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https://psyche.co/ideas/have-online-worlds-become-the-last-free-places-for-children
Have online worlds become the last free places for children?
by Eli Stark-Elster, evolutionary and cognitive anthropologist
Children have lost the freedom to explore and play independently. They now seek out autonomy in digital landscapes
Around 1950, when the developmental psychologist Peter Gray was five years old, his family moved to a new town. He didn’t know any of the kids in the neighbourhood, so his mother told him to go door to door and ask if any children lived in each house. He took her advice and, within a few minutes, had found a girl named Ruby Lou, who soon taught him how to ride a bicycle and climb trees. ‘During that first summer,’ Gray recalls in his book Free to Learn (2013), ‘Ruby Lou and I played together almost every day, often all day.’ Their adventures took them all across town, often far from the watchful eyes of adults.
This kind of independent exploration is the very essence of childhood. But in the past 50 years, the autonomy afforded to many children has vanished. According to results from a 2025 Harris Poll, 62 per cent of American kids aged eight to 12 have never walked or biked somewhere without an adult. Roughly the same percentage have never made plans with friends without adult assistance, and almost half have never walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store. ‘I’m not the only person who looks back at childhood and regrets that today’s children have less freedom than we did,’ Gray writes.
Without the freedom to explore and play, what do children do? Research from the World Health Organization shows that a third of adolescents in Europe, Central Asia and Canada play digital games every day. Another study found that half of those aged 12 to 17 in the United States averaged four hours or more of daily screen time. In cities around the world, it’s not hard to find much younger children sitting in front of glowing screens.
These are dramatic changes. Major public intellectuals and politicians have responded by arguing that children should rarely, if ever, participate in digital spaces. As a result, many schools in the US now demand that students seal their smartphones in magnetic pouches. A number of countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom and France, are even considering or have already implemented bans on social media accounts for children and teenagers.
Such restrictions, however, are not the tools of liberation we may imagine them to be.
In fact, for some children, the internet may be one of the last remaining spaces where they can grow up doing what children everywhere have evolved to do: independently play and explore with their peers.
For most of our evolutionary history, humans were hunter-gatherers, and children were allowed to roam free. But you’ve heard this story before: once we were pure, free from the strictures of civilisation; now we find ourselves everywhere in chains. To understand the circumstances in which the natural structure of childhood evolved, it’s helpful to start with machetes.
The 2025 Harris Poll found that 71 per cent of American children have never held a sharp knife. But among modern foraging groups like the BaYaka in the Congo, children start playing with knives before they can talk.
At the beginning of the anthropologist Gül Deniz Salalı’s documentary Rising in the Forest (2025), we see one of these BaYaka children smacking the ground with a full-length machete. Others climb saplings and bathe in rivers. At one point, Salalı’s camera follows a group ranging in ages from one to 11 as they gear up for a day-long fishing trip, entirely free of adults.
Children preferred to play in derelict construction sites rather than the parks carefully designed for them
Similar degrees of independence have been granted to children in many other small-scale cultures, as documented by anthropologists in the early and mid-20th century. Among the Mbuti, a Central African foraging group, Colin Turnbull observed makeshift playgrounds set far away from camp: ‘all day long the children splashed and wallowed about.’ Reflecting on her time in Samoa, Margaret Mead recalled groups of young girls who ‘scoured the villages alternately attacking or fleeing from the gangs of small boys.’ Regarding the lives of Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski noticed a ‘small republic’ of children that ‘acts very much as its own members determine, standing often in a sort of collective opposition to its elders.’
Of course, the rainforests and islands where some children live lend themselves to exploration and play. But even in desolate environments, children still seek out secret worlds.
When the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie documented the lives of children in post-war Britain, they noticed that kids liked to roam in packs through bomb sites, where they would play hide-and-seek and roast potatoes over campfires. In Denmark in the 1930s, the landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen was amazed when he realised that local children preferred to play in derelict construction sites rather than the parks he had carefully designed for them. In response, he developed the concept of ‘junk playgrounds’. These structures eschew adult-designed swings and slides, allowing kids to guide their own activities instead. They were later adopted by the British and renamed ‘adventure playgrounds’, hundreds of which have been built since Sørensen’s time. And thousands more, surely, have been anointed without adult guidance.
