Episode 201: Music is Movement with Mark Changizi

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?
Cognitive scientist, Mark Changizi joins me this week for a fascinating exploration into the hardware and software that allows humans to understand, interpret and make sense out of music. In his book “Harnessed,” he makes the case 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.
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