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Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
The scientific consensus is that our ability to understand human speech has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. After all, there are whole portions of the brain devoted to human speech. We learn to understand speech before we can even walk, and can seamlessly absorb enormous amounts of information simply by hearing it. Surely we evolved this capability over thousands of generations.
Or did we? Portions of the human brain are also devoted to reading. Children learn to read at a very young age and can seamlessly absorb information even more quickly through reading than through hearing. We know that we didn’t evolve to read because reading is only a few thousand years old.
In Harnessed, cognitive scientist Mark Changizi demonstrates that human speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand. Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.
Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the beginning of time.
From Library Journal:
"Many scientists believe that the human brain's capacity for language is innate, that the brain is actually "hard-wired" for this higher-level functionality. But theoretical neurobiologist Changizi (director of human cognition, 2AI Labs; The Vision Revolution) brilliantly challenges this view, claiming that language (and music) are neither innate nor instinctual to the brain but evolved culturally to take advantage of what the most ancient aspect of our brain does best: process the sounds of nature ... it will certainly intrigue evolutionary biologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists and is strongly recommended for libraries that have Changizi's previous book."
From Forbes:
“In his latest book, Harnessed, neuroscientist Mark Changizi manages to accomplish the extraordinary: he says something compellingly new about evolution.… Instead of tackling evolution from the usual position and become mired in the usual arguments, he focuses on one aspect of the larger story so central to who we are, it may very well overshadow all others except the origin of life itself: communication.”
Or did we? Portions of the human brain are also devoted to reading. Children learn to read at a very young age and can seamlessly absorb information even more quickly through reading than through hearing. We know that we didn’t evolve to read because reading is only a few thousand years old.
In Harnessed, cognitive scientist Mark Changizi demonstrates that human speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand. Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.
Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the beginning of time.
From Library Journal:
"Many scientists believe that the human brain's capacity for language is innate, that the brain is actually "hard-wired" for this higher-level functionality. But theoretical neurobiologist Changizi (director of human cognition, 2AI Labs; The Vision Revolution) brilliantly challenges this view, claiming that language (and music) are neither innate nor instinctual to the brain but evolved culturally to take advantage of what the most ancient aspect of our brain does best: process the sounds of nature ... it will certainly intrigue evolutionary biologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists and is strongly recommended for libraries that have Changizi's previous book."
From Forbes:
“In his latest book, Harnessed, neuroscientist Mark Changizi manages to accomplish the extraordinary: he says something compellingly new about evolution.… Instead of tackling evolution from the usual position and become mired in the usual arguments, he focuses on one aspect of the larger story so central to who we are, it may very well overshadow all others except the origin of life itself: communication.”
216 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2011
17 people are currently reading
337 people want to read
About the author
Mark Changizi
22 books32 followersMark Changizi is a cognitive scientist, and Director of Human Cognition at 2AI Labs. He has written three books about his research:
HARNESSED: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man
,
THE VISION REVOLUTION
(Benbella 2009), and
THE BRAIN FROM 25,000 FEET
(Kluwer 2003).
He writes about science at places like... ChangiziBlog (HUB), Forbes , Wired , PsychToday , Atlantic , Seed (a, b), Telegraph , Scientific American , New Scientist .
He writes about science at places like... ChangiziBlog (HUB), Forbes , Wired , PsychToday , Atlantic , Seed (a, b), Telegraph , Scientific American , New Scientist .
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 2, 2015
Harnessed, and The Vision Revolution –Mark Changizi previous book–, present altogether radically new explanations for how vision (color, pattern recognition, pattern processing) and hearing (language and music) have evolved to help humans interact with our environments (environments in which other humans are their most important constituents). Whereas in the first book the mechanisms are mainly explained by biological evolution (except for reading/writing), Harnessed is about cultural evolution. Our brains, not lacking innate traits (that would be the blank slate model), aren't either already designed to perform many of the most important tasks they do, such as reading (evolution hadn't had time) or, as Mark tries to demonstrate, using language.
