Why Did Music Evolve? - 4 Hypotheses 

Take a look at the endocannabinoid system in humans. Our evolution seems to be deeply integrated with and reliant upon it, and music interacts strongly with it. The endocannabinoid system is what is at play with the "runner's high" - anandamide floods the body and makes you feel good. It helps regulate the human caloric intake, helps modulate our social engagement, and is involved in infant cognitive development - mother's milk is loaded with endocannabinoids. Learning is tied to the endocannabinoid system as well - it interacts strongly with the dopamine system in the brain. Rhythm is both triggered by and a result of the endocannabinoid system (think dogs wagging their tail - dogs do this when they're happy, because their endocannabinoid system is activated, and out comes the ryhthmic movement of the tail). When you put all this together, I believe music and dance are much less of a mystery, and more of a specific puzzle. All these things that interact with the endocannabinoid system, from nurturing the young (not just mother's milk but lullabies and children's songs), to learning, to social engagement (including falling in love) to running for long periods of time to surviving pregnancy, all rely on strong signaling of the endocannabinoid system. So if this system is both triggered by and results in music and dance, of course we evolved this way! The question is more, to me, what the specific order of it was. Did we have a need to run for long periods of time and that selected for a robust endocannabinoid system? Which then resulted in a highly social species? Or was it the highly social species part that came first, then the running? Etc. But definitely look into the ECS, it's a trip. Oh, editing to add a few things as I watch. 1. The highest concentration of endocannabinoid receptors in the brain speaks directly to one of the few regions of the brain with large sex differences. The region of the *body* with the highest amount of endocannaboid receptors is the *ovaries*. Men and women have very different responses to weed and to endocannabinoids. This explains both the mechanisms of sex differences in birdsong (the system even in distantly related creatures is still set up for sex differences) but also why women also do music - the human species is going gangbusters with the endocannabinoid system and if your ability to do well as a human depends on your mother having a large amount of endocannabinoids in her milk when she nurses you, and your development will depend further on her singing to you (because being sung to will improve your memory), she'll be into music too, not just dad. 2. Humans already were disconnected from grooming by our hairlessness. After witnessing an abandoned young kitten so preoccupied by a rampant flea infestation it wasn't playing normally, I now think a major evolutionary shift for us was hairlessness. If some of us were hairless, bam, we didn't need to spend so much time grooming or distracted by pests. These hairless humans would be subjected to a bunch of needs like learning (how do you make clothing, now that you're hairless), social bonding (as you alluded to), etc. So maybe that's the mechanism by which we developed such a robust ECS. 3. The reason why grooming leads to social engagement is because grooming strongly triggers - you guessed it, the ECS. Every species with grooming behavior/cleaning functions, down to single cell organisms - has an ECS. There is ECS interaction between members of the species AND between species. This is why dogs and cats get enjoyment out of being pet - it triggers their ECS. It also triggers our ECS to pet them.

Yes!! Love Nebula, and of course love your videos (your book, as well!). Would love to see Nebula exclusives from you 🤩

Hey Stefan, in the same vein of this video, would you be interested in doing a dive into why humans have a desire to create things? Practical tools, equipment and shelter make sense; but we create many things simply because we want to, or for the satisfaction of just *doing it* even if it doesn't serve a purpose.

Stefan! I can't believe you guys are only thinking about social reasons. Social music is just the outcome of why why like music. However, it's not the reason we evolved to love it. The reason we love it so much is because we stay in the mothers womb so long. A babies brain is huge compared to any other species, massive actually. We grow accustomed to hearing our mothers heartbeat. Also, we subconsciously remember the rhythms of our mothers walking around. Also we can hear the cadence rhythms of our mothers voices and of ghsie who talk with her. Depending on her tone is the beat of her heart. If she talks in an excited way, her heart beat will changem he tone will change, babies in the womb are smart enough to know this. It's not evolved exactly. Instead it's psychologicaly learned from being in your Mom's stomach for 265 days with a brain 3 times larger then a chimps.

Ah yes! Great point! Group memory, history, family recent ancestors, mythology, and I imagine group boasting as well, like cheerleading at a sports game, to raise group energy and sense of belonging.

Indeed, chants have been passed down for thousands of years.

@@kaarlimakela3413 Don't forget flyting.

But to me that seems more like a result of our appreciation for music rather than a purpose. _Because_ we already like music, music can help us remember things.

There's a reason the oldest Vedas are sung. If I recall correctly, there's a number of Vedic verses that no one knows what they mean because it's in an old language that didn't survive and no one knows how to translate.

