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It's sounds like the sort of hand-waving, armchair-evolutionary theory that sounds nice and explains nothing which you often hear on morning BBC radio. I realise you're only paraphrasing, but... >is that he was so in tune with his natural ‘neural firings’ (sic) as to be transposing them immediately into his musical arrangements. They were an aural rendition of his direct cerebral experience, consequently very pleasing, with a sense of something sublimely unusual, but familiar when heard. Is that a way of saying that 'being in tune with' (presumably a pattern of neural firings doing the tuning in here) is relating mysteriously to another pattern of neural firings? I guess that *just* might happen. No, of course it must - neural firing is what brains do. But where's the meat? Has anyone identified the neural centres for ancestral environment sensations, or for that matter explained why our ancestors never wrote Mozart until much later? Sorry, Anth, but if I get an itch, I need to scratch... (and usually regret it by the time the thread hits the floor and there's blood on the carpet  )
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It means he was directly transposing 'neural firing' sequences into a musical arrangement, hence with elegance and hitting some deep internal G spot in the listener. That is what the guy meant. I thought it rather OTT, but the notion of how we respond to art or (as a further thought) nature being according to how it matches our cerebral architecture and processes rather than the usual intellectual abstractions caught my interest. I'm sure there is some truth in it, but obviously not the whole story. After watching David Threlfall (Frank from Shameless) play the tortured questing Wordsworth in The Romantics on Saturday, I think I'll continue to take my country walks gently and often rather than looking for transcendental haunting cataracts. I'm a bit too old for that.
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>It means he was directly transposing 'neural firing' sequences into a musical arrangement, hence with elegance and hitting some deep internal G spot in the listener. It's a delightful concept, Anth, but unless there's a bit of explanatory detail to indicate how that might work, how musical scores correlate with the neuronal whatnot, it's just imaginative, self-indulgent waffle. I've been interested in psychological theories of music for years now, but haven't come across anything that explains why a 12-bar blues sounds good.
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that the idea of Mozart directly channelling his internal neural sequences, i.e. making a musical map of his own brain, is delightfully over the top.
That is really the point about it - it's on the level in some ways with the existence of Atlantis or the Continent of Mu or wherever.But the point about Atlantis, for example, is that it derives from a humbler notion, with some probable accuracy, namely the cataclysmic destruction of the island of Thera. The charm of the fanciful story of A, and other historical legends is that they often contain some grain of (tantalizing) truth. I think it quite possible that aesthetic/artistic appreciation is based upon what is appealing to the natural functioning of sensory organs, which, according to rob's quotation in his post below, prefer pure sound (presumably visual, etc. too) and simple arrangement at the expense of cacophony. Plus a secondary appreciation or preoccupation with more subtle sound, etc. This in my mind evokes e.g. the Greek preference for simple geometric structure as the highest architectural form. Imagine the Parthenon, with the original delicate friezes around it (E Marbles - totally beautiful/elegant). Now, the thing about a 12 bar blues is its simplicity, its measured and (usually) equal lines, apart from the turnaround at the end, whose bars are shorter but proportional to the rest.
The 12 bar format is subject to much variety within its simplcity. It relies also on one or two very simple but affecting melodic shifts - the 7th and maybe a minor.
The turnaround, with a 7th and a minor included in the little melodic descent is quite beautiful and moody.
Altogether, it's probably a prime example of musical elegance, very basic but also sophisticated, and I can easily see why the brain would prefer this to the oeuvres of John Cage, etc. Even to this day, bebop and certain other modern jazz forms are resisted by many, because they appear to be formless, or meaningless/arbitrary strings of notes. One great exception might be Miles Davis, whose hallmark may be very simplified presentations of pure or delightfully toned sounds whose distances offer an audible charm in their slight unpredictability, but inevitability as they fall, and might in some stimulate the brain to accompanying 'correlative' visual imagery, and all that great stuff........... (out with Sketches of..)
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Nigel,
Either some sounds sound better than other sounds or they don't. If the former then all sounds generate the same emotional response and music wouldn't exist. So, as music does exist, the latter is true.
