Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

528 HOW THE MIND WORKStion-rich, consequential objects and forces. Imagine scooping out theentire scene in front of you, putting it in a giant blender set on LIQUEFY,and pouring the detritus back in front of you. The scene no longer containsany object of interest. Any food, predators, shelter, hiding places,vantage points, tools, and raw materials have been ground into sludge.And what does it look like? It has no lines, no shapes, no symmetry, andno repetition. It is brown, just like the color you got when you mixed allyour paints together as a child. It has nothing to look at because it hasnothing in it. The thought experiment shows that drabness comes froman environment with nothing to offer, and its opposite, visual pizzazz,comes from an environment that contains objects worth paying attentionto. Thus we are designed to be dissatisfied by bleak, featureless scenesand attracted to colorful, patterned ones. We push that pleasure buttonwith vivid artificial colors and patterns.Music is an enigma. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick asks, "Is itnot strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" Inall cultures, certain rhythmic sounds give listeners intense pleasure andheartfelt emotions. What benefit could there be to diverting time andenergy to the making of plinking noises, or to feeling sad when no onehas died? Many suggestions have been made—music bonds the socialgroup, coordinates action, enhances ritual, releases tension—but theyjust pass the enigma along rather than explaining it. Why do rhythmicsounds bond the group, dissipate tension, and so on? As far as biologicalcause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs ofdesign for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurateperception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision,social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from ourspecies and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Musicappears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugsthat we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits atonce."Music is the universal language," says the cliche, but that is mislead -ing. Anyone who lived through the craze for Indian raga music afterGeorge Harrison made it hip in the 1960s appreciates that musical stylesvary from culture to culture and that people most enjoy the idiom they