Music...

The evolution of pleasure

"A principle of evolution is that in general, if something feels good, evolution must have made it so - evolution must have provided a reward mechanism for synchronized movement and music making, in the same way that evolution provided mechanisms of reward when we eat and have sex." (The World in Six Songs, Daniel J. Levitin)

We’re still awake and still singing

According to the Media Daily News “The (American) Senate may green-light legislation compelling advertisers to turn down the sound on commercials. But although much of the public is annoyed by the high volumes, a minority feel the government should get involved in the issue.”

Daniel Levitin writes in his wonderful book The World in Six Songs “The surprise, predawn attack was a gruesome innovation in prehistoric warfare. The attackers would wait until their opponents were in deep sleep and attack just an hour before dawn, sometimes in complete silence, sometimes with a fanfare of menacing instruments, creating as much noise and mayhem as they could to terrify their victims. (...) Those bands of early humans who were unable to develop a strategy for fending off such attacks were killed. Their genes did not endure in the population.”

Whatever compelled bands of primitive people to turn that volume knob increasingly up during commercials we will never know... 

What we do know however is that, still according to Levitin, “A few clever humans did develop countertactics —no doubt as a direct consequence of the increased size of their prefrontal cortex (...) These countertactics may well have involved staying awake at night and singing as a way to broadcast, ‘We’re awake, and we are here.’ “

Still singing after all these years...