So the explanation why the Blues sounds good is that out of all the sounds that exist some will sound better than others, and of those that sound good, some will be among the best.
No mystery.
Do you have any other mysteries you want explaining? 
John.
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Here's a few for starters: (1) Why do you never encounter black cornflakes any more? (2) Why do Penguin bars with green wrappers taste nicer than the others? (3) Where did I put my pen? (4) Whatever happened to white dog turds? [to be continued...]
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Of course this happens a lot more gradual, but the simple explanation is that we like nature because all our ancestors who found nature repellent didn't have the will to live and breed.
Can you imagine living here in Latvia and hating the sight of sunlight on snow covered fir trees, or deer coming to feed on the still present frozen rotten apples, or in spring when everything explodes in a riot of shades of green? You wouldn't want to live.
It's just random, Anth, and those random mutations that made the species appreciate being alive helped us thrive, and those that didn't, didn't. We appreciate life because that's what natural selection naturally led us to.
John the happy to be the result of random changes
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Hi Anth, Just happened to be re-reading Pascal Boyers book Religion Explained (which was recommended on an ex forum a couple of years ago, and I still haven't come across anything better) today, and he says something similar concerning music. He describes the complexity of the processing that goes on in the brain to make sense of sounds, particularly speech sounds. He goes on ... ... to do this, the auditory cortex comprises different subsystems, some of which specialize in pure tones, and others in more complex stimuli. All this is clearly part of a complex, evolved architecture specialized in fine-grained sound analysis, a task of obvious adaptive value for a species that depends on speech for virtually all communications. But it also has the interesting consequence that humans are predisposed to detect, produce, remember and enjoy music. This is a human universal..... Although the traditions are very diffent, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance musical sounds are always closer to pure sounds than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the priviledged role of particular intervals such as fifths and fouths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels ... and pure consonants ... These properties make music an intensified form of sound-experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way. He suggests the same type of stimulation/satisfaction is derived from other art forms: " .... Humans everywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that overstimulate their visual cotex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of the dull browns and greens of their familiar environments. " Literature, in the form of narratives, also provides the brain with "intense doses of what usually activate it" in the sense that the brain is an organizer and planner, that represents the environment in terms of stories. This of course is all part of his main thesis which is that humans are religious because of the way the human brain structure has evolved; which doesn't mean that you have to be religious (or enjoy art) but only that it is not surprising that some people are, and that they get something from it. rob
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the brain receives pleasure from being stimulated to discern and categorize sensory phenomena.
It enjoys music as it needs to differentiate and order pure and more subtle sounds.One imagines, therefore, that it must take great pleasure from e.g. having to differentiate and classify (interpret?) all the features of great sweeping multicoloured valleys and lakes, and (in ancestral times) also assess the implications to its possessor of the features thereof - distance, natural characteristics, implications of changing colorations, the different sounds, position of significant environmental features (water.. shelter.. concealment of potential foes). I guess therefore that spatial vastness has a very trippy effect on the brain - it produces an intoxication.
Also - the superabundance of visual/auditory experience delights the sensory receptors. All of which adds up to the fact that Wordsworth et al, professional townies, were just destined to trip out when encountering the Lakes - and with an intensity due partly to the till then underused latent potentiality of their brains.
They had the preset capability to receive and order vast amounts of physical environmental stimuli, bequeathed within their genes and hardwired into the brain,just waiting to spring into operation. Which is what I surmised in my post. Namely - that their appreciation of and wonder at the Lakeland environment was an inherited evolutionary gift involving highly sophisticated adaptive sensory organs and very elegantly configured associated neural circuitry just ready to 'read' and be overwhelmed emotionally by the physical panorama. It also suggests to me that, while the normal denizens of the Lakeland landscape - the toilers in the fields - would be similarly impressed by their environment, the emotional response in their case would be more muted, due to familiarity and the requirements of direct tasks, than the townies with loads of time to rapturise over waterfalls. The permanently changing and mutating sensory experiences produced by the power-house of nature - the underlying 'presence' often evoked by Wordsworth - would quite naturally suggest to him a divine impulse, whereas he might just have been tripped out by 'life'. Thanks, rob, for that extremely interesting and useful post.
