Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 2, August 2014
___________________________________________________________________
From
neurotransmitters to aesthetic experience: Jay
Schulkin's Reflections on the Musical Mind
by
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Jay Schulkin’s Reflections on the Musical Mind makes a brave foray into a cultural practice that historically has a complex and elliptical relationship with scientific inquiry. If this monograph resists summary judgement this is not least because of the interdisciplinary complex of thought that Schulkin assembles and inhabits – drawn from social neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, pragmatist philosophy, music theory, and more. But his book also resists easy summary because this array tends more to espouse an ethos (by turns illuminating and opaque) than press home a thesis: the volume’s subtitle – An Evolutionary Perspective – does not signal a Dawkins-style call to arms; Schulkin is not out to prosecute a particular world view in contention with others. While he argues much of his case from his brain sciences background (he is Professor in the Neuroscience Department of Georgetown University, Washington D.C.), and while his stance is informed largely by epistemologies that have a naturalistic basis, perhaps it is his own practical experience of music (as ‘an ex-clarinet player who grew up playing Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw’ (130–1)) that encourages him to give epistemic breathing space for consideration of the aesthetic and its wider human implications.
In this sense, then, the word ‘reflections’ in the main title accurately captures Schulkin’s non-confrontational approach. As the jacket blurb claims, ‘His aim is not to provide a grand, unifying theory. Instead the book guides the reader through the relevant scientific evidence that links neuroscience, music, and meaning.’ A fair summary: the volume does no more or less than this. Yet for all that Schulkin’s avoidance of scientistic dogmatism is attractive, we’re not left entirely clear what overarching point(s) he is trying to make through the substantial body of material he mobilises. This is partly due to a measure of opacity in his writing style and the structure of his text (more on this below); but it is also because he fights shy of foregrounding some of the larger arguments and issues implicit in the wealth of ideas he presents. Nonetheless, a larger coherent position is detectable beneath the detail, even as the reader is left needing to do some of the work of unearthing it.
The interdisciplinary framework I have alluded to is discernible across the book’s seven main chapters and framing introduction and conclusion. This is informed by a large corpus of scholarly sources: there are almost 50 tightly typed pages of references in the volume’s back matter. If this is impressive, there is also the niggling sensation that the text sometimes reads like an extended literature review – again a symptom of the need for a stronger overarching metanarrative to pull the detail together. The preponderance of Schulkin’s evidence – including many diagrams and graphics (some of which only find a loose connection with their surrounding text) – derives from this body of secondary literature, while his own authorial agency resides in constructing this multi-faceted assembly and in drawing out connections. This multiplicity of sources raises an issue about epistemological pluralism – a corollary of avoiding ‘a grand unifying theory’, but a challenge that nonetheless faces Schulkin if he wants to get beyond merely presenting a miscellany of loosely connected viewpoints. My argument is that Schulkin goes some way towards doing this, but that a possible architectonics of epistemologies that seems to underlie the book, as well as the questions posed by spaces around them, could have been made more explicit. It seems to me that there are three key epistemological levels.
First, there is a foundational concern for music’s origins, in a Darwinist evolutionary sense. At an early stage in the book, Schulkin states (after Theodosius Dobzhansky): ‘A biological perspective is the cornerstone in understanding our capabilities, with our musical ability being just one of these’ (19). If your premise is that music is fundamentally rooted in evolutionary processes then there is a certain logic in looking back to earlier stages in the evolutionary tree. Following such a phylogenetic rationale, Schulkin prefaces his investigation of human song with a chapter on song production in birds (not to mention frogs and crickets). He is shrewd enough not to ‘overinterpret song as a completely shared function between birds and humans’, since ‘music plays many roles for humans that have nothing to do with territory, sex, or explicit biological functions’ (46; let us file this this point for later discussion). But he nonetheless argues for key continuities across the species barrier:
Like human language, song production [in birds] is lateralized in the brain; the left side is dominant in these behaviors. Song production, like language production, appears to follow syntactic rules and is expressed in both male and female songbirds. Song in birds resembles speech in some ways, coupled as it is to syntax and local dialects. Social interaction is a common correlate of both birdsong and speech. (47)
The second principal strand of Schulkin’s implicit larger model, interwoven with these evolutionary concerns, draws on neuroscience, and especially his home discipline of social neuroscience – part of the ‘cognitive revolution’ that marked a turn away from behaviourism (2). At one extreme, this taps into research that is biologistic indeed, bringing the relationship between chemical neurotransmitters and social behaviour well into the foreground. Arts-and-humanities based researchers will need to ponder the implications of the observation that ‘information molecules such as oxytocin, vasopressin, or vasotocin are critical for social contact and perhaps musical expression’ (55); or that song in birds is linked to a process in which testosterone is converted to estrogenic compounds (50) (in more detail: ‘While testosterone induction of vasotocin facilitates song production in several bird species estrogen can also have a profound effect on the brain, with organizational implications that promote changes in structure and function essential for diverse social behaviors’ (51)). The language of neurotransmitters also looms large in Schulkin’s account of human song (chapter 3), with dopamine cast as a key player. Dopamine, Schulkin tells us ‘is central in the organization of drives and rewards’ (66). Interestingly, ‘Dopamine is neutral with regard to function; it is only essential for the organization of behavior or the organization of effort (e.g. … persevering at practicing the clarinet …)’ (68).
