An article in the Department of Psychology offers a new theory on the connection between music and survival: "Because of the rewarding values of music, humans continue to learn and pass it on to future generations, and not necessarily through specific genetic traits as we thought until today"
Hebrew University researchers examined the question of whether music evolved in order to promote sociality in humans, and is it able to help people survive together for years? New article of Dr. Shir Atzil and Dr. Lior Abramson from the Department of Psychology, Offers a new perspective on the relationship between the development of music and social relations between humans. The article was recently published in the international journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences of the British University of Cambridge.
The researchers suggest that, in contrast to a cumbersome and rigid evolutionary process, our brains may have developed throughout history one simple ultimate feature: The ability to learn the environment in order to survive. Dependence on other humans for survival provides the ultimate driving force to strengthen social skills such as musicality. According to the researchers, this evolutionary mechanism maximizes adaptation to a dynamic and changing social environment. "We all know the verse 'It is not good for man to be alone' so since ancient times, humans have depended on their own kind in order to survive. This produces a strong driving force for the learning of complex social skills - including language, culture and music, through flexible neural mechanisms." Dr. Abramson explains.
The prevailing assumption until today was that human sociability itself developed in evolution as an innate set of traits, which allows humans to manage complex social relationships. However, the new theory explains the role of music in human culture in that our behavior is culturally shaped in a continuous process of adaptation to the environment. Dr. Atzil emphasizes that "because of the rewarding values of music, people continue to learn and pass it on to future generations, and not necessarily through specific genetic traits as we thought until today". Musicality and sociality are dynamic, so it is a general mechanism of reward and prediction to improve survival by being flexible and connected to the environment.
According to the researchers, the article raises new questions and research directions that can provide answers we hadn't thought of before in the field of brain development and various social and cognitive developments. "Our research deals with different directions in order to test this theory, and investigate how social and emotional development depends on the social environment at the beginning of life", the researchers conclude.
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