And Another Thing We're Hardwired For...Music

In the Boston Globe:

[A] growing number of neuroscientists and psychologists are starting to ask exactly that question. Researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, for example, have scanned musicians' brains and found that the ``chills" that they feel when they hear stirring passages of music result from activity in the same parts of the brain stimulated by food and sex.

As evidence mounts that we're somehow hard-wired to be musical, some thinkers are turning their attention to the next logical question: How did that come to be? And as the McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin writes in his just-published book, ``This is Your Brain on Music," ``To ask a question about a basic, omnipresent human ability is to implicitly ask questions about evolution."

The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it's unclear what purpose it serves.

[Hat tip: Chandan]