Deep Secrets

Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man

Deep Secrets

It isn’t nice to tell secrets in front of others. I recently had to teach this rule to my six‑year‑old daughter, who, in the presence of other people, would demand that I bend down and hear a whispered message. To my surprise, she was genuinely perplexed about why communicating a message only to me, in the presence of others, could possibly be a bad thing.

Upon thinking about it, I began wondering: What exactly is so bad about telling secrets? There are circumstances in which telling secrets would appear to be the appropriate thing to do. For example, if Dick and Jane are over for a formal dinner at my house, and in order to spare my wife some embarrassment I lean over and whisper, “Honey, there’s chocolate on your forehead,” is that wrong? Wouldn’t it be worse to say nothing, or to say it out loud (or in a published book)?

The problem with telling secrets is not that there aren’t things worth telling others discreetly. Rather, the problem is that when we see someone telling a secret, it taps into a little program in our head that goes, “That must be very important information–possibly about me . Why else keep it from me?” The problem with secrets is that we’re all a bit paranoid, and afflicted with a bad case of “me, me, me!” The result is that secrets get imbued with weighty importance, when they mostly concern such sundries as foreheads and sweets.

Not only do we tend to go cuckoo over the covert, attributing importance to unimportant secrets, but we also have the predisposition to see secrets where there are none at all. Our propensity to see nonexistent secrets has engendered some of the most enduring human preoccupations: mysticism and the occult. For example, astrology, palm reading, and numerology are “founded” upon supposed secret meanings encoded in the patterns found in stars, handprints, and numbers, respectively. Practitioners of mysticism believe themselves to be the deepest people on Earth, dedicated to the ancient secrets of the universe: God, life, death, happiness, soul, character, and so on. Astrological horoscopes don’t predict the morning commute, and palm readers never say with eerie omniscience, “Don’t eat the yogurt in your fridge. It’s moldy!” The secrets are not only deep, but often personal: they’re about ourselves and our role in the universe, playing on our need for more “me, me, me.”

Even those who pride themselves on not believing in mystical gobbledygook often still enjoy a good dose of deep ancient secrets in fiction, which is why Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code did so well. In that novel secret codes revealed secret codes about other secret codes, and they all held a meaning so deep that people were willing to slay and self‑flay for it.

Secrets excite us. But stars, palms, and numbers hide no deep, ancient secrets. (Or at any rate, not the sort mystics are searching for.) And stories like the The Da Vinci Code are, well, just stories. What a shame our real world can’t be as romantic as Dan Brown’s fictional one, or the equally fictional one mystics believe they live in. Bummer.

But what if there are deep and ancient secrets? Real ones, not gobbledygook? And what if these secrets are about you and your place in the universe? What if mystics and fiction readers have been looking for deep secrets in all the wrong places?

That’s where this book enters the story. Have I got some deep secrets for you! And as you will see, these ancient secrets are much closer than you may have thought; they’re hiding in plain sight. In fact, as I write these very words I am making use of three of the deepest, ancientest secret codes there are. What are these secrets? Let me give you a hint. They concern the three activities I’m engaged in right now: I am reading (my own writing), listening to speech (an episode of bad TV to keep me awake at 2 a.m.), and listening to music (the melodramatic score of the TV show). My ability to do these three things relies on a code so secret few have even realized there’s a code at all.

“Code, schmode!” you might respond. “How lame is that, Changizi? You tantalize me with deep secrets, and yet all you give me are run‑of‑the‑mill writing, speech, and music! Where are the ancient scrolls, Holy Grails, secret passwords, and forgotten alchemy recipes?”

Ah, but . . . I respond. The secrets underlying writing, speech, and music are immensely deep ones. These secret codes are so powerful they can turn apes into humans. As a matter of fact, they didturn apes into humans. That’s deeper than anything any mystic ever told you!

And it is also almost certainly truer. So shove that newspaper horoscope and that Dan Brown novel off your coffee table, and make room for this nonfiction story about the deepest ancient secret codes we know of . . . the ones that created us.

To help get us started, in the following section I will give you a hint about the nature of these codes. As we will see, the secret behind the codes is . . . nature itself .

Mother Nature’s Code

If one of our last nonspeaking ancestors were found frozen in a glacier and revived, we imagine that he would find our world jarringly alien. His brain was built for nature, not for the freak‑of‑nature modern landscape we humans inhabit. The concrete, the cars, the clothes, the constant jabbering–it’s enough to make a hominid jump into the nearest freezer and hope to be reawakened after the apocalypse.

