Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man [Paperback]

Mark Changizi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1935618539 | ISBN-13: 978-1935618539

The scientific consensus is that our ability to understand human speech has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. After all, there are whole portions of the brain devoted to human speech. We learn to understand speech before we can even walk, and can seamlessly absorb enormous amounts of information simply by hearing it. Surely we evolved this capability over thousands of generations.

Or did we? Portions of the human brain are also devoted to reading. Children learn to read at a very young age and can seamlessly absorb information even more quickly through reading than through hearing. We know that we didn’t evolve to read because reading is only a few thousand years old.

In Harnessed, cognitive scientist Mark Changizi demonstrates that human speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand. Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.

Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the beginning of time.

From Library Journal:
"Many scientists believe that the human brain's capacity for language is innate, that the brain is actually "hard-wired" for this higher-level functionality. But theoretical neurobiologist Changizi (director of human cognition, 2AI Labs; The Vision Revolution) brilliantly challenges this view, claiming that language (and music) are neither innate nor instinctual to the brain but evolved culturally to take advantage of what the most ancient aspect of our brain does best: process the sounds of nature ... it will certainly intrigue evolutionary biologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists and is strongly recommended for libraries that have Changizi's previous book."

From Forbes:
“In his latest book, Harnessed, neuroscientist Mark Changizi manages to accomplish the extraordinary: he says something compellingly new about evolution.… Instead of tackling evolution from the usual position and become mired in the usual arguments, he focuses on one aspect of the larger story so central to who we are, it may very well overshadow all others except the origin of life itself: communication.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...this remarkable book...promises to revolutionize thinking about what separates us from apes." — Daniel Simons, author of The Invisible Gorilla

"...builds a compelling case, and his wry style of storytelling makes for an entertaining read." — Discover Magazine

...brilliantly challenges...view...that the human brain's capacity for language [and music] is innate..." — Cynthia Knight, Library Journal

...makes a persuasive case in this fascinating volume." — New Scientist
"...simple but striking premise to show how language and music...harness our brains." — The Scientist

...this book might hold the key to one of humanity's longstanding mysteries..." — Stanislas Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain

About the Author

Mark Changizi is an evolutionary neurobiologist aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. His research focuses on "why" questions, and he has made important discoveries such as on why we see in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why letters are shaped as they are, why the brain is organized as it is, why animals have as many limbs and fingers as they do, and why the dictionary is organized as it is.

He attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and then went on to the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University of Maryland for a PhD in math. In 2002, he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2010, he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs.

He has more than 30 scientific journal articles, some of which have been covered in news venues such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Wired. He has written three books, The Brain From 25,000 Feet (Kluwer 2003), The Vision Revolution (BenBella 2009), and Harnessed(BenBella 2011).

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: BenBella Books (August 2, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935618539
• ISBN-13: 978-1935618539
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #367,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #93 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology

More About the Author

MARK CHANGIZI is a theoretical neurobiologist aiming to grasp the ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. His research focuses on "why" questions, and he has made important discoveries such as on why we see in color, why we see illusions, why we have forward-facing eyes, why the brain is structured as it is, why animals have as many limbs and fingers as they do, why the dictionary is organized as it is, why fingers get pruney when wet, and how we acquired writing, language and music.

He attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and then went on to the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University of Maryland for a PhD in math. In 2002 he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007 he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2010 he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs.

He has more than three dozen scientific journal articles, some of which have been covered in news venues such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and WIRED. He has written three books, THE BRAIN FROM 25,000 FEET (Kluwer 2003), THE VISION REVOLUTION (Benbella 2009) and HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella 2011). He is working on his fourth non-fiction book, this one on emotions and facial expressions, called FORCE OF EMOTIONS. He is simultaneously working on his first novel, called HUMAN 3.0.

[Photo credit: Rensselaer / Mark McCarty.]

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting but bound to be controversial September 1, 2011

By Dennis Littrell HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I always assumed that language developed using sound rather than sight because sight would not be effective at night and because in some environments (dense jungles and forests) it is easier to hear than it is to see. But what Changizi argues in this most interesting book is that the reason we use sound rather than say hand signals as language is that sounds, not sights, signal events.

He explains: "Audition excels at the `What's happening?' sensing a signal only when there's an event. Audition not only captures events we cannot see...but serves to alert us to events occurring even within our view. Nonevents may be screaming visually, but they are not actually making any noise, and so audition has unobstructed access to events--for the simple reason that sound waves are cast only when there is an event." (p. 34)

You can have sights without events. You can look out onto a landscape and see a myriad of things without anything moving, without a perceptible event taking place. But (to reiterate) you cannot have a sound without an event. Sounds signal events and that's what we are interested in. Something that changes. And that is why our eyes are tuned to movement, because it is movement in the visual world that signals change.

In Changizi's use of the word "harnessed" we can see the interplay between the organism and the environment. In one sense "harness" means "to restrain"; in another sense it means "to utilize." From one point of view the organism is restrained by the environment; in another sense it utilizes the environment. This is particularly true of humans.

Aside from this however I am not sure that this clever use of the word and the idea of "harness" really adds to our understanding of how "language and music mimicked nature," to quote from Chingizi's subtitle. In fact, to make "language" itself a kind of actor that "harnesses" or utilizes our auditory system is really just a metaphor since language itself does not act. The tail does not wag the dog. It is our auditory system that uses sound from nature to form language that is congenial to our evolutionary makeup including especially our brains.

What Changizi demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt--and he does it in a most edifying and nearly exhaustive way--is that speech and music imitate sounds found in nature. Changizi categorizes these sounds into "three fundamental building blocks: hits, slides, and rings." (p. 35) He calls these "nature's phonemes" and goes on to show how spoken language is made up of various combinations of these basic sounds.