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.....All of which adds up to the fact that Wordsworth et al, professional
townies, were just destined to trip out when encountering the Lakes -.......
All of the borderline new agey speculation in this thread is making me think that pantheism feels itself in just as much need of rationalisation as any other belief. The really interesting thing about the evolution of consciousness in this area ( if you want to grace it with such a grand name) is why did previous generations of townies have exactly the opposite experience when they ventured into the wilderness. I'm thinking here specifically of Dr Johnson & Boswell & their trip to Scotland, but they were just reflecting the widely held attitude of the time that the country was 'horrid'.
I remember reading the explanation somewhere , but my neural firings not being what they once were, I'm afraid it's too difficult to condense into a short post.
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'why did previous generations of townies have exactly the opposite experience when they ventured into the wilderness. I'm thinking here specifically of Dr Johnson & Boswell & their trip to Scotland, but they were just reflecting the widely held attitude of the time that the country was 'horrid'' Well, the answer that the text books would give to that is that J & B lived in the middle of the Age of Reason, when everyone was convinced that human logic and reason alone were enough to eliminate all the ills of the world and produce utopias. This particular error continued well into the 20C, as you know. Wordsworth and mates were seeing the results of economic rationalism - the dark satanic mills, and yearning to get back to nature a la Rousseau to indulge their emotions all over again. Which is presumably why they were deeply affected by the Lakes. I also have this notion that as townies, we use certain mental processes required for city existence which are somewhat different from those associated with country dwelling - or at least different from those of the ancestors who were compelled from the land into the cities by the Industrial Revolution.
So when some enter the country, they can be struck by a sensory awakening and an emotional stirring which is kind of explicable by the return of a dormant mind-set. Incidentally, the realities of country life before the Industrial Revolution, as opposed to the romanticised and somewhat yucky notions of Rousseau, were often squalor and economic misery, so I'm not surprised Johnson's generation found the country grim, especially Scotland, where everyone ate porridge. Much of this IMO confirms the notion that reason and emotion/intuition are inseparable human requirements for balanced living and society.
And that an over-reliance on one to the detriment of the other will always provoke a backlash.
The worship of reason in the 18th C produced the contrapuntal mass ranter religious evangelical meetings, the cult of emotionalism a la suffering Werther, and soppy letter writing to one's chums, then the Romantic Movement. While over-indulgence of the emotions to the detriment of reason usually results in catastrophe. We have to sensibly blend the two - reason and emotion/intuition.
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We have to sensibly blend the two - reason and emotion/intuition.
I agree in theory, but find the practice more difficult.
Where's my bottle of Hyde antidote, must be around here somewhere..............
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Suppose: as soon as humans developed intelligence they also began asking fundamental philosophical questions like, "Well, what's the point?" A stab of pleasure from, say, a sunset, could offset an existential crisis. This instinct evolved grabbing anything it could to kid the human organism that life had meaning, hence the connection (however illusionary) between aesthetics and the transcendent. Those without that instinct didn't bother and their genes did not survive. (Yes, this is a variation on John's argument.) Neville B
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I've never really bought the idea that evolution provides us with transcendental experience to kid us that life has a higher design or purpose, and thus dissuade us from topping ourselves.That is just, well, oversubtle. The mind kidding itself by double bluff. However, a link between aesthetics and the transcendental seems very possible.
I could conceive that the developing complexity of brain functioning - the sophistication of sensory organs, and their pleasurable use - provided a loop to encourage the ongoing complexity and subtlety of said organs, and the intricately involved associated neural circuitry. The development of self-awareness might be associated with an awe at the capabilities of the individual (which we still feel), combined crucially with a perception that what was requiring such an evolution (nature) was itself a vastly greater, all-encompassing power of immeasurably greater subtlety, operating to laws and volition, one part of which was to bring the human spectator to a position in which he could entertain these very notions. And it is that situation - in which we as intrinsic units of nature can stand back in reverence at the whole, which is both outside yet part of us, which is the most awesome thing of all.
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