This evidence tells us something important about human development: children want to explore together and build independent peer cultures that are partially distinct from the ways of adults. Yet since the early 1970s, many Western countries have increasingly limited the social and physical independence of children. From 1970 to 1990, for instance, independent mobility starkly dropped for children living in England and Sweden. According to research by the Policy Studies Institute, roughly 63 to 94 per cent cent of English children were permitted to travel to places other than school alone in 1971, but by 1990 that count had dropped to 37 per cent. Similarly, as of 1981, 60 per cent of Swedish children were allowed to go to the library alone, but in 2009 the same privilege was granted to only 15 per cent.
The story behind these shifts is complicated. It likely involves urbanisation, fears of kidnapping, greater dependence on cars and several other factors. A 2022 survey from Play England found that many parents were especially concerned about the threats of abduction and traffic. New social norms, too, have influenced the willingness of parents to let their kids roam. Parents may worry that granting more mobility to their children will lead to judgment from other adults.
In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet
Some of these concerns are warranted. Many families now live in neighbourhoods that are, in fact, less safe for free-roaming due to the presence of vehicles. People willing to let their kids brave the streets may also risk legal consequences: one survey found that more than a third of American parents think it’s reasonable to call child protective services if they see a 10-year-old playing alone in a nearby park for three hours. Simultaneously, schools continue to assign more homework, truncate recess and vacations, and impose competitive standards on children at younger ages than ever before. As a result, kids end up trapped inside.
This de facto imprisonment harms the physical and mental health of children. Using data from 2009 and 2010, one study correlated metrics of independent mobility with metrics of childhood wellbeing and revealed an unmistakable pattern: less mobility meant poorer wellbeing. A review by Gray and colleagues also marshals an abundance of evidence for this view. They reference one study in which children aged six to eight were asked to depict activities that made them happy. Virtually every child drew pictures of themselves playing, often alongside their friends.
In physical spaces, we restrict the movement of children and refuse to let them play and explore without us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t look for ways to escape.
In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet.
This is not the standard view on so-called ‘screen time’. Digital media tend to be viewed as repressing free play, rather than an expression of it. Virtual spaces are seen as compelling because they’re addictive.
Of course, the addictive features that characterise many online platforms are a real problem. For instance, Epic Games – the company that makes Fortnite – settled a class action over their use of ‘loot boxes’, which effectively act as in-game slot machines. Yet if we focus only on the coercive parts of the online world, we risk missing its deeper appeal to children.
Consider the example of Minecraft, which is still the best-selling video game of all time. One study from 2017 found that more than half of Australian children aged six to 12 played the game regularly. Why is it so compelling? Its magnetism has little to do with addictive design. Instead, children love Minecraft because it offers an infinite, complex and entirely self-directed world to explore.
Rather than restricting children, BaYaka parents find ways to limit the dangers
In middle school, my friends and I played Minecraft incessantly. Our busy schedules often made it hard to do anything together in person, and even when we could meet, our suburb provided few interesting places to roam. But Minecraft lifted those limits. There were jungles and tundras to explore, replete with hidden temples. Online, we discovered communities full of equally passionate players with whom we could swap new ideas and learn from. Strangely, when I think about the moments that distinguished my childhood, Minecraft is utterly central. It gave me a secret world in an otherwise tightly supervised life.
That’s not to say digital spaces don’t contain genuine risks. Some social media platforms are particularly dangerous: in 2024, users of X (formerly known as Twitter) were given access to an AI chatbot (Grok) that has since been widely used to generate explicit and non-consensual images of women and, in some cases, children. Popular video games like Roblox – which is played by more than 100 million people every day (most of whom are children) – also attempt to extract real money from their users in exchange for appealing digital items. Many parents also worry about online predators: Roblox is presently litigating several lawsuits that allege they have failed to protect young users from sexual exploitation through their platform. These are serious threats, and parents should not take a purely laissez-faire attitude toward them.