A key explanatory challenge for Schulkin here (and throughout) is to bridge the gap between an account of neurotransmitters and associated brain regions on the one hand (67) and our socially and culturally meaningful experiences of music on the other. The loose organisation of chapters doesn’t really galvanise the connections, but an outline model is again discernible. Schulkin draws connections most tersely in statements such as: ‘dopamine is released in regions of the brain during expectations of music, and while hearing music, it is released in regions of the brain that are critically involved in the organization of action, namely the basal ganglia and in particular the nucleus accumbens’ (76). And this links to assertions of the unity of cognition and action – for example: ‘there is no separation between motor and cognitive systems; all motor systems are embedded in information processing and cognitive appraisal, reflexive or not’ (77). Schulkin asserts that language and syntax (and related social semiotic systems, including music) are profoundly linked to motor systems and action, with gesture as perhaps a key symptom of this bond (63–6). Similarly, ‘The mechanisms for generating action are not separate from the mechanisms for thought’ (69); and dopamine neurons are implicit in the process – in the detection of salience in the environment, the mobilisation of intent, the prediction of reward, and so on.
With this, then, Schulkin expounds a view in which the biological and cognitive are inseparable. And this forms an important premise for what I would see as the third level of his implicit architectonic model: his view of aesthetics and musical meaning. In a similar vein to the above statements about the intimacy of thought and action, Schulkin later states: ‘I … don’t know what part of aesthetics is not linked to information processing systems in the brain.’ This is because information processing cannot be cleaved from aesthetic appraisal and feeling: ‘it is not as if one side of us is doing the thinking and another is only appreciating’. Invoking Darwin himself, Schulkin continues: ‘It is a pernicious if deeply ingrained separation to say that emotions and cognitions are tangibly different' (100). In epistemological terms, then, what Schulkin needs is an aesthetics and a model for theorising musical experience that are consistent with such a worldview – a view that locates cognition, action (motor systems), motion and emotion on the same continuum of a dynamic, embodied relationship with our environment. Philosophically, the tradition he finds most congenial is that of American pragmatism. His quest for a ‘[d]emythologizing aesthetics’ (116) – an aesthetics rooted in the everyday, that ‘heightens and deepens our experience’ (91) – draws explicitly from key exponents of that tradition: John Dewey most notably, but also William James and Charles Sanders Peirce. Accordingly, a vital touchstone in Schulkin’s understanding of musical meaning is Leonard B. Meyer’s theories of musical expectation – influenced, as Schulkin points out, by ideas from Dewey.
The idea which links a demythologised, pragmatic account of human being (as bequeathed to us from our evolutionary prehistory) to aesthetic experience is the notion of ‘the human problem of grappling with the unexpected while sustaining the familiar, a core feature that underlies human experience and inquiry in general, but which is also essential, in part, to musical sensibilities’ (87–8). Quoting Dewey, Schulkin states: ‘We make peace with the uncertain as we forage within inquiry and infuse “… objects of sense which are also objects which satisfy, reward and feed intelligence … through ideas that are experimental and operative”’ (89, citing Dewey 1929/1960: 169). Schulkin draws attention to the connection between Dewey’s view of learning, which, ‘whether aesthetic or otherwise, is one in which the failure of an expectation initiates the process of learning’ (105, referencing Dewey 1925/1989), and Gestalt-based notions of musical expectation fundamental to Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (Meyer 1956). In this classic text – whose ideas were further developed in Explaining Music (Meyer 1973) – Meyer argues that one important way in which emotion is engendered by music is when expectations implied by, for example, the trajectories of melody and harmony (syntactical structures of sorts) are not fulfilled – or at least not immediately so. This nonetheless implies a background level of stability against which deviations and departures can be become salient and hence meaningful. As Schulkin states, ‘we search for the stable amidst the precarious’; ‘Meyer's emphasis, like Dewey's, is on stability and probably implicit in homeostasis’. (Schulkin adds his own slight twist to this notion – one which probably underscores his evolutionist predilections: ‘rather than the stable (homeostasis, or staying the same), we search for the viable so we can adapt to changing circumstances (allostasis)’ (92).)