Is it language already 'wired' in our brains, as Chomsky and Pinker defend, or has it evolved culturally: this is probably one of the most difficult and pending questions that will be addressed in this century. Changizi's approach: language evolved culturally, tapping in our brains capability to harness nature ("nature-harnessing: mimicking nature so as to harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose") provides fresh air to the discussion and, without being conclusive, it clearly provides enough evidence and ideas in favor of cultural evolution. The relations between Nature and Mind have its own grammar, and our brains are constantly using it to develop new structures (physical, visual, musical, linguistic…) around, among and within us.
Artists, musicians and creators in general should read these books. Although Changizi is the first to suggest that one cannot simply reverse engineer some of the explained perceptual rules, that for instance explain why we enjoy music and why music is (statistically) structured the way it is, to automatically produce beauty, I believe these books offer hints to communicate with deep/lower level perception worth to explore.
An interesting corollary of both books is that our modern world, even if we perceive it (build it) as being a sort of opposite universe to Nature (the archetypical dichotomy of civilization versus the wild world, the raw and the cooked as Levi Strauss put it), is actually a recreation of Nature, but not in an 'aesthetic' or 'look&feel' way, but more in brain-functional way (something more related with our low perceptual level). Our urbanism, architecture, music, art and writing, have deep and complex connections with our perception systems, that evolved in non-civilized environments. We build those artifacts to mimic nature, at least the parts of nature that better interact with our brains. We built palaces of rich interaction for our minds.
A second interesting corollary (not mentioned by Mark) it's an exciting consequence of having such an open (yet structured) "machine" inside us: many other great capabilities might be there yet to be discovered, to be culturally evolved… new "languages" or "writings" if you wish (there's no way to describe this hypothetical new things, except in terms of old things…, the limit of our language are the limit of our world). "Things" so wide and powerful and complex and beautiful and constructive and structured, that it will be very hard to believe (again) that they are not wired in our brains and weren't designed throughout millions of years and by biological evolutionary means.
I wonder, what's the speed of culture?
Is it language already 'wired' in our brains, as Chomsky and Pinker defend, or has it evolved culturally: this is probably one of the most difficult and pending questions that will be addressed in this century. Changizi's approach: language evolved culturally, tapping in our brains capability to harness nature ("nature-harnessing: mimicking nature so as to harness evolutionarily ancient brain mechanisms for a new purpose") provides fresh air to the discussion and, without being conclusive, it clearly provides enough evidence and ideas in favor of cultural evolution. The relations between Nature and Mind have its own grammar, and our brains are constantly using it to develop new structures (physical, visual, musical, linguistic…) around, among and within us.
Artists, musicians and creators in general should read these books. Although Changizi is the first to suggest that one cannot simply reverse engineer some of the explained perceptual rules, that for instance explain why we enjoy music and why music is (statistically) structured the way it is, to automatically produce beauty, I believe these books offer hints to communicate with deep/lower level perception worth to explore.
An interesting corollary of both books is that our modern world, even if we perceive it (build it) as being a sort of opposite universe to Nature (the archetypical dichotomy of civilization versus the wild world, the raw and the cooked as Levi Strauss put it), is actually a recreation of Nature, but not in an 'aesthetic' or 'look&feel' way, but more in brain-functional way (something more related with our low perceptual level). Our urbanism, architecture, music, art and writing, have deep and complex connections with our perception systems, that evolved in non-civilized environments. We build those artifacts to mimic nature, at least the parts of nature that better interact with our brains. We built palaces of rich interaction for our minds.
A second interesting corollary (not mentioned by Mark) it's an exciting consequence of having such an open (yet structured) "machine" inside us: many other great capabilities might be there yet to be discovered, to be culturally evolved… new "languages" or "writings" if you wish (there's no way to describe this hypothetical new things, except in terms of old things…, the limit of our language are the limit of our world). "Things" so wide and powerful and complex and beautiful and constructive and structured, that it will be very hard to believe (again) that they are not wired in our brains and weren't designed throughout millions of years and by biological evolutionary means.
