Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Auditory Cheesecake

Professor and popular writer Steven Pinker has long been a proponent of evolutionary psychology, an effort to apply principles of evolution by natural selection to explain complex social, behavioral, and cognitive traits. Pinker has promulgated the view that music, unlike other universal features of human culture, does not provide evidence of being an evolutionary adaptation. He expresses the view that music more likely emerged in human evolution by indirect means, being the by-product of other processes, an accident of circumstance. In How the Mind Works, he writes the following:

As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits as once.

The passage that gives title to this article can be seen a few pages following the quote above, where Pinker writes the following:

I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties. A standard piece tickles them all at once, but we can see the ingredients in various kinds of not-quite-music that leave one or more of them out.

Later on, he proposes some possible nonadaptive causes for music's emergence in human cognitive and cultural evolution:

Perhaps a resonance in the brain between neurons firing in synchrony with a soundwave and a natural oscillation in the emotion circuits? An unused counterpart in the right hemisphere of the speech areas in the left? Some kind of spandrel or crawl space or short-circuit or coupling that came along as an accident of the way that auditory, emotional, language, and motor circuits are packed together in the brain?

The term spandrel is borrowed from architecture, referring to the space between two adjacent archways, and is used in evolutionary theory to describe traits that are by-products rather than targets of evolutionary forces. To conclude his argument, Pinker notes the following:

The analysis of music is speculative, but it nicely complements the discussions of the mental faculties in the rest of the book. I chose them as topics because they show the clearest signs of being adaptations. I chose music because it shows the clearest signs of not being one.

A Counterfactual Argument

The speculation regarding the possible consequence of an absence of music in human culture (“virtually unchanged”) is an example of what is termed a counterfactual argument, a thought experiment that presents a theoretical circumstance rather than one that is observable. In standard scientific experimentation, painstaking effort is made to control the test environment and to compare as closely as possible nearly related conditions, ideally ones that differ by a single clearly measurable element, which then can be pointed to in explaining any difference in results that accrue between the two conditions. A counterfactual is sometimes used by theorists when circumstances or ethics prevent the testing of such a condition. By their nature, counterfactual arguments are unfalsifiable. They cannot be disproven. In this case, music does in fact exist and has been in evidence throughout human history, so there is no real means to test its hypothetical nonexistence.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution