Read The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Online

Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

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BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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I knew about the curmudgeonly anti-love diatribes of some writers, and figured they were just trying to be funny. Kurt Vonnegut wrote:
I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as “common decency.” I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it. Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs. When a child, and not watching comedians on film or listening to comedians on the radio, I used to spend a lot of time rolling around on rugs with uncritically affectionate dogs we had. And I still do a lot of that. The dogs become tired and confused and embarrassed long before I do. I could go on forever.
 
W. Somerset Maugham weighs in with “Love is what happens to a man and woman who don’t know each other.” According to the cold, clinical view of science, Zappa, Mitchell, and Vonnegut may be a lot closer to the truth than the Turtles, Ella Fitzgerald, or Parthenon Huxley, and Maugham may be the closest of all. Was love really here to stay or was what we were feeling just kid stuff? “And they called it puppy love.” It may have been wonderful, powerful, and full of youthful energy, but not very mature.
Researchers have identified neurochemical changes that occur during the first few months of a relationship; huge releases of oxytocin (the “trust” hormone) and feel-good hormones like dopamine and norepinephrine, and at such high levels that they could be regarded as inducing clinically verifiable altered states of consciousness. The Stylistics crooned “I’m stone(d) in love with you,” B. J. Thomas sang that he was “hooked on a feeling/high on believing /that you’re in love with me.” Bryan Ferry sang “Love is a drug and I need to score,” and Robert Palmer sang “Doctor, doctor, give me the news/I got a bad case of lovin’ you/No pills are gonna cure my ills.” The Beatles harmonized “And when I touch you I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that my love/I get high, I get high” (in Dylan’s famous misunderstanding of the lyric, which was actually “I can’t hide, I can’t hide”). This neurochemical high causes our heart rate to speed up when we think about our loved one, impels us to make resolutions such as losing weight or exercising more, and fills us with a kind of giddy optimism that with this person, everything will work out right.
The drug aspect of love is reflected as more sinister in other songs, such as “Cupid’s Got a Brand New Gun” by one of my favorite songwriters, Michael Penn (Sean’s brother, and husband of Aimee Mann):
This quick opiate
might wear the wings of angels
that’s when you realize
you’ve been shot down
wounded unto death by something called love
 
Penn suggests that love is a kind of death: a death of our single self, a death to some extent of our ego and of boundaries we place around our most private thoughts and feelings. The implicit message in his lyric is something we’ve all experienced, that love can make you do things you might not otherwise do, as Percy Sledge sang about in “When a Man Loves a Woman” (the lyric in Chapter 1). Having had romantic love and lost it can be one of the most painful things we experience—so much so that, like the person who drank too much alcohol the night before, we resolve never to do it again: “No, I don’t want to fall in love (this love is only gonna break your heart)” (Chris Isaak); “I don’t want to fall in love” (Tonya Mitchell); “I don’t want to fall in love with the idea of love” (Sam Phillips).
“In songs like that,” Sting says, “you really have an aspect of knowledge songs and love songs combined—they’re trying to teach you about love, to be wary: ‘Don’t put your faith in love, my boy, my father said to me/I fear you’ll find that love is like the lovely lemon tree/Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet/But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.’ ”
The fact that romantic love can be reduced to or described by distinct changes in neurochemistry does not make it any less real. Stubbing your toe and winning the lottery also cause neurochemical changes, but that doesn’t mean that when the brain chemistry is back to normal your toe isn’t still bruised, or that your bank account isn’t still flush.
At the historical core of this propensity for romantic love is the ability to form a strong partnership with another person, and that has clear evolutionary advantages—with the long maturation period of human children, those men and women who feel bonded and committed to one another are more likely to share in the raising of the children, and those children are more likely to thrive both physically and psychologically. Nowhere in your lineage, no matter how many thousands of years you go back, will you find an ancestor of yours who failed to have children. And although care may have differed considerably from one child to another and from one family unit to another, none of us has an ancestor who didn’t receive at least the care necessary to grow up and successfully reproduce. Life in any era is unpredictable and child rearing is potentially fraught with difficulty. Feeling committed to your partner through romantic love confers obvious advantages to the offspring.
Unfortunately, the neurochemical high doesn’t last forever. Sometimes it is gone after a few days or weeks or months; sometimes it can last five or seven years (leading to the so-called “seven year itch” in marriages). Perhaps the second most common song in pop music, after the romantic love song, is the breakup song, or the song of love lost. In “Let It Die,” Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters writes:
Hearts gone cold and hands are tied
Why’d you have to go and let it die?
 
