… what’s that tune? Come on, you must hear it, too! No, it’s coming from…in here: [sung]“My Mama done told me, when I was in knee pants…”