But would modernity really seem so frightening to our guest? Although cities and savannas would appear to have little in common, might there actually be deep similarities? Could civilization have retained vestiges of nature, easing our ancestor’s transition? And if so, why should it–why would civilization care about being a hospitable host to the freshly thawed really‑really‑great‑uncle?

The answer is that, although we were born into civilization rather than melted into it, from an evolutionary point of view we’re an uncivilized beast dropped into cultured society. We prefer nature as much as the next hominid, in the sense that our brains work best when their computationally sophisticated mechanisms can be applied as evolution intended. Living in modern civilization is not what our bodies and brains were selected to be good at.

Perhaps, then, civilization shaped itself for us , not for thawed‑out time travelers. Perhaps civilization possesses signature features of nature in order to squeeze every drop of evolution’s genius out of our brains for use in the modern world. Perhaps we’re hospitable to our ancestor because we have been hospitable to ourselves .

Does civilization mimic nature? I believe so. And I won’t merely suggest that civilization mimics nature by, for example, planting trees along the boulevards. Rather, I will make the case that some of the most fundamental pillars of humanity are thoroughly infused with signs of the ancestral world . . . and that, without this infusion of nature, the pillars would crumble, leaving us as very smart hominids (or “apes,” as I say at times), but something considerably less than the humans we take ourselves to be today.

In particular, those fundamental pillars of humankind are (spoken) language and music. Language is at the heart of what makes us apes so special, and music is one of the principal examples of our uniquely human artistic side.

As you will see, the fact that speech and music sound like other aspects of the natural world is crucial to the story about how we apes got language and music. Speech and music culturally evolved over time to be simulacra of nature. Now that’s a deep, ancient secret, one that has remained hidden despite language and music being right in front of our eyes and ears, and being obsessively studied by generations of scientists. And like any great secret code, it has great power–it is so powerful it turned clever apes into Earth‑conquering humans. By mimicking nature, language and music could be effortlessly absorbed by our ancient brains, which did not evolve to process language and music. In this way, culture figured out how to trick nonlinguistic, nonmusical ape brains into becoming master communicators and music connoisseurs.

One consequence of this secret is that the brain of the long‑lost, illiterate, and unmusical ancestor we unthaw is no different in its fundamental design from yours or mine. Our thawed ancestor might do just fine here, because our language and music would harness his brain as well. Rather than jumping into a freezer, our long‑lost relative might instead choose to enter engineering school and invent the next‑generation refrigerator.

The origins of language and music may be attributable, not to brains having evolved language and music instincts, but rather to language and music having culturally evolved brain instincts . Language and music shaped themselves over many thousands of years to be tailored to our brains, and because our brains were cut for nature, language and music mimicked nature . . . and transformed ape to man.

Under the Radar

If language and music mimic nature, why isn’t this obvious to everyone? Why should this have remained a secret? It’s not as if we have no idea what nature is like. We’re not living on the International Space Station, and even those who are on the Space Station weren’t raised up there! We know what nature looks and sounds like, having seen and heard countless examples of it. So, given our abundant experiences of nature, why haven’t we noticed the signature of nature written (I propose) all over language and music?

The answer is that, ironically, our experiences with nature don’t help us consciously comprehend what nature in fact looks and sounds like. What we are aware of is already an assembled interpretation of the actual data our senses and brains process. This is true of you whether you are a couch potato extraordinaire or a grizzled expedition guide just returned from Madagascar and leaving in the morning for Tasmania.

For example, I am currently in a coffee shop–a setting you’ll hear about again and again–and when I look up from the piece of paper I’m writing on, I see people, tables, mugs, and chairs. That is, I am consciously aware of seeing these objects . But my brain sees much more than just the objects. My early visual system (involved in the first array of visual computations performed on the visual input from the retina) sees the individual contours, and does not see the combinations of contours. My intermediate‑level visual areas see simple combinations of several contours–for instance, object corners such as “L” or “Y” junctions–but don’t see the contours, and don’t see the objects. It is my highest‑level visual areas that see the objects themselves, and I am conscious of my perception of these objects. My conscious self is, however, rarely aware of the lower hierarchical levels of visual structure.

