Aniruddh Patel, an expert on music and the brain at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, finds Dunbar’s research unconvincing. If music evolved as a substitute for grooming, he notes, then you would expect that people with social impairments would have trouble with music. Those with autism have no trouble perceiving music, however. In fact, psychologist Rory Allen of Goldsmiths, University of London, has found that they have the same physical responses to emotional music that typical people do.
In rejecting music as an evolutionary adaptation, Patel carries on an old tradition. William James, the pioneering psychologist, declared in 1890 that music was “a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.” Rather than evolving as some essential adaptation, it “entered the mind by the back stairs,” James wrote. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker echoed this view in his 1997 best-selling book, How the Mind Works. “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless,” he declared. Music is a by-product of how we communicate with each other—nothing more than “auditory cheesecake,” in Pinker’s words.
In the 13 years since Pinker coined that fetching phrase, neuroscientists such as Patel have collected evidence that supports the auditory cheesecake hypothesis, but only up to a point. When Patel and his colleagues examined the parts of the brain that handle different aspects of music—tone, rhythm, and so on—they found that there is no special lobe uniquely dedicated to those particular jobs. It looks as if music is riding the coattails of other parts of the brain that evolved for other functions.