That’s awesome!

g'day stacie, when i look at something like this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AxSWVkPfVc8.html i couldnt agree more. its a chechen zikr. and bonding seems like its major purpose. but when i look at something like this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FDg86QM5-jk.html you would have to say there is a fair element of sexual selection going on. being its a georgian lezginka at a wedding there is still a social bonding aspect to it. (they are all georgians) but it is at a wedding and its a display infront of the opposite sex with feats of strength, rhythm and sexual fitness. best of luck to you and your dog adam

I feel the same way. Like, I agree with people that think some musical elements just already existed in communication, but music as we would generally speak of it developed a social element. It became a drug for us, so we could create feelings and share them with our community.

Yes! I also make a living with art. Visual and dance. And by doing so you realize so much about humanity you never thought youd learn. What symbols they revolve and evolve around. The arts are incredibly important. Creativity needs to be seen for how intelligent and needed it truly is. Without it humans would become a fraction of what they are now.

I'm always a sucker for an academic saying Steve Pinker is (probably) wrong

Thanks Robert, I’m always trying to improve my abilities. It’s hard not coming from a film background but I try

@@StefanMilo having followed your channel for a few years, i'd say you are always improving in that aspect :)

Same. Really dug the presentation in this one.

I agree. Breaking it up with all the different presentations really made it easier to follow to me. 👍

@@StefanMilo being a musician is opening yourself up and saying... Hey, come over here.. check out what I'm doing... I'm opening up to you and you're welcome to join me. It's a way for a person to ask for more friends.

I adore the idea of your budgie correcting a bad note.

That is well interesting, thank you

I think that looking at other primapes would be a smarter move to understand it.

4:35 Those are Geladas

@@user-pakshibhithi10 Briefly shown, but not mentioned or discussed, which is what I specifically commented on as being lacking.

@@earthknight60 👍

I'd say this phenomenon branches out to all artforms. It's more of like a shortcut to getting to know someone. If they look like you or profess to enjoy the things you enjoy, you can instantly extrapolate a lot about who they are. This can obviously be dangerous as one could assume that you are a bad person just because you look different or you profess not to like the same foods or whatnot. But it is definitely something that seems to be universal to humans. The key is learning not to hate people who are different while still bonding with those who are similar.

@@miketheburns Yeah it's a pretty universal thing among humans to feel more kinship with those who like and spend time on similar things.

Being attracted to similar music is one of the core ways adolescents build trust. They have music they share with family and new or statement music that bonds them with a peer group.

I think a good example of this is the Iliad, where thousands of lines where memorized by rhapsodes, storing the history and myths of the Greeks through music.

As a musician who once put a ridiculously long poem to music in order to memorize it, I wholeheartedly agree. To this day, nearly 40 years later, I still can recite the whole thing.

Yes good one, sea shanties that set a timing for pulling rope or sails etc

@@AmyKSpreadborough can you please recite the poem?

@@Akrafena "They chained us each to a column stone, and we were three yet each alone. We could not move a single pace. We could not see each other's face, but with that pale and livid light that made us strangers to our sight, and thus together, yet apart, fettered in hand but joined in hear t'was still some solace in the dearth of pure elements of earth to hearken to each other's speech and each turn comforter to each with some new song or legend old, but even these at length grew old, an echo of the dungeon stone, a grating tone not full and free as those of yore were won't to be. It might be fancy, but to me, they never sounded like our own." verse 3 of Prisoner of Chillon, Lord Byron. My 14-year-old self was pretty into it back in the day, lol. I may not have gotten it all correctly, but I'm still impressed I can recite it. Power of music.

It's somewhat common for dairy farmers to have a radio on in the barn during milking, since cows really do seem to find music interesting and pleasurable. It's so interesting to me -- I wonder what music must sound like to them! There's no reason to believe cows have a sense of rhythm, so they presumably comprehend it very differently than we do.

You said that so beautifully .thank you 💜💙✌️

Reminds me that RU-vid has tried to entice me with videos of a pianist playing for elephants, who apparently appreciate. If you click on one such videos, the algorithm will offer to your consideration plenty of other videos of animals that like or at least are attracted by music.

@@pansepot1490 I came across a number of parrot videos, and they seem to have a distinct enjoyment of music. My favorites are the Cockatiel, whose voices can be very sweet, and also the Cockatoo. An Umbrella Cockatoo can get down, they are real headbangers, getting excited easily. But they do listen well and follow the tempo with vigorous motion. But Cockatoos are usually not great singers, just really great music appreciators. 🙂 My favorite common wild singing bird is the Robin. They seem to sing in complete sentences including a little fillip of punctuation at the end! ❤️

Cows give more milk if you play music for them.

I like that. Something emergent, that grows in complexity ...