For example, do you recall the figure at the start of the chapter–the person’s head with a lock and key on it? Notice that you recall it in terms referring to the objects –in fact, I just referred to the image using the terms person, head, lock , and key . If, instead, I were to ask you if you recall seeing the figure that had a half dozen “T” junctions and several “L” junctions, you would likely not know what I was talking about. And if I were to ask you if you recall the figure that had about 40 contours, and I then went on and described the geometry of each contour individually, you would likely avoid me at cocktail parties.

Not only do you (your conscious self) not see the lower‑level visual structures in the image, you probably won’t find it easy to talk or think about them. Unless you have studied computational vision (i.e., studied how to build machines that see) or are a vision scientist, you probably haven’t thought about how contours intersect one another in images. “Not only did I not see T or L junctions in the image,” you might respond, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about!” We also have great trouble talking about the orientation and shapes of contours in our view of three‑dimensional scenes (something that came to the fore in the theory of illusions I discussed in The Vision Revolution ).

Thus, we may think we know what a chair looks like, but in a more extended sense, we have little idea, especially about all those lower‑level features. And although parts of our brain do know what a chair looks like at these lower levels, they’re not given a mouthpiece into our conscious internal speech stream. It is our inability to truly grasp what the lower‑level visual features are in images that explains why most of us are hopeless at drawing what we see. Most of us must undergo training to become better at accessing the lower levels, and even some of the great master painters (such as Jan Van Eyck) may have projected images onto their canvases and traced the lower‑level structures.

Not only do we not truly know what nature looks like, we also don’t know what it sounds like. When we hear sounds, we hear the meaningful events, not the lower‑level auditory constituents out of which they are built. I just heard someone at the next table cutting something with her fork on a ceramic plate. I did not consciously hear the low‑level acoustic structure underlying the sound, but my lower‑level auditory areas did hear just that.

For both vision and audition, then, we have a hierarchy of distinct neural regions, each a homunculus (“little man”) great at processing nature at its level of detail. If you could go out for drinks with these homunculi, they’d tell you all about what nature is like at lower and middle hierarchical scales. But they’re not much for conversation, and so you are left in the dark, having good conscious access only to the final, highest parts of the hierarchy. You see objects and hear events, but you do not see or hear the constituents out of which they are built.

You may now be starting to see how language and music could mimic nature, yet we could be unaware of it. In particular: what if language and music mimic all the lower‑ and middle‑level structures of nature, and only fail to mimic nature at the highest levels? All our servant homunculi would be happily and efficiently processing stimuli that appear to them to be part of nature. And yet, because the stimuli may have a structure that is not “natural” at the highest hierarchical level, our conscious self will only see the dissimilarity between our cultural artifacts and nature.

Why should we believe what we can’t consciously perceive–that language and music mimic nature at all but the highest hierarchical level? Why not go all the way and make language and music completely like nature?

Let’s not forget that language and music are not merely trying to mimic nature. They have jobs to do: writing is for putting thoughts on the record, speech is for transmitting thoughts to others, and music is perhaps for something like evoking feelings in others. Language and music want to capture as much of the structure of nature as they can so that they have an easy ride into our brains, but they must serve their purpose, and will have to sacrifice nature‑mimicry when it is necessary to do so.

So one can see how sacrifices of nature‑mimicry may sometimes be part of doing business. But why should the sacrifices be up near the top, where we have greater conscious access? The principal reason for this is that if the earlier regions of the hierarchy receive stimuli that they can’t make any sense of, then they will output garbage to the next higher level, and so all levels above the unhappy level will be unhappy. Breaking nature‑mimicry at one level will break it at all higher levels

For example, I have argued in earlier research and in The Vision Revolution that writing looks like nature. In particular, I have suggested that written words look like visual objects. But words do not necessarily look natural at all levels up the hierarchy. Strokes look like contours, and letters look like object junctions; and thus the lower and middle levels of your visual hierarchy are happy. But because in alphabetic writing systems the letters in a word depend on how it is spoken, there is no effective way to make entire words look like objects. (For example, the junction‑like letters in the words you are currently reading are simply placed side by side, which is not the way junctions in scenes are spatially related.) Your highest‑level regions, of which you are most directly aware, only notice the nonnatural look of written words. And when visual signs do more closely match the visual structure of objects at the highest levels, people do see the resemblance to nature–this is why trademark logos and logographic writing systems like Chinese look (to your conscious self) much more object‑like than the words you’re reading here.

