Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

The Universal Sense
, titled a chapter “Ten Dollars to
the First Person who Can Define ‘Music’ (and Get a Musician, a
Psychologist, a Composer, a Neuroscientist and Someone Listening to an
iPod to Agree . . .).”
And yet, at some level, we all know what music is, as did our ancestors.
Music has tempo, changes in frequency, and something we call timbre (the
quality that separates the “sound” of a sitar from the “sound” of a violin, for
example). It is often associated with movement, such as dancing. It is a real
phenomenon, even if it is elusive to define.
Some scientists think we are born musical. You can certainly watch
babies respond to music, swaying and responding with glee to specific
intervals. They even love it when parents talk to them in musical speech
called “parentese,” which is rhythmic and high-pitched, with long, drawn-
out vowels. Music has been a part of the cultural expression of virtually
every culture ever studied. It may even extend into prehistoric times. A
35,000-year-old flute made from bird bone has been discovered, to cite just
one example. If every culture has some form of musical expression, and if
babies so readily respond to it, some scientists say, music must serve some
evolutionary function. We must be hardwired for music, with regions in the
brain specifically devoted to music.
Harvard professor Steven Pinker begs to differ. “I suspect that music is
auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive
spots of at least six of our mental faculties,” he writes in 
How the Mind
Works
. Like music, people love cheesecake, and they have for a very long
time (a recipe for cheesecake was found around 5th century BCE). But that
doesn’t mean the brain has a region specifically dedicated to cheesecake.
We are hardwired to respond not to cheesecake specifically, Pinker says, but
to fats and sugars. These major energy boosters were somewhat rare in the
lean world of the Serengeti. Because of their scarcity, our brains became
sensitized—dedicated, you might say—to detecting the presence of fats and
sugars. Because of their value, our brains rewarded their consumption with
a powerful jolt of pleasure. Pinker makes a similar argument for music. He
thinks music stimulates specific regions in the brain that are actually
hardwired to process nonmusical inputs. There is no reason to go after

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evolutionary arguments that explain dedicated musical modules in the brain,
Pinker posits, for a very practical reason: there are none.
So the matter is unsettled on why music exists, and scientists don’t
agree on how to even define music. Still, researchers forge ahead with
studies on cognition and social skills. They’ve discovered fascinating ways
that music may benefit the brain. The benefits just aren’t the ones that the
average person thinks they are.
What music training does for the brain
Ray Vizcarra was an award-winning music and band teacher in a Los
Angeles high school. He took kids who had no musical training, and he
whipped them into shape with such skill, and such speed, that the kids were
soon winning all-city contests. That’s saying something, given that Los
Angeles is ground zero for musical contests. The LA City Council singled
him out for a special honor in 2011. And then he lost his job. In a round of
budget cuts and layoffs, he didn’t have enough seniority to stay. The story
was written up in the 
Los Angeles Times.
Most of my wife’s friends are professional musicians, and they were
outraged. They saw his layoff as one more sad example of music falling to
the wayside now that schools emphasize standardized tests, which favor
reading and math. Invariably, the conversation turned to questions about the
value of keeping music in schools. Doesn’t music help improve test scores
in reading and math? they ask me.
My response is not what they expect.
“It’s not a simple story,” I usually respond. Then I start listing the
variables. When they say “music,” do they mean listening to music all the
time? Or do they mean music training, like what the band teacher did with
his students? Both involve exposure to music but are hardly the same thing.
Does “help” mean changing an SAT score? How about cognitive processes
not generally covered by standardized tests; do those count?
Usually they’re talking about the effect of music lessons on reading
ability, math scores, or intelligence in general. And in that case, I have bad
news—made worse because I first need to spend a few minutes giving a
statistics lesson. The lesson centers around something called an