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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.”
- Sales Rank: #791043 in Books
- Model: 17528491
- Published on: 2011-08-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 216 pages
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).
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Very interesting but bound to be controversial
By Dennis Littrell
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.
--Dennis Littrell, author of The World Is Not as We Think It Is.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Intriguing but limited analyses lead to unconvincing and disappointing book
By L. Byrne
Unlike other reviewers so far, I found this book to be a major disappointment. The storyline generated does not hold up to scrutiny. It sounds good superficially and is at times thought-provoking but many limitations creep in throughout the text that call into question the basis of the research and its main conclusions.
The author tries to weave together an evolutionary story for why humans are a "musical species." This is a worthy task. However, most damningly to the whole premise of the book, there is little to no discussion about the real-world environmental and social context of humans' earliest days on Earth. Many of the examples used have no relevance to what sounds humans and our direct ancestors would have heard in the African and European "wild" environments; mostly he draws examples from more modern life to explain, post-hoc, why music evolved. It is very frustrating because it suggests that the author has little to no knowledge of human evolution--or worse, purposefully ignores it to make his case.
Also, there is a strange focus only on classical music throughout the book. It is not well justified and leads to the ignoring of all other types of music. Whether his ideas relate to other types of music is never discussed so it remains unclear whether the conclusions can be extrapolated to other genres. For someone professing to have an broad theory of why we listen to music, it would seem prudent to at least address why we listen, collectively, to so many different types of music.
The data sets used in the book from which to draw the conclusions seem to be all from the author's lab. Many of the data sets appear to have come from undergraduate projects; this is not a problem per se but it does raise questions about the quality of the data and arguments. It is unclear how many data sets are published (no footnotes or references are made to peer-review literature). This also begs questions about the approach used by the author--to focus only on work from his own lab conducted in many mini-projects by undergrads. This book definitely does not contain a wide-ranging review of the literature. Rather, the author sets up questions like bowling pins and tries to know them down simply and quickly (and, it seems he thinks, solidly) with small data sets from research led by him. The statement "Indeed this is what we find" is over used and seems to be used in a way to convince the reader that the data are more powerful that they really should be made out to be. It became annoying by the end of the book.
In sum, I would say that this book was written prematurely, and it is unclear whether the ideas are actually as definitive as that they are suggested to be by the author. Maybe the ideas have merit but the data are not yet available to support them which leaves the whole premise of the book on shaky ground. Unless the evolution and psychology of music are your main areas of study, I would suggest avoiding this book and looking to others that are more comprehensive and revealing such as "This is your brain on music" by Levitin.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
the speed of culture
By Santiago Ortiz
Harnessed, and The Vision Revolution -Mark Changizi previous book-, present altogether radically new explanations for how vision (color, pattern recognition, pattern processing) and hearing (language and music) have evolved to help humans interact with our environments (environments in which other humans are their most important constituents). Whereas in the first book the mechanisms are mainly explained by biological evolution (except for reading/writing), Harnessed is about cultural evolution. Our brains, not lacking innate traits (that would be the blank slate model), aren't either already designed to perform many of the most important tasks they do, such as reading (evolution hadn't had time) or, as Mark tries to demonstrate, using language.
Is it language already 'wired' in our brains, as Chomsky and Pinker defend, or has it evolved culturally: this is probably one of the most difficult and pending questions that will be addressed in this century. Changizi's approach: language evolved culturally, tapping in our brains capability to harness nature ("nature-harnessing: mimicking nature so as to harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose") provides fresh air to the discussion and, without being conclusive, it clearly provides enough evidence and ideas in favor of cultural evolution. The relations between Nature and Mind have its own grammar, and our brains are constantly using it to develop new structures (physical, visual, musical, linguistic...) around, among and within us.
Artists, musicians and creators in general should read these books. Although Changizi is the first to suggest that one cannot simply reverse engineer some of the explained perceptual rules, that for instance explain why we enjoy music and why music is (statistically) structured the way it is, to automatically produce beauty, I believe these books offer hints to communicate with deep/lower level perception worth to explore.
An interesting corollary of both books is that our modern world, even if we perceive it (build it) as being a sort of opposite universe to Nature (the archetypical dichotomy of civilization versus the wild world, the raw and the cooked as Levi Strauss put it), is actually a recreation of Nature, but not in an 'aesthetic' or 'look&feel' way, but more in brain-functional way (something more related with our low perceptual level). Our urbanism, architecture, music, art and writing, have deep and complex connections with our perception systems, that evolved in non-civilized environments. We build those artifacts to mimic nature, at least the parts of nature that better interact with our brains. We built palaces of rich interaction for our minds.
A second interesting corollary (not mentioned by Mark) it's an exciting consequence of having such an open (yet structured) "machine" inside us: many other great capabilities might be there yet to be discovered, to be culturally evolved... new "languages" or "writings" if you wish (there's no way to describe this hypothetical new things, except in terms of old things..., the limit of our language are the limit of our world). "Things" so wide and powerful and complex and beautiful and constructive and structured, that it will be very hard to believe (again) that they are not wired in our brains and weren't designed throughout millions of years and by biological evolutionary means.
I wonder, what's the speed of culture?
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