My claim in this book that language and music mimic nature must be understood in this light. I claim that they mimic nature, indeed, but not necessarily “all the way up.” The reason why writing, speech, and music don’t obviously seem like nature is that nature is not being injected at the higher levels, perhaps–as we’ve seen with writing–in order to better accomplish the functions they are designed to carry out.

We see, then, why it is that the nature‑mimicry in language and music has remained a secret for so many millennia. If only your lower‑level visual and auditory areas could speak! They’d have long ago let you know that language and music are built like nature. Because those lower homunculi are part of you, there is a sense in which you have known about this ancient, deep secret code all along. Pieces of meat inside you knew the secret, but weren’t telling. In this light, one can view this book as a kind of psychoanalysis–if you’re into that–digging up the homunculus‑knowledge you already have deep inside you, and working through the ways it shaped who you are today.

Nature’s Hard Core

“Language and music mimic nature.”

I will try to convince you of that over the course of this book. But we humans are very bad judges of whether a stimulus is natural or not, as we just finished discussing. How, then, are we to have any idea whether language and music do or do not mimic nature? And isn’t the phrase “mimicking nature” awfully imprecise?

Indeed, it is imprecise. Part of the book’s point is to make this more precise–to say specifically which aspects of nature are mimicked by language and music. But can this really be done? How can we possibly know the details of the natural world our ancestors experienced? It is, after all, that version of nature that our brains evolved to be good at processing, and that was a long time ago. In order to show that language and music mimic the primordial natural habitats that shaped our brains, it would seem that we have no choice but to start familiarizing ourselves with the sights and sounds of the savanna, and wherever else our ancestors hung out.

A field trip is in order. Like all natural habitats, savannas feature a hodgepodge of characters and settings, and we must take a visual and auditory inventory. We will need images from all over the savanna, including acacia trees, tall grass, sunsets, rocks, giraffes, lions’ manes, and termite mounds. And we will need to record the sounds within those habitats, including wind, rustling leaves, bird calls, insect buzzes, and rhino grunts. Once we have built an encyclopedia of how our ancestral world looked and sounded, we can then ask whether language and music mimic nature.

Hold it right there! Sorry, but I’m pulling your leg. That is definitely not what we’re going to do. Trekking across the Serengeti with a camera and tape recorder sounds grand, but it isn’t the route to a compelling scientific explanation. We want generalizations about what visual nature looked and sounded like for our ancestors, not merely an itemized list of all the furniture in the savanna. We need to grasp the fundamental “grammar” of nature. We need to pick apart nature, carve it at its joints, and elegantly summarize its structure. With such a “grammar” in hand, we will be able to make powerful predictions about what a nature‑mimicker should be like . . . and thus, what language and music should be like.

Might there be fundamental regularities that cut across a wide swath of terrestrial habitats? Could it be that, although there are large salient differences across habitats, there are nevertheless deeper respects in which they are all similar? Although the savanna and any other specific habitats shaping our ancestors have hosts of peculiar features, might the sights and sounds of these habitats nevertheless have the same fundamental “core grammar”?

If there is a “core grammar” to nature, then this core would have been a highly steady invariant over our evolutionary history, and would thus have been a strong shaper of our visual and auditory systems. Sensory structure specific to the savanna or other particular habitats would, on the other hand, have been highly variable and intermittent over evolutionary time, and consequently less important for understanding what our visual and auditory systems became good at.

It’s this hard core of nature that we want. But is there one? Yes, indeed. There are solid core grammars underlying the structure of visual and auditory nature–there are “universals” in the structure of nature. That’s what I’ll endeavor to show you in this book; and then I’ll show you that language and music mimic these cores. I’ll give you a preview of these hard cores in the next section, when I introduce the central tenets of the theory–that is, when I first reveal the big secrets.

The Reveal

At this point, we have discussed the possibility that language’s and music’s mimicry of nature could be what enabled us humans to acquire language and music. We also took up why, if this were so, it would not be obvious to us. And in the section just above, I made myself clearer about the role that “nature” will play in understanding the origins of language and music: the goal is to find fundamental principles underlying the structure of nature (as opposed to a catalog of savanna paraphernalia), so that we’ll be in a strong position to ask whether these fundamental principles underlie language and music.