But it’s also important to remember that the activities and places that children have historically benefited from exploring were never completely safe. BaYaka kids, for example, risk falling out of trees or cutting themselves with machetes. Yet in a world that demands tree-climbing and swinging sharp blades, these risks are offset by the benefits of exploratory freedom. Rather than restricting children, BaYaka parents find ways to limit the dangers. Similarly, the apparent risks of digital life are real, and yet the exploratory opportunities provided by it – particularly given the present and future importance of digital fluency – demand that we take the benefits seriously.
Regarding the use of machetes as toys, a Dusun father from northern Borneo put it best: ‘How can you learn to use a knife if you do not use it?’
When we look carefully at how kids engage with the digital landscape, the desire for independent exploration becomes impossible to miss. Children play online games and use social media not simply because of addictive algorithms. Instead, as research from the social scientists Emily Weinstein and Carrie James suggests, platforms and applications for connection can help young people stay in near-constant contact with each other.
The impulses that guide the digital lives of young people are the same as those that fuel the lives of their BaYaka counterparts and every other human child that has ever lived. Though we might want to remake our physical world in that ancestral image of outdoor freedom, some things cannot be undone – at least not straightforwardly. We are unlikely, for example, to eliminate our dependence on cars or tear down our suburban sprawls. However, we can avoid inflicting further damage on the necessary freedoms of childhood by advocating for, imagining and creating better online worlds. If the remaining free places lie behind a screen, so be it. At least our children will have one last place to hide.
To some, that may seem like a defeatist conclusion, especially if you believe that our reality has become impoverished by the presence of social media and online games. But the digital world does not always need to be seen as inherently lesser. In fact, virtual spaces may provide opportunities for liberating new forms of exploration and social play that were previously unimaginable.
Eli Stark-Elster is a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He studies culture-cognition coevolution and writes the Substack Unpublishable Papers.
https://atmos.earth/climate-solutions/one-solution-for-invasive-species-put-them-on-the-menu/
one Solution for Invasive Species? Put Them on the Menu.
https://bigthink.com/series/full-interview/music-human-body/
How music rewires the human body, in 59 minutes
Professor Michael Spitzer argues that music is something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling.
MICHAEL SPITZER: I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm professor of music at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. I've written a book called The Musical Human, A History of Life on Earth. The past, present and future of music with Michael Spitzer.
Part 1. The History of Music. How did you approach the history of music? People often write books in response to reading other books. When I read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, well, hold on. Music is at least a million years older than the Sapiens. Most books about music do the usual thing of which composer wrote what piece at what time. I wanted to get away from that and see the bigger picture.
We're in that kind of moment of thinking of the global of the universal. And music is absolutely universal. It also transcends sapiens because animals have music, birds, whales and other creatures. And ultimately, the musical human is a musical animal. It's almost inconceivable to write a prehistory of music because Edison invents a phonograph in 1777. And prior to that, we have no record of any sound.
One of the problems with instruments is that the materials biodegrade. But looking as far back as we can, what doesn't degrade are lithic instruments made of rocks, such as stalactites or the famous rock gongs in Tanzania. The absolute landmark are the bone flutes discovered in the South German caves. About 40,000 years old, and they were constructed from the bones of griffon vulture. But other than that, we have to wait until the invention of ceramics on over which people stretched high to create the first frame drums. But of course, skin and leather biodegrades, and we have no evidence for exactly when these were made. And even more so for strings.
So the first string instruments, harps and lutes, were created after the invention of farming. And once people farmed cows and created strings from twisting the guts of animals. So we create harps and lutes. But again, strings biodegrade. So we have to work inferentially by mapping from what we do know and looking at, say, the history of anatomy, of the evolving technology of tools, reverse engineering from linguistics to model language, and observing everyday life across the world in hunter-gatherer societies in different environments. It's as much about piecing together a number of disciplines. And here is an example of an inferential argument.
About 1.5 million years ago, Homo Erectus, one of our hominid ancestors, invents what is called a bi-facial axe. This is an axe with two symmetrical faces. Now, the capacity to create symmetry in an axe bespeaks two things. An ability to create a beautiful form, a symmetry, and an enjoyment of form for aesthetic reasons. We can also borrow from psychology to create an inference that you can map from the domain of tools to the domain of sound, because mental capacity is cross-modal. So the ability to create symmetry is also found in sound. And we call symmetrical sound meter or regular rhythm.