In “Downbound Train,” Bruce Springsteen sings:
She just said, “Joe, I gotta go
We had it once, we ain’t got it anymore”
 
Or as Rosanne Cash sings, with the heartbreak dripping from her voice in her song “Paralyzed”:
I picked up the phone, you were both on the line
Your words to each other froze me in time
A lifetime between us just burnt on the wires
Dissolved in a dial tone, consumed in your fires
 
What is this thing called love that it is so slippery, so ephemeral, so capricious? Could some of the greatest literature and music of all time have been written about an illusion? For those legions of modern thinkers and scientists who are atheists, there is certainly precedent in all the great writing and painting that was directed at a nonexistent God.
Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms—the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one’s way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense
caring
(the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself. Describing a man who played his last game of chess before committing suicide, Gabriel García Márquez writes in
Love in the Time of Cholera
: “Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love.” “Without love” is rendered as the equivalent of “without care.” Parthenon Huxley writes in “Buddha Buddha”:
Everything I do, Buddha did with love and that’s what I aspire to,
Try to rise above the petty things I run into
I think of love when I do everything I do
 
Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.
Romantic love is typically blind, as Maugham notes; we feel it for those we don’t really know. And it tends to be very
me
-oriented: I love her because of the way I feel when I’m with her; because I have fun when I’m with her; because
I
find her beautiful, sexy, smart, funny, and so on. A more mature love comes when we care more about that person’s happiness than we do our own—the selfless love that parents show toward children, a willingness to do without so that the child or our mate can do with. Romantic love drives us to be with the other person at all costs; mature love drives us to want to see the other person happy, even if that means not being with us. “If you love somebody, set them free,” as Sting famously sang.
From an evolutionary perspective, it may seem that putting others before oneself doesn’t make sense—after all, the name of the evolutionary game is to put your genes first. How in the world could
not
putting them first end up getting more of them in circulation? The apparent paradox of this kind of altruism has an explanation in evolutionary science. Because we share half our DNA with our siblings, sacrificing ourselves for a sibling or a sibling’s offspring still helps some of our DNA, some of our genes, to survive. The same argument is made for homosexuality, which on the surface of things might seem to be maladaptive. But if a gay brother or sister cares for a sibling’s children, he or she is still helping to promote the family’s genes. Altruism also helps to diffuse potentially deadly conflicts. During harvest festivals celebrated by Southwest American Indians, for example, foodstuffs are redistributed equitably among neighboring tribes, eliminating what could be deadly food-jealousy wars.
Altruism is not limited to humans—animals show it as well. Vervet monkeys delivering alarm calls to warn others are putting themselves at risk (by attracting the attention of the predator) in the service of protecting their kin. Dolphins have been shown to aid other species who are injured by helping them to get to the water’s surface or to shore.
Some evolutionary biologists argue that love developed as an adaptation that helped increase the likelihood that human offspring would receive the care they require. Humans have the longest maturation period of any animal. Baby mice at three weeks can be left completely alone by the parents and survive. By twelve weeks dogs are self-sufficient. But leave a nine-month-old human infant alone and—even if no harm comes to the child—you can be arrested for child endangerment. Human children need at least a decade of care and instruction. Unlike spiders, bees, and birds, who have instructions encoded in their brains for building their webs, hives, and nests, human infants learn by being taught explicitly. Using the same phrase that Joni Mitchell used to describe humans, the anthropologist Terrence Deacon has referred to this as
de
-evolution, in that the brain itself carries fewer and fewer preprogrammed instructions (compared to other primates and other mammals), and culture and experience take on a greater role in shaping education and behavior. This appears to be related to humans’ fantastic adaptability and ability to thrive in disparate environments, far more so than apes and monkeys. The band Devo (named for the principle of de-evolution) satirically wrote in their song “Jocko Homo”: “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it.” Or as XTC sang, “We’re the smartest monkeys.”
Across all species, young brains are more sensitive to environmental input and more resilient in recovering from brain injury than older brains. This reflects a parsimony on the part of evolution: Rather than building into genes and brains information that is ubiquitous and readily available in the environment, brains are configured such that they can incorporate regularities in the environment, learning through exposure. They do this through the initial
over
production of neurons that are later selectively pruned (in a kind of Darwinian selection process). The system is thus designed to configure itself. It needs to, because as we grow, our brains need to adapt. For example, as we grow taller and heavier, we need to adjust the force we apply to walk. As our eyes grow farther apart (because our head gets bigger), we still need to reach and grasp, and so the brain must take into account these differences in the binocular disparity. If we were designing the brain for efficiency, we would create a system that can learn rules, can map itself, and can respond to the particulars of the environmental input it receives. This efficient parsimony also confers flexibility in the case of unusual circumstances. For example, an organism born with one functioning eye instead of two maps all the input from that one eye to the entire visual cortex (including regions normally reserved for projections from the other eye)—this way the cortical real estate for the nonworking eye isn’t sitting empty.
The brain learns music and language because it is configured to acquire rules about how musical and linguistic elements are combined; its computational circuits (in the prefrontal cortex) “know” rules about hierarchical organization and are primed to receive musical and linguistic input during the early years of development. This is why a child who is denied exposure to music or language before a certain critical age (believed to be somewhere between eight and twelve years old) will
never
acquire normal music or language skills—the pruning process has already begun, and those neural circuits that were waiting to be activated become eliminated. Certain universals of music suggest that the innate structures themselves contain loose constraints for how music will be represented. Among these are the octave, the fact that all musics work with a set of discrete pitches, and the ubiquity of simple rhythmic ratios (the durations of musical notes across disparate styles and cultures tend to occur in ratios of 2:1, 3:1, or 4:1, not more complex ratios such as 17:11).
BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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