I agree: it's more like a combination of hypotheses. There's no single cause.

The thing about birds singing, and probably whales, wolves, and others, is that their "singing" can keep the group together even when they're out of sight of one another. They can signal information, such as territory boundaries, alarm, peaceful conditions, or a call to action. Bugle calls in battle may serve the same purpose.

@@jerrymiller2367 Well it's not that bugle calls in battle may serve the same purpose, they literally serve the same purpose. European armies adopted the bugle because it was an effective tool of battlefield communication, we know this for a fact because it's fairly recent history and it's all written down. Drums are similar, they were adopted because they're an effective way to maintain cohesion in a unit by synchronizing the march. Many armies still maintain music cores in order to maintain these traditions even though music isn't used for these purposes on the modern battlefield but because the tradition has persisted we know exactly what the purpose of it was. The Ancient Romans probably also used horn instruments for similar purposes and in Mesoamerica conch shells were used for battlefield calls.

Well in general with things like this it's always a combination of all three, none of the hypotheses are exclusive and the debate is more over which one was the most important, since it's hard to conclusively prove or disprove one.

Is that a euphemism?

We like to recognize patterns and be able to predict them so it would make sense that percussions tickle our brain, we analyze the pattern then once we get it we can predict it and get a bit of dopamine for it because it's usually good for us to be able to predict patterns. Even if we don't get the full pattern just knowing when it repeats or being able to tell when one drum will be played is kinda comforting. Notes are basically just really fast percussions. If you hit a drum about 78 times per second it would sound like the lower E string of a guitar. I think what makes us feel emotions when notes are played either one after the other or in a chord is similar to percussions, if you play a note and the same note an octave higher, it's like if you hit a drum at a steady rate and another one twice as fast, which is very predictable and thus sound "right", although a bit boring. I think what makes a chord sound happy or sad is how complicated it is, to an extent, too simple like just octaves and it doesn't make us feel much emotions but sounds right and too dissonant and it doesn't sound sad it just sounds wrong.

look up "Caveman" starring Ringo Starr.

@@jessestreet2549 I never in my life saw a more disturbing trailer

"Play with feeling" is horrible advice. To get good at music you need to practice, practice and practice.

Well this is definitely not a universal experience among humans, those with alexithymia like me would be completely unable to do that since we can't intuitively figure out what we're feeling. Music can help me access feelings but having played guitar myself I wouldn't be able to sit down and play something based on my feelings, I'd just be blank if you asked me to do that.

@@hedgehog3180 There's no such thing as "playing music with feeling". No real music teacher would tell their student to "play with feeling" since it means nothing. If someone gives that "advice" concerning music then they are not worth listening to. You won't find a single professional musician who thinks "play with feeling" is good advice.

@@hedgehog3180 so you can't feel the difference between john denver's leaving on a jet plane and rage against the machine's killing in the name of? That's mind blowing. I feel for ya!

@@hedgehog3180 Most people have difficulty expressing exactly how we feel. Why we say "I feel like crap" instead of "I feel tired, achy, depressed" etc. For me I wound up in an anger management back in 87. It help me to gain an emotion vocabulary. And it took a lot of work/ practice. Here in Canada that kind of help is close to free. I bet in the US it's far more expensive but I would suggest some sort of group therapy may help. Just to put it in perspective the dictionary lables emotions as emotions and there are thousands of them.

Makes sense but you mean walking right? I doubt our ancestors ran marathons mate....

@@kostaborojevic498 Evidences seem to point that our ancestors, starting with Homo Erectus, became Persistence hunters. This involves running for hours straight.

@@EvilMaxWar you are right my bad.....

​@@kostaborojevic498 We are designed to run very long distances in order to run down our prey just as wolves do today . Humans and wolves are persistance hunters .

It’s like when you hear people singing the songs from World War 2, it brings back the feelings that they had then. Music seems to bypass the logic and go straight to the feelings. That’s what music is all about.

That would support the social cohesion theory, since it's making us connect deep emotions with symbols of specific groups and making us feel part of those groups, though it also supports other ideas like how music can be a great stress relief in hard times.

Corrupt and failed state, thats Ukraine.

Trance and healing are an important aspect. Coherence of society. Trance, divination and clearvoiance can be induced by rhythmical stimulation in accordance to a changed brainwave pattern. Brainwaves of people adapt to the brainwaves of the drummer is what scientists measured. There is sound and music everywhere in our body. Here in Germany Dr. Sabine Rittner, Department for Musical Therapy / Medical branch from the University of Heidelberg, made interesting research. Evolution of music seems multifaceted but healing must be seen as an important factor.