I wonder, what's the speed of culture?
September 28, 2012
So you're presenting a complex research-based neurobiological evolutionary hypothesis without footnotes, a works cited, OR a topical index?
July 17, 2019
Very interesting but bound to be controversial
I always assumed that language developed using sound rather than sight because sight would not be effective at night and because in some environments (dense jungles and forests) it is easier to hear than it is to see. But what Changizi argues in this most interesting book is that the reason we use sound rather than say hand signals as language is that sounds, not sights, signal events.
He explains: “Audition excels at the ‘What’s happening?’ sensing a signal only when there’s an event. Audition not only captures events we cannot see…but serves to alert us to events occurring even within our view. Nonevents may be screaming visually, but they are not actually making any noise, and so audition has unobstructed access to events—for the simple reason that sound waves are cast only when there is an event.” (p. 34)
You can have sights without events. You can look out onto a landscape and see a myriad of things without anything moving, without a perceptible event taking place. But (to reiterate) you cannot have a sound without an event. Sounds signal events and that’s what we are interested in. Something that changes. And that is why our eyes are tuned to movement, because it is movement in the visual world that signals change.
In Changizi’s use of the word “harnessed” we can see the interplay between the organism and the environment. In one sense “harness” means “to restrain”; in another sense it means “to utilize.” From one point of view the organism is restrained by the environment; in another sense it utilizes the environment. This is particularly true of humans.
Aside from this however I am not sure that this clever use of the word and the idea of “harness” really adds to our understanding of how “language and music mimicked nature,” to quote from Chingizi’s subtitle. In fact, to make “language” itself a kind of actor that “harnesses” or utilizes our auditory system is really just a metaphor since language itself does not act. The tail does not wag the dog. It is our auditory system that uses sound from nature to form language that is congenial to our evolutionary makeup including especially our brains.
What Changizi demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt—and he does it in a most edifying and nearly exhaustive way—is that speech and music imitate sounds found in nature. Changizi categorizes these sounds into “three fundamental building blocks: hits, slides, and rings.” (p. 35) He calls these “nature’s phonemes” and goes on to show how spoken language is made up of various combinations of these basic sounds.
A lesser idea, that civilization mimics nature (p. 10), is the sort of idea that from an evolutionary point of view has to be true. Where would we get our ideas? From God? From Plato’s ideal types? If it is not obvious that culture and civilization spring from the natural world it is because some cultural tools, artifacts and practices are far removed from their primitive progenitors. I am thinking of the spaceship from the Stanley Kubrick film, A Space Odyssey, 2001, that comes very distantly from the bone used as a club by an ape.
Perhaps it would be better to speak of cultural evolution as utilizing or “harnessing” the environment in such a way as to make it convenient for human beings. Changizi instead speaks of “culture’s general strategy for harnessing us.” (p. 199) But we are not being harnessed; we are doing the harnessing (and in some respect, we are harnessing ourselves). Changizi realizes this when he goes on to say (still on page 199): “The trick is to structure modern human tasks as tasks at which our ape selves already excel.”
I think the reason Changizi insists on having this metaphorically backwards is to demonstrate the dialectic nature of the evolutionary process (whether biological or cultural). To understand this, consider that in order for our feeling pain to be adaptive at least two things have to happen more or less in tandem. One, we have to feel the pain as something we very much want to avoid, and two, the pain must come as a result of some environmental event that is at least harmful to our continued existence. What is being “harnessed” here? The pain is being utilized (harnessed) by the organism as a means to alter behavior. One can speak (as Changizi might) that the pain is harnessing the organism to behave in a manner consistent with its survival, but this would be metaphorically speaking.
