Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar

Language and music are central to what it means to be human. But where did they come from? In his new book "Harnessed", cognitive scientist Mark Changizi argues that language and music are in us not because we evolved for them, but, rather, because they evolved for us. Over history, language and music came to have the structure that our non-language and amusical brains could brilliantly absorb. In particular, language and music came to have the structures of the sounds in nature -- the sounds of, respectively, solid-object physical events and human movement -- just the sorts of sounds our brain had evolved to process.