HENRY

….and the award for the stupidest science story I’ve seen in months goes to LiveScience.com for “Cave Men Loved to Sing“, in which we’re told that our cave-dwelling ancestors used echo-location:

With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn’t be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave, Reznikoff explained.

“When acting in a cave in conditions similar to prehistoric ones … the surroundings a few meters ahead are almost completely dark,” he said, adding that “since sound reaches much farther than reduced light, especially in irregular surroundings, the only possibility and security is to explore the cave with the voice and its echoing effects.”

This work is good, because…  “(some work was done in past years and combined with the latest findings)”.  A scientific paper being based off previous findings… Fancy that.

The conclusions? -

Because Paleolithic humans had a deep connection with the melodic properties that helped them navigate in a cave, they likely celebrated the unique acoustics by singing in conjunction with their painting sessions.

Colin McGinn reviews Oliver Sack’s new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Sacks opens his book with a striking case, rather literally striking. Tony Cicoria, a forty-two-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was making a phone call to his mother when he was struck in the face by lightning. He thought he was dead immediately following the event but sustained no serious injuries and went back to work a few weeks later. But then, quite unexpectedly, he experienced an intense craving to listen to piano music—something he had never felt before. He started listening to piano music all the time, couldn’t get enough of it. Then, a little later, he started hearing piano music in his head, insistently and powerfully; he felt the need to write it down, though he had no training in musical notation. Soon he was teaching himself to play the piano, playing the tunes that came to him unbidden at all moments. He played the piano at every opportunity, driving his wife to distraction. He had a bad case of sudden-onset musicophilia, somehow triggered by the brain alterations wrought by the lightning. He had become, in effect, a completely new person, evidently because of having had his brain electrically rewired.

Continued in The Musical Mystery…

I’ve been rather swamped this week, off to the NZ Phylogenetics Meeting in a few hours, and have to finish writing my talk. So - just a quick round-up of interesting links to keep you all occupied!

• Music reliably evokes common colors - a fascinating demo by cognitive daily.
• The great blog, Shared Symbolic Storage has a nice post on the influence of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s 1990 paper “Natural Language and Natural Selection”:
  

  The paper had a tremendous impact. In the open peer commentary, Jim Hurford (1990) hailed it as a “Liberation!” and saw it as the crucial step “Beyond the roadblock in linguistic evolution studies” most clearly represented by the 1866 ban on papers about language origin by the Linguistic Society of Paris and the rumored “Gentleman’s Agreement” with a similar notion by the Linguistic Society of America (Indeed, no paper about the topic appeared in the society’s journal, ‘Language’ until 2000 (Newmeyer 2003)), while Philip Lieberman (1990) (rightly) argued that he was making the same claim for years. To others, however, for example Richard Lewontin (Lewontin 1990: 740) and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Piattelli-Palmarini 1990: 754), language still appeared as “a system of such complexity that its selective value [still was] difficult to imagine” (Studdert-Kennedy/Knight/Hurford 1998: 3)

• A promising tool-use paper: Setting tool use within the context of animal construction behaviour:

  Tool use and manufacture are given prominence by their rarity and suggested relation to human lineage. Here, we question the view that tool use is rare because cognitive abilities act as an evolutionary constraint and suggest that tools are actually seldom very useful compared with anatomical adaptations. Furthermore, we argue that focussing on animal tool use primarily in terms of human evolution can lead to important insights regarding the ecological and cognitive abilities of non-human tool users being overlooked. We argue that such oversight can best be avoided by examining tools within the wider context of construction behaviours by animals (such as nest building and trap construction).

Beautiful - Dusty Springfield, via the medium of sign-language

According to new research presented at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting & Exposition in Washington, D.C., 33 percent of the most popular songs of 2005 portrayed substance use. The study, in which researchers analyzed 279 of the year’s most popular songs according to Billboard magazine, also found that allusions to substance use varied widely by genre.

More at ScienceDaily…

Ok. Time for a catch up post. There’s just not enough hours in the day…

1: Native Language Governs The Way Toddlers Interpret Speech Sounds:

Toddlers are learning language skills earlier than expected and by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning

2: Claire Bowern’s started a new project for Pama-Nyungan Languages and Australian Prehistory which aims “to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements”. It’ll be exciting to see how this works out. Also take a look at the blog: Pama-Nyungan reconstruction, which is fronted with a lovely picture of a neighbor-net.

3: Oh the irony: Disney’s Baby Einstein videos that promise to enhance your babies brain power, don’t work. In fact, the babies who watched Baby Einstein videos had worse performance on language assessments. It’s almost as if it’s pseudo-science or something. More details are here…

4: Mark Liberman on Language Log has an interesting article on Fox P2 and bird song grammar:

…But to reify human speech and language abilities as a “parser” located in the caudate nucleus, regulated by FoxP2 and shared with finches — well, speculation is fun, but this is like the kind of too-specific science fiction that’s out of date by the time it’s published, and seems merely quaint within a few years.

5: Eric Cline in the Boston Globe says "Biblical archeology is too important to leave to crackpots and ideologues. It’s time to fight back":

NOAH’S ARK. The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The Exodus. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. All have been “found” in the last 10 years, including one within the past six months. The discoverers: a former SWAT team member; an investigator of ghosts, telepathy, and parapsychology; a filmmaker who calls himself “The Naked Archeologist”; and others, none of whom has any professional training in archeology.

A study in NeuroImage suggests that language and music are processed by the same underlying brain systems. Using EEG (which has really good temporal sensitivity), the authors presented subjects with melodies that were violated in one of three ways:

1) Rule-only violations: where the melody contained out-of-key deviant notes that violated the tonal harmony rules in melodies that were unfamiliar to the listener.
2) Memory-only violations: where the melody contained notes that followed musical rules, but deviated from the actual melody known to the listener.
3) Both memory and rule violations: the notes in the melody violated both musical rules and memory.

The results of this study show a double-dissociation between the rule violations and the memory violations where both the rule violation conditions (1 & 3) but not the memory-only condition (2) caused an early negative event-related potential (ERP), localised to the anterior central right hemisphere.

This is strikingly similar to the “N400” ERP which is seen when subjects are presented with rule-based violations of linguistic stimuli (e.g. “I like my coffee with cream and dog“), which suggests that music and language are both subserved by similar processing systems.

The full paper will be out later in the year: Double dissociation between rules and memory in music: An event-related potential study, but until then, ScienceDaily has a brief write-up.