A lesser idea, that civilization mimics nature (p. 10), is the sort of idea that from an evolutionary point of view has to be true. Where would we get our ideas? From God? From Plato's ideal types? If it is not obvious that culture and civilization spring from the natural world it is because some cultural tools, artifacts and practices are far removed from their primitive progenitors. I am thinking of the spaceship from the Stanley Kubrick film, A Space Odyssey, 2001, that comes very distantly from the bone used as a club by an ape.

Perhaps it would be better to speak of cultural evolution as utilizing or "harnessing" the environment in such a way as to make it convenient for human beings. Changizi instead speaks of "culture's general strategy for harnessing us." (p. 199) But we are not being harnessed; we are doing the harnessing (and in some respect, we are harnessing ourselves). Changizi realizes this when he goes on to say (still on page 199): "The trick is to structure modern human tasks as tasks at which our ape selves already excel."

I think the reason Changizi insists on having this metaphorically backwards is to demonstrate the dialectic nature of the evolutionary process (whether biological or cultural). To understand this, consider that in order for our feeling pain to be adaptive at least two things have to happen more or less in tandem. One, we have to feel the pain as something we very much want to avoid, and two, the pain must come as a result of some environmental event that is at least harmful to our continued existence. What is being "harnessed" here? The pain is being utilized (harnessed) by the organism as a means to alter behavior. One can speak (as Changizi might) that the pain is harnessing the organism to behave in a manner consistent with its survival, but this would be metaphorically speaking.

In the conclusion in the final chapter entitled "So What Are We?" he writes, "Language and music are evolved, organism-like artifacts that are symbiotic with...human apes. And like any symbiont, these artifact symbionts have evolved to possess shapes that fit the partner biology--our brains."

Okay, it's pretty clear what is at issue here: it is Changizi's idea that culture (in general) and language and music in particular are "organism-like" "symbionts." By definition and a long tradition in biology a symbiont is an organism, not an artifact of culture or even a meme. Changizi makes the very important point that we cannot understand humans or any organism without also understanding its environment and how it interacts with that environment. But I don't think it serves more than an illustrative purpose to call elements of culture symbionts; and I am willing to bet that the establishment in evolutionary biology is not going to be giving Changizi any high fives.

Still I think it is instructive to see language and culture in this manner as long as we realize that human beings in interaction with the environment create culture which in turn becomes part of our environment which in turn influences further cultural changes--all the while keeping in mind that culture is not alive in the same sense that biological organisms are.

For those readers expert in music and linguistics (which I am not) this book should prove to be an additional source of excitement and illumination because of Changizi's creativity and his obvious erudition and enthusiasm.

The World Is Not as We Think It Is.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Radical (In a Good Way) Evolutionary Perspective August 23, 2011

By Aaron

Format:Paperback

Changizi has made a career out of fleshing out radical yet compelling ideas about how our species has evolved, and this book is no exception. Like other sensory systems, the auditory system evolved to interpret the natural environment. Language and music are both human inventions designed to be utilized by and appeal to this system. Given these assumptions, the seemingly radical notion that music and language mimic natural sounds becomes almost inevitable. As with much of his previous work, Changizi draws from a wide spectrum of evidence to make compelling arguments out of what first appear to be out-there ideas. While this is serious science, it is written in a very accessible and conversational manner with a healthy dose of humor. A must-read for anyone interested in where science can, but has yet dare to go.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific pop science -- full of new ideas August 17, 2011

By Kevin Rio

Format:Paperback

In Harnessed, Mark Changizi puts forth a radical idea: that humans didn't evolve specialized brain mechanisms to process music and language. Instead, he argues that music and language were shaped by culture to sound like nature -- language sounds like objects hitting, sliding, and ringing, and music sounds like people moving around us. Along the way, he answers questions you didn't even know you had, like why rhyming words are so easily grouped together or why a song's melody changes more quickly than its loudness. The case is compelling, and it's all backed up with hard data and sound logic.

Pop psychology books are a dime a dozen these days, but what makes Harnessed stand out is that it isn't just a watered-down rehasing of old journal articles. Instead, it's full of new ideas, fresh from the frontier of science. That alone is enough to warrant a careful reading by specialists, and they'll find enough meaty prose and scatter plots to keep them happy. But as someone with little background in language -- and sadly without a musical bone in my body -- I still found the book very accessible. Sure, I read to re-read a few sections, but summaries at the end of each chapter help bring it all back together. Changizi's writing is superb throughout. His style is conversational, and at times laugh-out-loud funny.

That said, a book this far-reaching is bound to overstep at times, and Harnessed is no exception. Changizi is enthusiastic in support of his theory, but sometimes fails to acknowledge its shortcomings, or the questions it leaves open. If music evovolved to sound like people moving around us, why don't we listen to music in surround sound, like we do with movies? (When's the last time you bought a Quadrophonic record?) Perhaps the most glaring omission is an explanation of what makes human unique among primates. Chimpanzees evolved in much the same auditory environment, but never learn language or make music. Yes, humans have culture, but once culture -- any culture, human or chimp -- has shaped music and language to sound like nature, why shouldn't they work in any species that shares the same environment? Harnessed also relies largely on unpublished research, which Changizi acknowledges.

But these nitpicks do little to detract from an otherwise masterful piece of science. At worst, Harnessed will challenge you to think twice about how we came to have music and language (three times if your last name happens to be Pinker or Chomsky). At best, it will change the way you see (hear?) the world -- not just language and music, but also art, culture, evolution, and the human species.