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In my opinion it's all of them. I don't need to know the exact message wolves are trying to communicate. I only need to know that it doesn't bode well for me. Music evolved over time, that much is obvious. So it very well could have gained additional social functions over time. Example. We tend to prefer music that is closer to our own cultural experience, yet we still instantly recognize music as music from other cultures. Signal recognition, but not necessarily a bonding feeling, not my group, the ones I trust. I'm not a musician despite trying really hard to learn guitar and specifically during puberty. It was not difficult to see the ladies gravitating to the guy who could play guitar. We don't get to see the outcome of that gravitation. Did he get with one of those ladies or not, I have no idea. Hence not a universal mating practice. Parents singing to kids is a decent counter argument. However, I pet my cat, but there's nothing sexual about it. With a sexual partner "petting" has a different meaning. That dopamine hit is always welcome in humans, one more way to get one would certainly also be welcome. Anyhow, I enjoyed this video as I have all the rest. Thanks much👍

I don't think there is ANY hypothesis that covers all kinds of sound signaling or even all kinds of music. I don't consider the sounds of Gibbons, crickets or the noise and shouting of the Maoris music at all. Some birdsong which is pleasing to my ears, I could regard as getting close to something which could be called music.

I was slightly skeptical with the credible signaling hypothesis, because I've heard it before in the broader context of language origins where it tends to be discarded specifically because it is so easy to lie with language, but your point of not putting the human thing above the animals we're evolving alongside made me think about it again, as that's the exact same reason I favor the language origin hypothesis I do, the manual language first hypothesis. So many language origin hypotheses seem to have it emerging far too quickly and too fully formed, like it's some magic dividing line where we didn't have it and we were animals, and we did have it and we no longer were.

This works in-practice, can confirm I had a solo wilderness experience where I had a large pack of wild canines following me in the dark and I could see the reflections of light in their eyes at a distance, lurking in the dark, avoiding the light i was in a clearing, but not a big one, and I had no way of keeping them from going wider than the clearing and encircling me I didn’t have my firearm loaded bc i had already spent the ammo on missed shots earlier in the day and I wished I had some kind of spear or bayonet but alas none of that either besides the empty rifle I had a pretty decent bluetooth speaker, with some strong bass subwoofers, so i quickly unpacked it and I started playing music and singing along, very percussive stuff, i think it was the skyrim ost or something similar with taiko drums anyways i put it at full volume and started chanting and jumping up and down, it seemed to confuse them because they recoiled and fled, looking around frantically for the source of the extra noise with enough battery on the speaker for like 12-16 hours of music, i was able to rest in peace for 8 and leave in the morning (i found tracks all around my camp about 100 meters out, but the music made them think i was awake and in a large group maybe?) i theorize that most dangerous animals like moose or grizzly bears avoid you if you’re loud and percussive enough on-approach

Yeah I think our modern music has little in common with its earliest roots. Our intelligence has allowed to it to become so much more. But you’re right I think initially, the very first beginnings of music has to have been similar to the complex vocalisations of other animals. I don’t see why our song would need a fundamentally different origin to that of a whale or gibbon.

I think we have all the basic same instincts as animals, maybe more, we have more complex brains after all.

Humans are definitely highly instinctual animals. We're just more complex. Saying that humans aren't instinctual puts us on some strange, non-existent pedestal.

Have you ever jumped at a sudden noise? Yelped in fear after seeing a snake or a spider? Felt you heartbeat quicken when a huge dog you can't see starts barking angrily somewhere close? That's all instinct. We have full suite of it, and we use them all the time. We fear the darkness. We smile when we see someone we like. We start fidgeting when we're nervous and need to find an outlet for tension.

I agree that we have echos of many instincts and that this may be one of them. Some of the comments here argue that we do have intincts, and we do. But from what I've seen, we do have echos of instincts too. For example, when I worked in customer service years ago I noticed that without fail, people tended to all go to the register to check out at the same time. So much that it was predictable. I realized that we still have a herding / flocking / schooling instinct that is barely more than an echo now. Certain physiological things, (like when we can get pregnant), often follow the cycles of the moon too - but not everyone does and few people realize this. I believe that to be another shdow or echo of how our species once was. I think it is very likely that humanity's deep desire for music is a rther loud echo of what it was originally for. Loud because most people feel the desire strongly and actively pursue it. But echo because we no longer conciously remember what it was for.

As a Cultural Theorist, I’d be inclined to associate silence with Fatalism as a ‘thought style’ in the first instance, however there are other varieties of silence as Fadiah Alraies has shown in her brilliant Brunel University PhD thesis ‘Many Silences’

So I am not the only one who’s gone down the rabbit hole of animals listening to music.