People Who Empathize Highly With Others Process Music Differently in the Brain

> "This study contributes to a growing body of evidence," Wallmark said, "that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction."

An alternative hypothesis is that singing co-evolved with humans' peculiarly selfless social interaction. Joseph Jordania argues that rhythmic signing and dancing evolved as a method of defense and offense for scavenging on the savannah. A group of humans in synchronous motion and polyphonous vocalization might appear quite formidable to a large predator, and the behavior could have begun to emerge immediately upon or simultaneous to human ancestors' descent onto the open savannah. We know that higher-order primates usually already possess all of the physical prerequisites, such as primitive vocalization capabilities, call/response behaviors, and rudimentary capacity to mimic necessary to start down that path.

The cognitive mechanisms which permitted humans to instinctively synchronize their behavior with others would be the foundation upon which not only language could develop (via the emergence of shared, complex modulated vocalizations to which meaning could be subsequently affixed), but also selfless empathy. There aren't any good theories for how significant, non-kin selflessness could evolve using standard genetic models. Game theory shows its too easy for genetic free riders to stifle the emergence of human-level selflessness among non-kin group members. Thus concrete evidence of so-called "group selection" has remained stubbornly but unsurprisingly elusive.

But in Jordania's theory it's presumably difficult to fake the neurobiological characteristics that permit perfect physical and polyphonic synchronization. If you get it wrong or simply don't participate you stick out like a sore thumb (or a wounded animal), become food for a lion, and are removed from the gene pool. And its best if those characteristics for unified behavior are deep, instinctual, and almost autonomic. Those characteristics might not be sufficient to get you to modern humans, but they're a huge leap forward (perhaps the biggest one) in terms of the emergence of complex non-kin selflessness and cooperation via selfish genes. And at its root would be humans' capacity to immerse themselves in and "become one" with music--music would be the bridge between the self and the group, literally and figuratively. And it would have been strongly selected for as part of a survival strategy at the _individual_ genetic level; no need for group selection.

Very interesting. I just broke up with a woman who I now think may have been sociopathic, or at the very least extremely selfish, due not only to the utterly cold way she dumped me, but looking back, many many other cues I ignored.

She had no real interest in music whatsoever. She played some awful Top 40 crap in her car, but I think it was just to avoid having silence. She was never interested in hearing me play anything (I play guitar), never expressed any real interest in particular bands or anything.