In the conclusion in the final chapter entitled “So What Are We?” he writes, “Language and music are evolved, organism-like artifacts that are symbiotic with…human apes. And like any symbiont, these artifact symbionts have evolved to possess shapes that fit the partner biology—our brains.”
Okay, it’s pretty clear what is at issue here: it is Changizi’s idea that culture (in general) and language and music in particular are “organism-like” “symbionts.” By definition and a long tradition in biology a symbiont is an organism, not an artifact of culture or even a meme. Changizi makes the very important point that we cannot understand humans or any organism without also understanding its environment and how it interacts with that environment. But I don’t think it serves more than an illustrative purpose to call elements of culture symbionts; and I am willing to bet that the establishment in evolutionary biology is not going to be giving Changizi any high fives.
Still I think it is instructive to see language and culture in this manner as long as we realize that human beings in interaction with the environment create culture which in turn becomes part of our environment which in turn influences further cultural changes—all the while keeping in mind that culture is not alive in the same sense that biological organisms are.
For those readers expert in music and linguistics (which I am not) this book should prove to be an additional source of excitement and illumination because of Changizi’s creativity and his obvious erudition and enthusiasm.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
I always assumed that language developed using sound rather than sight because sight would not be effective at night and because in some environments (dense jungles and forests) it is easier to hear than it is to see. But what Changizi argues in this most interesting book is that the reason we use sound rather than say hand signals as language is that sounds, not sights, signal events.
He explains: “Audition excels at the ‘What’s happening?’ sensing a signal only when there’s an event. Audition not only captures events we cannot see…but serves to alert us to events occurring even within our view. Nonevents may be screaming visually, but they are not actually making any noise, and so audition has unobstructed access to events—for the simple reason that sound waves are cast only when there is an event.” (p. 34)
You can have sights without events. You can look out onto a landscape and see a myriad of things without anything moving, without a perceptible event taking place. But (to reiterate) you cannot have a sound without an event. Sounds signal events and that’s what we are interested in. Something that changes. And that is why our eyes are tuned to movement, because it is movement in the visual world that signals change.
In Changizi’s use of the word “harnessed” we can see the interplay between the organism and the environment. In one sense “harness” means “to restrain”; in another sense it means “to utilize.” From one point of view the organism is restrained by the environment; in another sense it utilizes the environment. This is particularly true of humans.
Aside from this however I am not sure that this clever use of the word and the idea of “harness” really adds to our understanding of how “language and music mimicked nature,” to quote from Chingizi’s subtitle. In fact, to make “language” itself a kind of actor that “harnesses” or utilizes our auditory system is really just a metaphor since language itself does not act. The tail does not wag the dog. It is our auditory system that uses sound from nature to form language that is congenial to our evolutionary makeup including especially our brains.
What Changizi demonstrates beyond any shadow of a doubt—and he does it in a most edifying and nearly exhaustive way—is that speech and music imitate sounds found in nature. Changizi categorizes these sounds into “three fundamental building blocks: hits, slides, and rings.” (p. 35) He calls these “nature’s phonemes” and goes on to show how spoken language is made up of various combinations of these basic sounds.
A lesser idea, that civilization mimics nature (p. 10), is the sort of idea that from an evolutionary point of view has to be true. Where would we get our ideas? From God? From Plato’s ideal types? If it is not obvious that culture and civilization spring from the natural world it is because some cultural tools, artifacts and practices are far removed from their primitive progenitors. I am thinking of the spaceship from the Stanley Kubrick film, A Space Odyssey, 2001, that comes very distantly from the bone used as a club by an ape.
Perhaps it would be better to speak of cultural evolution as utilizing or “harnessing” the environment in such a way as to make it convenient for human beings. Changizi instead speaks of “culture’s general strategy for harnessing us.” (p. 199) But we are not being harnessed; we are doing the harnessing (and in some respect, we are harnessing ourselves). Changizi realizes this when he goes on to say (still on page 199): “The trick is to structure modern human tasks as tasks at which our ape selves already excel.”
