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

Introduction

The Reading Instinct

A
t the beginning of his book
The Language Instinct
, Steven Pinker demonstrates the amazing power of language with an example. He writes:

The [language] ability comes so naturally that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is. So let me remind you with some simple demonstrations. Asking you only to surrender your imagination to my words for a few moments, I can cause you to think some very specific thoughts:

When a male octopus spots a female, his normally grayish body suddenly becomes striped . . .

Cherries jubilee on a white suit? Wine on an altar cloth? Apply club soda immediately . . .

When Dixie opens the door to Tad, she is stunned, because she thought he was dead . . .

With just a handful of words, our brains are pulled hither and thither to far-off corners of a vast mental universe, and new content is installed. For me, the Dixie-and-dead-Tad story from
All My Children
is old news, but a few of you may not have known Tad is alive. And now you know, from just a few words in the right order.

That kind of brainpower doesn’t happen by accident, Pinker argues. The deeply malleable, blank-slate brains the social sciences have long supposed we possess could never learn and do language as we can. Language is astoundingly complicated—to this day, we cannot build effective speech-recognition machines—and yet we are uncannily good at it: children learn language too quickly and easily, we all comprehend it too automatically and effortlessly, and it pervades our life too completely to be something we simply learn with general-purpose brains. And our brains, indeed, have long appeared to have specialized regions for language. That we have an instinct for language is also suggested by its universality: language is found everywhere, and languages tend to share many common features.

And although Pinker may not extend these arguments to music—he famously called music “auditory cheesecake”—other researchers would. Steven Mithen, in
The Singing Neanderthals
, pointed out that music is complex, and yet we’re creepily good at processing it; we have seemingly specialized brain regions for it; and music is found virtually everywhere, with certain fundamentally similar characteristics.

To my mind, Pinker’s arguments that we are not the universal-learning machines we are often believed to be (something he has argued in all his books) are convincing. And his arguments that language possesses all the hallmarks of design (and analogous arguments by others in the case of music) are highly persuasive.

Language and music, on the one hand, and the human brain, on the other, are designed to fit one another.

But there is a gnawing problem, one Pinker himself implicitly reveals on the first page of his book, in the passage I quoted above: the octopus, club soda, and soap opera excerpts were
written
. My ability to comprehend Pinker’s examples—and all his books, and, well, everything I have ever come to know and admire about him—relied on writing and reading.

Why is reading a problem for the notion of language and music instincts? Because, like language and music, our ability to read
also
has the hallmarks of design . . . and yet we
know
we have no reading instinct.

We know there’s no reading instinct because writing is too recent, having been invented only several thousand years ago; in fact, it didn’t take hold among a large fraction of the population until just a few generations ago. There’s a good chance most of your great-great-great-grandparents didn’t read.

And yet, despite the fact that we cannot possibly have specialized reading mechanisms in our brains, reading has the same appearance of instinct, much like language and music. Reading is astoundingly complex—to this day, we cannot build effective handwriting-recognition machines—and yet we display machinelike proficiency at reading. Children learn to read at about twice the age at which they can comprehend speech, but when they do learn, their reading experiences are meager compared to those for speech. To put it in context, they’re often reading before they’re competent at pouring milk into cereal, wiping their bottoms, or even engaging in stereotypical ape behaviors like turning somersaults and climbing monkey bars. Once we’ve learned, we read automatically and effortlessly, and reading is arguably more pervasive in our lives today than speech. Our brilliantly capable reading brains even appear to have regions specialized for reading (one is called the “visual word form area”), which researchers like the neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen discuss, and which Dehaene takes up in his recent book,
Reading in the Brain
. The whiff of a reading instinct is also apparent in the near universality of writing and reading. Writing is found in nearly every human society today, and there are strong universal tendencies across writing (e.g., in the number of strokes per character among phonemic writing systems like ours, and in the ways that strokes can interconnect to build characters, something I discussed in Chapter 4 of
The Vision Revolution
).

If we can appear to have a reading instinct without actually having one, perhaps the appearance of instincts for language and music is an illusion, too. Perhaps the story of the origins of speech and music is the same as the story underlying our ability to read, whatever that story might be.

It does not escape Pinker’s notice that his illustration of language’s power is communicated to a reader, not a listener. He says in the paragraph following the octopus-soda-soap excerpts:

True, my demonstrations depended on our ability to read and write, and this makes our communication even more impressive by bridging gaps of time, space, and acquaintanceship. But writing is clearly an optional accessory; the real engine of verbal communication is the spoken language we acquire as children.

Writing is optional, Pinker says, but optional for what? Speech and writing serve distinctly different functions. As Pinker notes, writing, but not speech, can bridge space and time, giving writing a power akin to a superpower (for example, if I’m dead when you’re reading this, then you’re not merely reading, but spirit reading!). And as I discuss in
The Vision Revolution
, writing serves functions that audio recordings (which also bridge space and time) cannot, allowing the reader to interact with other minds and upload content so efficiently that it changed us from
Homo sapiens
to a universally programmable
Homo turingipithecus
. And these distinctive functions of writing are not optional: recorded history and modern civilization depend on it!

At any rate, optional or not, we appear to be designed to read, and yet we have no reading instinct. How is this possible?

The answer is that, rather than our brains being designed for reading, reading is designed for our brains. Writing is a technology that has been optimized over time by the forces of cultural selection to be good for our visual system. We have no reading instinct. Instead, writing has a brain instinct (i.e., is designed for the brain), something neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls “neuronal recycling.”

In my research and in my previous book,
The Vision Revolution
, I provided evidence to support a specific theory of how culture managed to shape writing for the brain: writing was culturally selected to look, in fundamental respects,
like nature
, which is the look our evolutionarily illiterate visual system is highly competent at processing. Writing doesn’t have a brain instinct so much as a
nature
instinct.

In the case of writing, then, instinct is not responsible for the appearance of design. The designer is not natural selection, but cultural selection. The tight fit between reading and the brain is because reading has been bent to the brain, not the other way around. And the tight fit was achieved via what I call
nature-harnessing
: mimicking nature so as to harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose.

And now we are poised to see the purpose of
this
book.

If cultural selection can give us writing shaped like nature that is thereby optimized for our visual system, and can do so in just several thousand years, then imagine how well optimized for our brains speech and music may be if they have been culturally evolving for
hundreds
of thousands of years to be good for our auditory systems! What if writing, speech, and music are
all
products of culture, but—consistent with the fact that we’re not general-purpose machines—they are highly designed technologies shaped for our minds?

And, more specifically, what if, just as writing
looks
like nature, these two auditory capabilities—speech and music—have come to
sound
like nature, and thereby to harness ancient, highly efficient brain mechanisms that were never intended for language or music?

But what in nature might speech and music sound like?
That’s
the topic of the book. Before getting into speech and music, however, we must discuss in more detail the general nature-harnessing approach that I believe explains writing, speech, and music—and explains who we are today. And that’s the topic of Chapter 1.