So it's a fair argument that given the evidence of a bi-facial hand axe, Homo Agasta would have been able to tap that axe in a symmetrical rhythm or using musical meter. How does bipedalism inform human music? When we talk about the original music, it's really about assembling elements of music, which were synthesized much further down the road. And one of these elements was bipedalism, that what marks the first hominids apart from apes, and our common ancestor, was getting up on our feet. 4.4 million years ago, an Australopithecine called Ardi, stirred on her legs and walked. And ever since then, the rhythm of walking has stamped human music.
But much more than that, that pun intended, that the first steps put us on the path to forging links between the brain, and muscular exertion and sound. And the hominids learn to hear footsteps as a pattern, and what patterns give you is a sense of time. You can predict what will happen next. And the idea of walking also gives humans their fascination with this metaphor that music moves. And if you think about it, music does not move. Music is just sounds or tones floating through the air. But we imagine that one note moves to the other. And most of music be it a symphony or a song, and folds a journey. And this journey takes us from one point to another in our minds.
It's an imaginary journey, a very long distance echo from the journey of our ancestors out of Africa. But walking is the first step of a whole cascade of evolutionary adaptations. And so many things evolve our cranial volume, triples in size, become a lot smarter. And with our increased brain size comes a capacity to control our fingers, to make links with the motor domains of our brain. We've become more dexterous and ultimately more capable of crafting flutes and playing them. But standing up also gives us more space to breathe. And our larynx descends through our vocal tract, our hyoid bone, which supports our tongue evolves so we can articulate what we sing.
As our vocal tract learned how to produce an infinitely greater variety of sounds, our capacity to make sounds exceeded their function. If you compare us with, say, the vervet monkey, they can make four kinds of calls, and each call warns other monkeys of a particular kind of predator. But when you can produce a thousand kinds of sounds, there's an excess of sounds. And this is where music starts to become a possibility, where you're playing with sound, you're enjoying sound for sound's sake, and you're longer having a function. And at this point I think that human music steps away from animal vocalization or animal cause. How does music function as a keeper of history? One of the, I think, profound messages which I discovered in writing my book was that music is all about memory and history.
When somebody two million years ago teaches their thumb how to nap a rock, their thumb remembers that. And tradition is, I call it, congealed muscle memory. Learning how to do something is a haptic, it's a meme, as Dawkins would say, it's mimetic. Unnecessarily cognitive, your muscles learn how to do it. And then you get the bone flutes and you have little parallel lines incised on the flute which tell you where to place your fingers. Indeed, the five holes on those flutes tell you how to play it.
That's also a memory. Most cultures across the planet see music as a way of explaining where their music came from. Here's an example, the Kaluli tribe of New Guinea, Papua New Guinea. They believe in their belief system that music comes from the Mooney Bird, a kind of fruit dove, and they believe that the birds hovering above the forest canopy are literally their ancestors speaking to them. And in imitating the core of the dove, they're participating in a great circle of life.
They're singing back their ancestors' songs. And that is recorded history. In the West, an example of that is a Beethoven symphony like the Eroica, which rehearses a memory of what it's like to live under Napoleon and fight a battle in 19th century France. So all music, be it in the West or across the planet or gave back millions of years ago, is very intimately connected to memory and to history. In what environments did early musical performances exist? When do we discover the first bone flute?
Some of the shards of the broken flutes were discovered in points of maximum resonance within the caves, suggesting a natural marriage, if you'd like, between music and sound and acoustics and architecture. And that also obtains in the West. There's no accident that a church is essentially a cave to worship a god, and the natural affinity between plainchant, singing in church and the acoustics, the resonance of that. So music goes together with architecture. In the caves, it's very likely that they were reserved for rituals. Nobody wants to live in a cave. So these were dark and possibly dangerous places, full of mystery, portals to the divine, the layers of savage beasts. And there would be reserved for special ceremonies or rituals, utilizing the astonishing resonance that the cave, the stone affords to the flutes or the human voice or banging stalactites. Otherwise, people would create music around a hearth.
A hearth is a point of stability where you have the fire. Fire, and the fixed quality of fire is a symbol for the fixed quality of a musical ritual. And the circularity of the hearth is that rituals tended to repeat in a cycle, because they were performed often after ritual events like the hunt or the eating of the meat that's attune, obtaining through the hunt. And there would be no necessarily distinction between singing and physical motion or dancing. So in the West, we have this word, music.
