Hey friend,

I hope you've been well!  

This week I went down a rabbit hole after watching a really cool video on how we evolved to create music. It talked about the earliest wind instruments found that were made from swan and vulture wings that dated back around 40,000 years ago.

After that I read a handful of articles and studies and watched a couple videos and I wanted to share some cool things I learned!

The First Steps

Around 4 Million years ago Australopithecus diverged from other apes and began to walk on two legs, which freed up our hands. Next, our brains tripled in size, giving us better motor control over our hands and fingers, giving us the ability to create tools and eventually, musical instruments.

Walking on two legs gave us more room to breathe and this led to the Larynx descending lower in our throat and gave us the ability to create more unique sounds with our vocal cords. Some animals can only produce a small number of different sounds, but with our ability to now create thousands of different sounds with our voice, it opened up the potential to create beautiful sounds for the sake of it.

The ability to emit sounds of variable pitch predates speech, so our ability to sing evolved before our ability to form language, and rhythm evolved before our ability to sing. It’s fascinating to know that we had the foundations of music before we even had any conception of a spoken language. This explains why music hits such a deep part of our being, and why it’s so universal.

The Healing Power of Music

We have mirror neurons that we use to empathize with others. When someone is upset, sad, or happy, our mirror neurons cause us to feel the same emotions that they feel. This is why it can be draining when people complain about their problems all the time, or why we feel so excited when our friend tells us some amazing news. We end up feeling their emotions in our own body.

When we listen to a sad song, we are emotionally resonating with the artist and what they went through in this song. Music helps us capture complex emotions that we are not quite able to articulate with language, and hearing a song that resonates with something from your own experience can help you connect with emotions and process them. This is one reason why music can be healing.

Why Did We Evolve to Create Music?

Steven Pinker wrote in his 1997 book How The Mind Works, “Music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties”. Without music, he said, our lives wouldn’t change all that much.

There have been many critics of this view though, and there are some pretty solid reasons why we may have evolved to create music that are more than just for the sake of pleasure.

Social Bonding

Music brings people together in ways that not many other things can. People from all different cultures can come together at a music festival and have a shared experience that deepens their experience of life. Music has always been something that brings people together, even dating back to our hunter gathering days.

Hunters would sing and dance to bring cohesion to the group before they went out on an important hunt and they would celebrate a successful hunt by singing and dancing around the fire. People from all cultures understand how music can help coworkers get through their day a little bit easier.

Social bonds created from sharing musical experiences may have led to social bonds between not only families, but communities as a whole, helping more solitary people come out of their shell and be a part of the group.

Charles Darwins theory of why we developed music was as a form of sexual selection. One partner may be attracted by the musical ability of the other. This is very evident in bird songs, but also in whales, frogs, cicadas, crickets, and even in human culture. We are naturally attracted to people with musical talent, but understanding why is interesting.

Book Recommendation

Why I love this book

I am in the middle of this book right now and so far it has been a pretty great read! This book is about how we have a limited amount of time on earth, our to-do lists just keep getting longer, and how we should focus more on the things that matter. We naturally don’t have time to fit in all of the things we wish we could fit in, so we try to get more efficient with our time, only for more to get stacked on to our plate every time.

Oliver Burkeman’s idea is to realize that our time is finite and to choose to make some things more of a priority than other things, and not feel so bad that we can’t fit everything in to our schedule. He has several insights that really hit home in our over productive world.

One cool thing he mentions from Warren Buffet, list out 20 things that you want to do with your life, hobbies, interests, etc. Prioritize them from most important to the least important. Now take the top 5 and focus your life on those, and forget the other 15 as those are the distractions that will pull you away from your top 5. The problem is that we don’t have an infinite amount of time to do all of the things on our to do list, so prioritizing our most important tasks will keep us from starting too many projects and finishing none of them.

I will write more about this book when I finish it, but if this sounds at all interesting you can check it out below! He has also appeared on podcasts, so if you prefer to listen to it, then you can find him on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson.

Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman

 Take care my friend,

- Niko