I think the reason Changizi insists on having this metaphorically backwards is to demonstrate the dialectic nature of the evolutionary process (whether biological or cultural). To understand this, consider that in order for our feeling pain to be adaptive at least two things have to happen more or less in tandem. One, we have to feel the pain as something we very much want to avoid, and two, the pain must come as a result of some environmental event that is at least harmful to our continued existence. What is being “harnessed” here? The pain is being utilized (harnessed) by the organism as a means to alter behavior. One can speak (as Changizi might) that the pain is harnessing the organism to behave in a manner consistent with its survival, but this would be metaphorically speaking.
In the conclusion in the final chapter entitled “So What Are We?” he writes, “Language and music are evolved, organism-like artifacts that are symbiotic with…human apes. And like any symbiont, these artifact symbionts have evolved to possess shapes that fit the partner biology—our brains.”
Okay, it’s pretty clear what is at issue here: it is Changizi’s idea that culture (in general) and language and music in particular are “organism-like” “symbionts.” By definition and a long tradition in biology a symbiont is an organism, not an artifact of culture or even a meme. Changizi makes the very important point that we cannot understand humans or any organism without also understanding its environment and how it interacts with that environment. But I don’t think it serves more than an illustrative purpose to call elements of culture symbionts; and I am willing to bet that the establishment in evolutionary biology is not going to be giving Changizi any high fives.
Still I think it is instructive to see language and culture in this manner as long as we realize that human beings in interaction with the environment create culture which in turn becomes part of our environment which in turn influences further cultural changes—all the while keeping in mind that culture is not alive in the same sense that biological organisms are.
For those readers expert in music and linguistics (which I am not) this book should prove to be an additional source of excitement and illumination because of Changizi’s creativity and his obvious erudition and enthusiasm.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”
May 5, 2012
As someone who has published work on evolutionary linguistics with a premise that is not too different from the one this author takes, I was prepared to enjoy this book. I didn't make it past the chapter on language. Weird combination of banal trivialities, unsubstantiated intuitions, and terminology that seems engineered to be as imprecise as possible.
January 30, 2021
i actually like it, but man, where's the research, where's the bibliography, anything?
July 31, 2022
La tesis principal de este ensayo es que tanto el lenguaje como la música explotan las propiedades de nuestro sistema auditivo, adaptado para identificar los sonidos de la naturaleza (concretamente, de nuestro entorno físico).
Como premisa es interesante. Pero, a partir de ahí, toda la argumentación que propone el autor resulta un tanto forzada, muy "ad hoc", basada en anécdotas inconexas y un tanto vagas. En su intento por conectar el mundo físico con el lenguaje, salta por encima de la biología, la psicología y la antropología, y establece conexiones remotas, que podrían encontrar una explicación mucho más sencilla recurriendo a estas disciplinas.
Por ejemplo, intenta explicar las asociaciones emocionales de las melodías cambian de frecuencia (hacia el agudo o hacia el grave) mediante el efecto Doppler, o los fonemas del lenguaje a partir de los fenómenos físicos de nuestro entorno que, supuestamente, nuestro lenguaje trata de imitar. Cualquiera de estos fenómenos tienen una explicación mucho más inmediata en la fisiología: nuestra voz cambia de tono con las emociones por la tensión de la garganta, nuestra lengua puede moverse para producir ciertos tipos de sonidos, etc.
(Tras completar el libro, descubrí que su autor había estudiado Física y Matemáticas como formación principal y, de repente, todo encajó).
Como premisa es interesante. Pero, a partir de ahí, toda la argumentación que propone el autor resulta un tanto forzada, muy "ad hoc", basada en anécdotas inconexas y un tanto vagas. En su intento por conectar el mundo físico con el lenguaje, salta por encima de la biología, la psicología y la antropología, y establece conexiones remotas, que podrían encontrar una explicación mucho más sencilla recurriendo a estas disciplinas.
