Do the Robot
In his Huffington Post blog, Indian medical doctor and popular spiritual adviser Deepak Chopra is deeply troubled by the notion that neuroscience can add anything to our understanding of what music is and why it effects us as much as it does:
"As with so much brain research, we are told that these are early days. Give the scientists time and they will unravel everything about music. In particular, they will answer why music developed in the evolutionary scheme of things to become encoded in our genes. Apparently every age, going back as far as history is measured, has contained some form of music. Why did evolutionary forces favor this behavior as a survival mechanism?"
Fascinating stuff for sure. And Robert Jordain does a great job of peeling away countless layers of brain/music onion skin in his elegant book Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination:
"Where lies sound's advantage? Surely in the fact that sound unfolds across time, that it moves. As we've seen, movement is any nervous system's raison d'etre. Our intentions are ultimately an impetus toward movement. And intentions are what we're referring to when we say 'I.' They are 'myself.' Music arrives in our nervous systems and causes our brains to generate a flood of anticipations by which we make sense of melody and harmony and rhythm and form. By eliciting these anticipations, music entrains the deepest levels of intention, and so takes us over."
Chopra, however, believes that using science to explain aesthetics is all too inhuman, and he leaves us with this cliffhanger:
"In the next post I'd like to argue why this whole scheme of looking at music is wrong-headed and will yield no answers that get near the truth. The current connection between music and the brain is useful only if the listener is a robot with a robotic brain. That's exactly the model being used here, and no amount of passing fascination makes it anything but what it is: inhuman to the core."
Stay tuned!
In India's Business Standard, meanwhile, Dr. Virendra Sherlekar's research has revealed a direct link between music and motion, at least when it comes to exercise, "Workout efficiency is dependent on intensity. If you listen to music, your mind gets diverted and you are able to be more productive." Reporter Archana Jahagirdar adds that, "In India, experience shows that the latest Hindi film songs are the first choice. Though a word of advice here, if you are on the treadmill and listening to 'Beedi jale le from Omkara, try not to emulate its on-screen version; that would look just gross."