In the West has a single word to cover the plurality of things which go on in music. Most cultures have different words for song, for instrumental, sound, for dancing, for telling stories to music. And all these things were tangled together into a single ceremony. Now, the caveat is that of course we cannot go back in time a million years.
Everything we say has huge scare quotes on it, but that said, it's very striking that looking at the spread of hunter-gatherer peoples across different environments from deserts to savannas to rainforest to the polar snow caps, they share a core, and that survival of a core bespeaks something essential. So it's more than a high-end parable. So if you compare, say, peoples as different as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia with the Inuit of North America, what they share is an entanglement of humanity with animals. In some ways, the purpose of music is to tell us an origin story of where we came from and we came from animals.
The nature of their songs imitates the cause of animals or the dancing of animals. Darwin himself, when he observed the Corroboree Semiramide in Australia, saw that the Aboriginal peoples imitated the dance of Kiwis and kangaroos. And if you look at the way that Inuit imitates the sound of a seal-cub in the songs to lure the cub to be trapped and to be hunted, it's similar looking at the Native Americans and imitates the call of a buffalo-cub. So in each context, modern hunter-gatherers are imitating the cause of animals, but not just that. The way they think of themselves as entangled also with the landscape.
We have the very famous song lines that Bruce Chatwin observed in the way that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, as they journey through or sail through the desert, they tag each feature of the landscape with a song and they navigate the landscape in terms of song. And they view music as a sort of shamanistic spirit journey where led by this shaman, music gives you wings. It enables you to fly through layers of the cosmos and ultimately to what they call the dreamland of their ancestors. If you compare the different environments, the sound of Australia is very different from the snow of North America. And in a certain sense, we can extrapolate back to the conditions obtaining 40,000 years ago in the Ice Age. The thing about snow compared to sand, it leaves no footprints, it leaves no traces.
It's very hard to navigate snow. And so you can extrapolate from that and make the inference that. Inuit navigate trails in their mind and much less footsteps through the snow. And you begin to imagine a web of culture superseding the web of footsteps or the web of trails in the landscape. Snow is also much more inimical to human survival than sand. And the Inuit have to learn to live with each other within closed spaces of e-glues. So music's function is really about anger or conflict management.
You can't afford to have a fight if you're dependent upon one another in a small space in the middle of a polar ice gap. Which is why so much of Inuit music is full of laughter and jokes. And you see that in the lyrics of Inuit songs, it's fostering a playful sociability and diffusing potential for conflict. How did the evolution of society affect music?
If you're looking at the broad picture, the wide-angled lens picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter-gatherer sedentary or farming community and under founding of cities and city states. And you these epochs is associated with mentalities. So hunter-gatherer is tended to be nomadic and we can see that in examples of hunter-gatherer peoples across the whole world from the Inuit in North America, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the pygmies in Africa. And they share an nomadic way of life. And if you're essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don't do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable, ideally just a voice or if not a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. We also see in music of the moment is that music tends to be very playful, avoiding repetition.
So the idea of a piece or a work, which could be repeated, was a very modern notion. And if you look at the music that is played by the Camaro and Pygmies, every time they play a piece it sounds different. It's very much music of the moment. Now, what changes when you invent farming and agriculture? You settle down and your whole mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And music has roots, it digs down and there's music composed for every frame of the circle of life, the cycle of the seasons. And you invent the work, the repeated repeatable work. And the structure of the world becomes as cyclical as life itself.
You invent the circle in music, invent musical rituals. And once music migrates from the farm to the town, certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite permanent roots into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps and dulcimers, which we damaged over a journey. And music's function now also changes with the growth of social hierarchy.
The job of music is to be a handmaid and to serve the power, the power of the prince or the church. And musicians become professionalized and their job is to create music to be listened to for people with leisure. And this is the origin of what we call concerts. What were the first concerts? We have to get away from the modern notion that music was performing what we call concerts. To have a concert requires leisure, requires money. And oftentimes it's the aristocrats or the upper middle class who had the time to sit back and enjoy music performed for them. For most people over millions of years, that didn't happen.