Por ejemplo, intenta explicar las asociaciones emocionales de las melodías cambian de frecuencia (hacia el agudo o hacia el grave) mediante el efecto Doppler, o los fonemas del lenguaje a partir de los fenómenos físicos de nuestro entorno que, supuestamente, nuestro lenguaje trata de imitar. Cualquiera de estos fenómenos tienen una explicación mucho más inmediata en la fisiología: nuestra voz cambia de tono con las emociones por la tensión de la garganta, nuestra lengua puede moverse para producir ciertos tipos de sonidos, etc.
(Tras completar el libro, descubrí que su autor había estudiado Física y Matemáticas como formación principal y, de repente, todo encajó).
June 27, 2025
I was intrigued until I went to check the reference list for the first time and realized there isn’t one. Please change the title to reflect the purely speculative nature of this work or add the necessary citations and index. Crazy that I need to say that at all.
October 6, 2020
DNF. Confusing and repetitive; I couldn't even get to the main point because it kept meandering. Regrettably, not my cup of tea.
November 5, 2011
In Harnessed, cognitive neuroscientist Mark Changizi tries to tackle two tough questions from modern cognitive science: where did language come from, and why are we musical? Like many scientists in either music cognition or the cognitive science of language, Changizi believes language and music skills are closely related. He gives an ecological explanation for the form and structure of language - which he claims follows from the acoustics of solid-state interactions - and argues that musical skills follow from the brain specializing in the acoustics of moving intentional agents. In a way, Changizi argues that music is, to quote Pinker, "cheesecake", that exists because it fits so nicely in the auditory component of social cognition.
The claims themselves are not that bold, but the degree to which Changizi has thought through the implications of his theses is impressive. He correlates the frequencies of natural sounds with those found in language, argues that rhyme is Gestalt-like grouping of sounds that are likely made by identical objects and uses the gait of human movement to explore rhythm and melody. It's this wide exploration that makes the book an exciting read, even if you're not entirely buying the story.
Of course, there are quite a few things lacking. Changizi stresses his idea of "harnessing", which basically means that cultural artifacts take a certain form because they fit well with our brains. This is an implication of what sociobiology called cultural evolution, and which later got rebranded as memetics, and is hardly controversial. However, Changizi argues for the strong case: even a defrozen hominid from the Ice Age should be able to deal with our current surroundings, he writes. This may all work well as long as we're talking about using a microwave or crossing the street, but Harnessed is about music and language skills, both of which are very sensitive to developmental paths. Psychology shows numerous cases of children who have missed out on learning language during a critical window, after which they never mastered the skill. Language may harness some earlier capability of the brain, but that capability is only accessible in a fixed time frame. Furthermore, cultural artifacts may steer the development of the brain in a new direction, once they start harnessing its features - the way rhythmic expectancies in Balkan babies quickly start to diverge from those in eurobeat-raised brains. Changizi's idea of "harnessing" would have matured had he addressed these matters, and it would also have given him the chance to throw in some neuroscience (which I imagine he would have liked to do).
Another problem is that the case for music-as-movement, as Changizi calls it, is pitched as a piece of sales writing. The reader is told of all the wonderful benefits of the author's kinematic model (as the larger class of movement-inspired accounts of music cognition is called) but isn't told of any weak spots. I am no expert in music cognition, but recall that kinematic predictions of the speed of ritardando fit very poorly with actual musical data. Is this still an outstanding issue? What does Changizi think of this? Such questions are missing in Harnessed. In fact, Changizi hardly mentions earlier kinematic models of music cognition.
Still, the book is a worthwhile read. While repetitive at times, Changizi has a clear style of writing and shows how a single, crazy-sounding hypothesis about the origin of music and language, can still be researched in a systematic manner. Harnessed will definitely provide all interested readers with much food for thought.