A wider body of research is invoked around these constructs, including that of music theorists of a later generation, such as John Sloboda (1991, 2008) and David Huron (2008), who build on Meyer’s ideas, often with a strongly empiricist slant. (Surprisingly, given that syntax is one of Schulkin’s concerns, any substantial account of work by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff – most notably their seminal A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983) – is conspicuous by its absence, albeit that the book is referenced in Schulkin’s bibliography.) Schulkin underlines the dynamism inherent in models such as Meyer’s with reference to work by, among others, K.S. Lashley, who is quoted declaring 'Input is never into a quiescent or static system, but always into a system which is already actively excited and organized' (104, citing Lashley 1951: 506) – a conceit that would also describe music well. But for Schulkin, let us recall, the world is never to be described in purely information-processing terms; hence a later application of notions prompted by Meyer is a chapter devoted to music and dance, which explores the linkages of motion, emotion and embodiment. Indeed this last might be a fourth possible level in Schulkin’s framework, embedded as it is in his formulation of aesthetics. And similarly, the social is a fifth important concern, which likewise receives its own chapter, and in Schulkin’s account is part of an evolutionary argument that is also linked to ontogeny, starting with the relationship between neonates and mothers. However, while these additional perspectives certainly emerge from the first three, it is arguable that they enrich rather than extend Schulkin’s key epistemological architecture in which a Darwinist concern for evolutionary origins supports neuroscientific approaches on the one hand and aesthetic and musical theories mediated by pragmatist philosophy and aesthetics, and pragmatist-informed music theory, on the other.
If Schulkin does not concertedly work towards any major synthesis of these perspectives in order to make paradigm-shifting conclusions, it is clear that he nonetheless wants to use this framework to support some claims about music in the human sphere that go beyond an arid materialist reductionism: that it is social (14-16); that it gives a window onto the transcendent and sublime (16); that it is a vehicle for the spiritual dimensions of human existence (170-1); that it can be misappropriated for malign political ends (173); that it can be a vehicle for aggression and war (176-8); that it enriches life (16); that it is a vital element in human well being (176-8). In the spirit of Schulkin’s assertion that cognition and emotion are inseparable, I would describe my own experience of reading and re-reading this book as a contradictory amalgam of feeling. Most positively, I felt strong admiration for a scientific scholar who seeks to link an evolutionary account of music with larger questions of our being in the world. At the other extreme was an acute feeling of frustration over the way the way the book has been written. Schulkin’s editors would have done well to encourage him to make his overall argument clearer, to tighten up the organisation of his chapters and to polish up his prose style. Schulkin has an at times exasperating tendency to create paragraphs by concatenating statements rather than building an argument. A particularly acute example would be the following jumble of non-sequiturs:
Music warms and cools, tranquilizes and invigorates. It soars and descends with time as we merge, our minds engaged with no Cartesian separation. The social context highlights what Dewey referred to as ‘lived experience’. Peirce, an early proponent of statistical literacy, was also a proponent of semiotics. Cognitive/motor skills are engaged in listening and certainly performing, in watching and stimulating, in imagining and transcending. (124)
Of course it’s mean to pick out a passage like this without its surrounding, potentially clarifying context. Yet that context itself tends to made up of paragraphs with a similarly loose connection, just as entire chapters are made of sections that are likewise casually juxtaposed. This isn’t to deny other moments of eloquence; and in mitigation, as I have endeavoured to show above, an argument is in there somewhere; but the reader has to do more than their fair share of the work to arrive at it. Moreover, as if mapping the book’s argument weren’t sometimes hard enough, matters are compounded by a diabolic referencing system (and there are many references), in which one first has to ferret in the back of the book for an endnote that cites works using the Harvard author–date system (why couldn't these have been put in the body text?), which then have to be looked up a second time in the list of references. A plague on Princeton University Press for this model of user-hostility!
But, as I said at the outset, there is no single summary judgement that one could fairly apply to this book. And researchers of consciousness should of all people be minded to approach this text with some empathy and generosity. To venture off one’s own disliplinary piste is a bold thing – and in going beyond a raw evolutionism Schulkin signals fertile territory for future investigation. Although he doesn’t identify consciousness as an issue per se, in effect he is engaging throughout with a dichotomy akin to the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness – as most famously formulated by David Chalmers (Chalmers 1996). On the one hand Schulkin shows how our cognitive and behavioural relation with the world is conditioned by a flux of neurotransmitters and brain functions. A fundamentalist materialist view might argue that this physical level is basically it: the resulting ceaseless reconfiguration and aggregation of neurones is what yields consciousness – to all intents and purposes an epiphenomenon of such material processes, rooted in our long bio-evolutionary history. Schulkin is too savvy to settle for this, though; and his grasp of the significance of music is one of things that clearly forestalls his taking such a position. As he puts it early on:
Song has long been viewed in the context of function, as it still is in birds. However, song also expands with cultural legacies and expression. Most people's enjoyment of Ray Charles or Beethoven serves no specific function. Biology is one thing; overzealous adaptationism is another. My hope is that this book reflects the former and not the latter. (14)
It most certainly does. At a micro-level this is reflected in the verbs Schulkin tends to choose when expressing the connections between biological, cognitive and cultural factors. Hence, for example, ‘dopamine in the brain and peripheral tissues … underlie thought, action, and musical expression’; ‘Oxytocin and vasopressin are … tied to social contact … [and] might be associated with our musical sensibility as well’ (85, 58, emphasis added). In other words, Schulkin takes care to avoid reducing brain chemistry and experience to one another; the many twists, turns and meanderings of the text reflect his efforts to bridge the explanatory gap.
The pragmatist philosophical tradition which so deeply informs Schulkin’s project unquestionably represents fertile mediating ground, especially for those who would keep faith with epistemological frameworks that maintain a meaningful connection with empiricism. While my own surmise is that empiricism may ultimately be an insufficient vehicle for consciousness studies, I’m nonetheless grateful to Schulkin for persuading me that that pragmatism is worth revisiting (see also Richard Shusterman’s Body Consciousness (2008), which applies pragmatist notions to consciousness studies and aesthetics). But perhaps the major unasked question that this book raises is whether the disjuncture may not be more radical – indeed unbridgeable – and what the implications of this would be. Song, music and aesthetic experience more widely may indeed have arisen originally as evolutionary adaptations as early hominids sought to find modes of survival in the world (116–17). But then at a certain point – arguably the point at which our species acquired higher-order consciousness – something – everything – changes. This point is probably coterminous with our emergence into culture; and from here on, to reiterate Schulkin’s own words, a phenomenon such as music ‘plays many roles for humans that have nothing to do with territory, sex, or explicit biological functions’ (46); the significance of Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Lady Gaga becomes essentially irreducible to any grand evolutionist metanarrative. And if this validates the need for different metanarratives and the agency of different disciplines, then evolutionary theory and science more widely need to be understood in their proper place: important, valuable, but not by any means the sole, or über-explanatory system for our time. It is to Schulkin’s credit that he maintains a healthy awareness of this likelihood, even if he shies away from pursuing the more radical implications.
References
Chalmers, D., 1996, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.
Dewey, J., 1925/1989, Experience and Nature, La Salle: Open Court.
Dewey, J, 1929/1960, The Quest for Certainty. New York: Capricorn Books.
Huron, D., 2008, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lerdahl F. and R. Jackendoff, 1983, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lashley K.S., 1951, The problem of serial order in behavior, in L.A. Jeffres (ed.), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, 110–33, New York: Wiley.
Meyer, L.B., 1956, Emotion and Meaning in Music, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Meyer, L.B., 1973, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Schulkin, Jay.
Reflections on the Musical Mind: An Evolutionary Perspective. Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press. 2013. 272 pages,15 halftones, 62 line illus., 16
tables. ISBN 9780691157443. £30.95 hbk.
Shusterman, R., 2008, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sloboda, J., 1991, Music, structure and emotional response: some empirical findings, Psychology of Music 19, 110–20.
Sloboda, J., 2008, Embracing uncertainty, Music Perception 25, 489–91.