So the rule is that most music was performed functionally in the fields. For instance, the cotton-holers we have in the 19th century, or performs underwater. And we think of examples of sea shanties, the quality of the song reflects the activity. So on a boat you're closely confined and when you're hauling the anchor, the rhythm of hauling, blow the man down. Sea shanty necessarily imitates the rhythm of work. If you compare that with a cotton-holer, you're no longer on a ship, you're on a wide open space.
You have to raise your voice to connect a somebody quite far away and you get a sort of wailing concert. And indeed many people argue that blues in jazz originates from the sadness, the grief of whaling, which happens naturally in a cotton-holer, where you'll be whaling literally, the whaling, your state of life. And similar comparisons can be made with falling cloth, where the rhythm of creating or weaving, you hear that in these rotations of the wheel. And spinning songs are memories of the origin of spinning songs when you were actually creating the cloth.
Most music was performed, as we say, whistle as you work. Also it was performed in a participatory way, so there was no distinction between those who create the music and those who listen to it. It was the same people. The idea that we have a composer and we have a listener, so it is a purely modern invention. When does music notation begin? As soon as civilization invents writing, it invents musical notation.
The Babylonians and the Sumerians invent the first musical notation. And the first example of that is the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, 1400 BC, which nobody can unfortunately decipher. The first decipherable complete piece of music is the Seikilos song, dated 280 and found in modern-day Turkey or Anatolia. But the West in many ways splits apart from the continental mainstream when it invents staff notation, which is writing music in five lines.
A thousand years ago, in the thousand, in the thousand twenty, Italian monk or Guido invents staff notation. And life was never again the same for Western music. Why is that so important? Staff notation was a tool of church control. And through writing chants down, the church could ensure literally that monks singing at the furthest outpost of the Empire of Christendom say, "Hadrians wall in the northern extreme of England," literally sang from the same Hymn sheet. You can control what people were doing across the entirety of the Empire. And then once the Empire expands beyond the Mediterranean basin and Cortez invades Mexico in 1519, he takes notation with him. He takes manuscripts of Spanish polyphony written down as staff notation, and he teaches the Aztecs how to sing Spanish counterpoint.
And what is astonishing is that ten years after Cortez decimates the Indians in 1519 by 1530, you have Aztec musicians singing Spanish polyphony in Mexico Cathedral. So music notation becomes the sharp end of the stick of globalization and the domination of the planet. What are the consequences of music notation? Now there are various consequences to staff notation.
Many of them are frankly bad. By pinning notes down to a page almost like capturing a butterfly, you're taking a note away from the voice. You're making it very precise. If you look at the way most people speak or sing, the pitch slides. It fluctuates. It doesn't stay. Still notation freezes a note. It becomes rather cold and mechanical. It also freezes music as an object, which is actually quite counterintuitive. Music isn't an object. It's an activity. It's a thing you do, like dancing or jogging. But once you turn it into an object, you create a devotion between the composer of the object and those who merely mechanically reproduce it, the performer.
And tradition becomes frozen into a museum, an imaginary museum of musical works. And if you compare that to what's done, say, in the Carnatic tradition or the Hindustani tradition of India, music there is an organic and evolving oral tradition which is handed down from guru to disciple, where a disciple doesn't mechanically reproduce a work. They creatively improvise around the idea of the work.
Part 2, the universality of music. How is music fractal in nature? One of the surprises is that music is fractal in its nature. It's as fractal as a universe, which is to say that a galaxy has the same shape as a brain cell. The universe exhibits self-similarity at rising orders of magnitude. Just as music does, music is the art of repetition. You have notes on the bar.
You have bars repeated in a phrase. You have phrases in a section in the work and so on added in a phonetum. And this is extraordinary because this music draws this capacity from the nature of sound or noise itself. You can take a spectrograph of noise, which is a way of representing noise through waveforms.