What I have not yet done is give you any specifics on what the hard cores in nature are that are being mimicked by language and music. That is, I haven’t revealed what any of the “ancient secrets” might actually be. Let’s rectify that, and simultaneously summarize the book’s two main theses, concerning speech and music.

Chapter 2 of the book is about the secret code underlying speech. Here’s the secret: human speech sounds like solid‑object physical events . Notice that this secret makes no mention of rustling leaves or rhino grunts. Instead, the “nature” that speech mimics encompasses a very broad class of events, namely those among solid objects. The main observation is that events involving solid objects bumping and crashing about have a signature core auditory structure, and I will provide evidence that human speech has this signature structure. Speech can thereby get into our brains by harnessing auditory‑recognition mechanisms we have long possessed for processing the “pinball” sounds of nature. This secret code gives us hominids the power to recognize speech without having speech‑recognition mechanisms.

And here is the deep secret underlying music, which is the topic of Chapters 3, 4, and 6: music sounds like humans moving and behaving (usually expressively) . Notice how general the notion of “nature” is here. It isn’t the sounds of people’s heartbeats, or heavy breathing, or missionary‑style sex, or skipping–it is the sounds of humans behaving. When we carry out behaviors we tend to make noise, and our auditory system can infer a lot about each other’s behavior from the noise. Music has the signature auditory structure of humans doing stuff, and can thus get into our brains by tapping into our auditory recognition mechanisms for identifying the actions of other people. No music‑processing mechanisms are required. This secret code of sounding like expressive human movers is what allows music to flow into our auditory system and be understood by it, even though we possess no special brain gears for processing music.

Although it is the ancient secret codes lying beneath speech and music that I’ll be whispering about in this book, this is not the first time I have written about deep secrets of this kind. In my previous book, The Vision Revolution , I wrote about (among other topics) another ancient secret, the one explaining how we hominids came to have a written history. And the secret is this: writing looks like three‑dimensional scenes with opaque objects . Writing looks like nature, but as before, nature of a very general kind–no images of acacia trees or termite mounds are needed. Writing has come to mimic the contour combinations occurring in natural scenes with opaque objects, and in such a way that written words mimic the structure of visual objects. Writing gets into our brains by harnessing our visual object‑recognition mechanisms. The secret code of looking like nature is what allows writing to be read by us hominids without any reading mechanisms in our brains.

The “nature” stories of the origins of speech, music, and writing are, then, not in the least about acacia trees or the other particulars in the rummage shop of our ancestors, but rather about solid‑object physical events, human movement sounds, and opaque objects in a three‑dimensional world. “Nature” is a highly general notion, just what is needed to make theoretical headway and empirical testing possible and practical.

And although the notions of “nature” I will rely on are very general, they are not so general that they include everything. For example, “solid‑object physical events” covers a wide swath, but it doesn’t cover sounds made by air and water. And “opaque objects in a three‑dimensional environment” is fundamental, but a habitat with semitransparent objects (like clouds at high altitudes) would not be included.

Distinguishing between the surface features of habitats (which vary wildly from habitat to habitat) and the core features (found in most or all habitats) is helpful in understanding why, even if writing, speech, and music have underlying core similarities, they nevertheless come in such tremendous variety. If nature were all core–if it had little or no variability across habitats–then our visual and auditory systems would have evolved to be competent at processing just the very specific kinds of stimuli in the world. Language and music that harnessed such a brain would be expected to have a very specific and consistent surface structure, something they do not, in fact, have. If, instead, as is the case, there is a small core of invariant structure to nature, yet loads of variability across habitats, one would expect us to end up with brains that are more open‑minded about what they’re willing to accept. Our brains would be most competent at processing stimuli that have the core signature, but in other respects, our brains would be open to many variants. Language and music that harnessed this kind of open‑minded brain would be expected to take widely varying shapes across cultures, but to share certain similarities. This is a much more accurate description of language and music as found on Earth: subject to large differences across cultures, but sharing certain core structural characteristics across cultures.

You have now gotten a peek at the ancient secret codes hidden inside speech and music. Hopefully you can appreciate their generality, and appreciate why it might be that the natural structure in speech and music has stayed hidden from us. In the next and final section of this chapter, I will be as clear as I can about how my nature‑harnessing theory differs from other stances on the origins of language and music, and I will justify why we should expect language and music to have nature instincts (i.e., designed to mimic nature) rather than just brain instincts (i.e., designed to be well shaped for the brain).