- 4.4 million years ago,
an Australopithecine called "Ardi"
stood on her legs and walked.
And ever since then,
the rhythm of walking has stamped human music,
but much more than that, pun intended,
that the first steps put us
on the path to forging links
between the brain and muscular exertion and sound.
Hominids learned to hear footsteps as a pattern-
and what patterns give you is a sense of time.
You can predict what will happen next,
and it's willy-nilly reflecting the experience
of walking through the Earth.
The condition of being human-
being midway between the birds in the heavens
and the whales in the ocean-
we can situate ourselves.
Birdsong is as jerky as the motions of the bird.
Just as whales have a much more fluid rhythm
of floating through their own medium.
Human music reflects walking,
and this also gives humans their fascination
with this metaphor that music moves.
And if you think about it, music does not move,
but we imagine that one note moves to the other.
And most of music,
be it a symphony or a song, unfolds a journey.
And this journey takes us from one point to another.
In our minds, it's an imaginary journey,
a very long, distant echo
from the journey of our ancestors out of Africa.
What makes human music so distinctive is our link
between sound and motion,
which is due to the connections in the human brain
between the motor regions controlling our motion,
and the regions controlling hearing and sound,
the auditory cortex.
As a rule,
the deeper you dive into the human brain,
the more universal one's propensity for music
and for emotion goes.
If you start with the brainstem,
our oldest layer, brainstems flinch to reflexes in sound.
So shocks and loud bangs will trigger the brainstem reflex.
The next layer up, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure.
Whether a sound is pleasant or unpleasant.
The amygdala is where emotions happen:
Sadness, happiness, anger, fear.
And the most modern layer, the neocortex,
is the point where you process patterns
and the complexities of music.
In terms of our music instinct,
one of our faculties, which are inborn,
is what's been called 'auditory scene analysis'
or the 'cocktail party effect.'
If you go to a party
and you are surrounded by people jabbering away
in different simultaneous conversations,
you have an astonishing capacity to tune
into a particular thread.
It's the same faculty you have when you're listening
to a line in a bar fugue or in a jazz standard.
We can focus our listening.
Birds also have that:
Infant and a father Emperor penguin surrounded
by 40,000 breeding pairs can hear
each other's voice in this incredible hubbub.
Appreciating music purely as a form
of relaxation or entertainment does a massive disservice
to all the things that music helps you with.
The biggest draw to mental health is loneliness.
Music can bring people together.
You don't have to actively make music with somebody else,
just to listen to music plugs you
into a social network because every note of music is social-
it's formed of social conventions.
Music lowers stress by reducing cortisol,
it gives you pleasure, makes you happy
by flooding the brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine.
Music is an excellent way of tagging memories,
remembering the past-
expressing your deepest emotions and your identity,
which can't be captured by language,
because music is far too precise for words.
All these things increase your mental health
and ultimately music becomes a mode
of mindfulness, of contemplation.
It's not purely relaxing
because there's too much going on when you're listening.
And the word relaxation gives a sense of passivity,
whereas to listen is a very active and creative activity.
- 'And today,
even the youngest children learn to toodle an instrument.'
- We also love to imitate rhythm,
and that's due to the existence
of mirror neurons in our brains.
When the brain sees an action,
you don't have to move to experience that motion
in your brain
because the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically.
We've always had an instinctive faculty to imitate.
We call it 'mimisis.'
Yawns are contagious.
If I see you yawning, I yawn back.
But also emotions are contagious.
When I hear a sad song, my body,
my mirror neurons are instinctively sympathizing,
are mimicking, are mirroring.
The sadness of the song isn't just acoustic,
it's also encoding the behavior which we associate
with sadness, which is grieving.
Emotion isn't just feeling.
Darwin was the first to observe
that emotion had an adaptive role in the field:
that animals and people,
they experience emotions in relation
to goals which help them survive.
So happiness is when you achieve a goal.
Anger is when the goal is blocked.
Sadness is when you lose a loved one.
Fear is the most archetypal emotion.
When you are exposed to a threat,
you have an instinctive response
to either freeze or to fight or to flee.
Music is full of similar responses,
as an extreme reaction to music,
which has been called "the chills,"
or 'frisson,'
or the sublime.
There are moments
in music which are so intense and they're often triggered
by breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity.
You have the same parts
of the brain which responds to that as responds to fear.
Which is why the chills give you goosebumps
or piloerection.
The hairs on your skin literally stand on end.
But you enjoy this fear.
And this is very strange,
and we have a similar experience
when we go on a fairground ride
or when we're watching a volcanic eruption
in the safety of an observation platform.
It's almost as if music is violence without the danger.
Nobody dies in music:
it's why we think that music is able to express emotion
in a very visceral way.
So when you are listening to music,
it's a kind of mental time travel.
When you are absorbed in the work,
you are traveling back through layer upon layer
of your brain, almost biologically,
which is why I call music a sort of
umbilical cord back to Mother Nature.
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