Shaping the evolution of human language

BBC News reports:

Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

The team analysed the way bonobos and chimpanzees used hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood. The scientists found the apes used gestures more flexibly than the way they used facial and vocal expressions. They say the findings support the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

These research findings would seem to chime nicely with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's ideas about overlapping cognitive processes for visual and auditory gestalts forming one basis of the evolution of human language. My speculation (which may very well not be original): having learned to gesture, did our distant ancestors take inspiration from the shapes both of the objects around them and of their own gestures to form the sonic shapes of their first, rudimentary words?

Self and Identity as Memory

"Self and Identity as Memory", by John F. Kihlstrom, Jennifer S. Beer and Stanley B. Klein of University of California, is a fascinating (albeit densely condensed) survey of philosophical, cognitive and behavioural psychological and neurological research findings that establish the basis of our sense of self and identity in our memory (as the paper's title suggests).

The authors do an admirable job in pulling together myriad strands of narrative (their diverse research sources) into a coherent whole, and there are many intriguing insights along the way—for instance, on the mutually-discrete nature of semantic and episodic memory, and on the possible existence of a separate brain module for self-awareness (as opposed to awareness of others). All the same, I couldn't help feeling that the authors were having to work pretty hard to get all their material to hang together—as if they were trying to facilitate a discussion by a hundred blind men groping their way around an elephant towards a consensus on what the elephant actually is.

Such is the slippery beast of identity... ; )

Musing on music

I have a particular piano pupil who is on the autistic spectrum. I shall call him Alan. Alan likes routine and dislikes changes in his routine. We have taken a few months to get to know each other, and now it is becoming really quite rewarding to teach him, as he is musical, motivated, and full of wild notions.

However, when I told Alan's dad that I had pointed Alan towards Wikipedia as a resource for finding out about the lives of the composers of the pieces he is playing (he always asks about them), the dad told me glumly that, while Alan had learned to read excellently by the (exceptionally early) age of two, he found it very difficult to sustain his attention for more than a few written words before his mind shot off on some tangent or other.

I realised that music making must be providing Alan a thread to keep hold of through passing time in a way that the act of reading the written word does not: he often sustains his attention well through his renditions of his piano pieces. Not always, and not perfectly, but there is certainly a continuity of attention present when Alan is playing the piano than at other times.

Music making simulaneously requires attention and expression on aural, physical and conceptual levels. It is an extraordinarily immersive experience. I am really glad that, through music, Alan seems to be strengthening his ability to sustain a dialogue with his world through time—and having a lot of fun doing thats, of course.

On a related note, while Alan is an intelligent boy, Charla and I heard a podcast from CBS's 60 Minutes the other day about so-called "idiot savants" who exhibit amazing musical skills. More than one child featured on the podcast was able to reproduce and improvise music on their chosen instrument, in a variety of styles and with no little panache. Yet the same children were unable to dress themselves or hold a basic conversation, thanks to their overall mental age of around two years (their actual ages were between 8 and teen).

Apparently, it is thought that such people hold the patterns and rules necessary for their musical feats in procedural memory—the type of memory that helps us to ride a bicycle or do the ironing.

Perhaps we could just about get a sense of how the learning and reproduction of a pre-determined piece of (e.g. classical) music could be achieved in this way, but musical improvisation is a far more complex activity than the simple execution of a pre-determined sequence of actions. With improvisation, the timing and pitch of each note must be chosen in the context of other simultaneous notes, previous notes and following notes, with respect to global rules and/or piece-specific templates (in the case of e.g. a jazz standard) of harmony, texture, melodic shape and phrase structure—rules which are at best partially understood by music theorists!

I know that when I improvise at the piano, I am far from conscious of what in my mind is generating all the simulataneous choices I am making about the movement of my fingers over the keys (and foot on the pedal). I just know or guess what feels and sounds good to me.

What an amazing gift music is for us—but also, what a mystery it remains!

The timetelling brain

Some aspects of our human experience seem so obvious and "natural" to us that we don't stop to question how they arise. For instance, I certainly have never given any thought as to how my brain detects the passage of time before!