The claims themselves are not that bold, but the degree to which Changizi has thought through the implications of his theses is impressive. He correlates the frequencies of natural sounds with those found in language, argues that rhyme is Gestalt-like grouping of sounds that are likely made by identical objects and uses the gait of human movement to explore rhythm and melody. It's this wide exploration that makes the book an exciting read, even if you're not entirely buying the story.
Of course, there are quite a few things lacking. Changizi stresses his idea of "harnessing", which basically means that cultural artifacts take a certain form because they fit well with our brains. This is an implication of what sociobiology called cultural evolution, and which later got rebranded as memetics, and is hardly controversial. However, Changizi argues for the strong case: even a defrozen hominid from the Ice Age should be able to deal with our current surroundings, he writes. This may all work well as long as we're talking about using a microwave or crossing the street, but Harnessed is about music and language skills, both of which are very sensitive to developmental paths. Psychology shows numerous cases of children who have missed out on learning language during a critical window, after which they never mastered the skill. Language may harness some earlier capability of the brain, but that capability is only accessible in a fixed time frame. Furthermore, cultural artifacts may steer the development of the brain in a new direction, once they start harnessing its features - the way rhythmic expectancies in Balkan babies quickly start to diverge from those in eurobeat-raised brains. Changizi's idea of "harnessing" would have matured had he addressed these matters, and it would also have given him the chance to throw in some neuroscience (which I imagine he would have liked to do).
Another problem is that the case for music-as-movement, as Changizi calls it, is pitched as a piece of sales writing. The reader is told of all the wonderful benefits of the author's kinematic model (as the larger class of movement-inspired accounts of music cognition is called) but isn't told of any weak spots. I am no expert in music cognition, but recall that kinematic predictions of the speed of ritardando fit very poorly with actual musical data. Is this still an outstanding issue? What does Changizi think of this? Such questions are missing in Harnessed. In fact, Changizi hardly mentions earlier kinematic models of music cognition.
Still, the book is a worthwhile read. While repetitive at times, Changizi has a clear style of writing and shows how a single, crazy-sounding hypothesis about the origin of music and language, can still be researched in a systematic manner. Harnessed will definitely provide all interested readers with much food for thought.
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January 16, 2013I did not finish this book. I only made it through the second chapter, so this review may not reflect the entirety of the book.
I had a few issues with this book which keep me from finishing it. Foremost, the arguments i read seemed very one sided and directional nearly skewed. This is what really made me put the book down, poor arguments. This book is proposing a scientific theory but it was doing a poor job at convincing me of the theory. Secondly, I could not figure out who the authors intended audience was. As a reader i felt as if the book was written in a way to try to make the reader feel unintelligent or a least feel that the author was incomprehensibly more intelligent than them. I don't know who that would appeal to. Finally, it really seemed that this book was partly written as a plug for the authors first book. Overall there was way to much self promotion. I personal did not care for the writing or the idea, but that's just me.
I had a few issues with this book which keep me from finishing it. Foremost, the arguments i read seemed very one sided and directional nearly skewed. This is what really made me put the book down, poor arguments. This book is proposing a scientific theory but it was doing a poor job at convincing me of the theory. Secondly, I could not figure out who the authors intended audience was. As a reader i felt as if the book was written in a way to try to make the reader feel unintelligent or a least feel that the author was incomprehensibly more intelligent than them. I don't know who that would appeal to. Finally, it really seemed that this book was partly written as a plug for the authors first book. Overall there was way to much self promotion. I personal did not care for the writing or the idea, but that's just me.
October 16, 2011
Really interesting insights, probably could have been half as long though, a little repetitive at times, some sections seemed irrelevant, but the overall concept and a lot of the info were interesting.
August 24, 2013
Somewhat anecdotal but pretty convincing. I buy the harnesses theory at least. Writing is pretty accessible--almost a little too pandering for a general audience at times.
August 4, 2014
Spare us the pretentions of being down to earth, quirky and accessible, please! and get to the point! gosh these repressed academics needa control their inner weirdo
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews