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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – From video chatting over Skype to today’s music-at-your-fingertips capabilities, language and music are seemingly natural parts of human life, made even more accessible in our digital world. Because language and music are engrained in our lifestyles, many might speculate that humans are biologically wired to understand and process these sounds.
Leading neuroscientist and acclaimed author Mark Changizi debunks this myth and uncovers the origins of speech and music—cultural evolution and his theory of nature-harnessing—in his new book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (BenBella Books, August 2011).
A theory Changizi applies to reading and writing in his book The Vision
Revolution (BenBella Books, 2009), nature-harnessing suggests that by
mimicking nature, ancient brain mechanisms can be shaped for new purposes.
Harnessed illustrates how this infusion of nature in humans’ cultural
evolution has designed language and music, abilities that set us apart from
early, more ape-like hominids, to literally sound like nature.
Harnessed displays how basic sounds occurring in nature — hits, slides and
rings — strongly connect to the three primary phonemes in human
languages—plosives, fricatives and sonorants.
“Nature’s hits, slides and rings were instilled in our auditory systems over
hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and culture ultimately shaped
language to sound like physics,” says Changizi, whose work has been featured
in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Wired.
Similar to nature’s influence on language, Harnessed explains, music mirrors
human movement and parallels the four auditory cues for human
movement—loudness, pitch, tempo and rhythm—to the fundamental ingredients of
music. Changizi supports his theory by explaining music’s impact on our
brain, emotion and movement and offers an extensive justification for why
music is organized the way it is. (See the following page for explanations
of each of these phenomena.)
Written in Changizi’s personable, anecdotal style with helpful chapter
summaries, Harnessed appeals to both the science enthusiast and the
scientifically challenged reader, unveiling how by mimicking natural events,
cultural evolution molded our languages and music to fit our brains.
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