The waveforms exhibit self-similarity, however much you focus it. So if you blow up a detail of the waveform, it looks the same. In the same way as a coastline or a cloud is fractal. So the noise of nature, the sound of the wind softening through the grass or the ripples of water, we enjoy this sound. It's pleasant. It's fractal. And music has the same structure as nature, as natural noise in this respect. And this makes music really perfectly natural. And it's a much more interesting way of regarding the relationship between music and the cosmos, and the rather old-fashioned myth of the harmony of the spheres, or universal harmony. So the ancients, the Greeks and the Chinese, and the Sumerians believe that music mirrors the cosmos because it represents the same harmonic proportions, which you see in the intervals. So fifths and octaves and fourths, the acoustic ratios are natural in that respect.
So Copernicus thought that the planets orbited in musical proportions. That's the old-fashioned view of music's universality. I think the fractal theory is much more interesting, and it plugs in much more dramatically into the letters findings in astronomy and in the analysis of musical structure. Is music inherently human? Once you widen the lens as widely as possible, you see the big picture of where sapient music comes from, the cosmic joke, the irony, is that humans aren't very musical at all compared to how naturally musical birds and whales are. And we know this because we evolved along the Ape line, and apes, compared to birds, are not musical. How can I say that? Birds have vocal learning. They can creatively learn new songs. Apes can't do that.
They are confined to the cause they're born with. Insects can pulse together in rhythm, they have a sense of rhythm. Some birds have a sense of rhythm, and apes don't have that. So it's very odd that humans evolved from apes who are not musical, but humans evolved from music again from the ground up from scratch. So humans are the great synthesizers. I think it's a reason why, although human music is innate and universal, it's also learned. And it's also a reason why humans have always been haunted by an nostalgia for birds songs. We hear birds and the trees, and this gives us a sense of inadequacy because birdsong is natural and human music is not.
What humans brought to the table is that where the great synthesizers, we put together the rhythms of insects, the melody of birds, the gestural, the gesturality of apes. We also reflect the fractal structure of the cosmos, but what we brought to it was the very human drives of emotions and indeed the finite quality of human life. That the fact that we die, I think, haunts us, and the idea of the limit is one of the horizons or boundary conditions of human music.
So whilst the elements of music might still be there in the future once humans are gone, so fractal structure and the hierarchical quality of musical structure, without human emotions or the finite of the human life span, it wouldn't be what I call music. What does all human music have in common? So when NASA sent a Golden Record aboard Voyager 40 years ago, this suggested a very interesting thought experiment because NASA stock the record with diverse examples of human music, for instance, a Bach, Vandenberg, and Stravinsky, Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Good", Pan Pipes from the Solomon Islands, Court music, Gamelan from Java. If we imagine aliens opened this in a billion years, will they be able to extrapolate some common denominator, something fundamentally human, and the assortment of Earth music? This begs the question, what do they have in common? I think what they do have in common, even for an alien, is that sapiens are flatlanders. We inhabit a very narrow band of perceptual space. We can't hear as low as whales.
We can't hear as high as bats. Our songs aren't as long as whale songs, which can be 23 hours long. The aren't as fast as a pippy-strel bat song, which can be as short as a single wing beat. What they will see, though, is a lot of commonality between sapiens music and animal music. Both are hierarchical, as to say that we repeat at rising levels as do birds and whales. That might strike aliens as interesting, and they might say, well, actually, this is not so different from animal music.
But they will recognize sapiens for perhaps having this walking meter, which goes back to Australopithecus, which seems four million years ago, we have a rhythm of walking, whereas whales have a much more fluid rhythm of floating through their own medium. Just as birdsong is as jerky as the motions of a bird. So each species, bird, whale and sapiens, reflects the kind of motion that their bodies pursue in their environments. I think that would be apparent to aliens.
Is music universal across cultures? So the question of, is music a universal language an interesting one, because on the surface, every culture in the world, though it values music, has different kinds of scales and harmonies. But you can say that there is a music instinct that we're all born for a capacity for music, which is an expression of express through an ability, which is innate, to recognize rhythm, to beat in time, to rhythm, to recognize melody, to recall a melody. So this universality then changes that the second the culture gets its hooks into a child.
It actually matters whether you bounce your baby in rhythms of two or three beats. And the kind of rhythm the baby will grow up to enjoy. It matters to the baby, the kind of melodies you sing to the child. Babies born in the west prefer certain kind of tuning systems to those born in, say, Indonesia. Another aspect of this universality is that we all share a vocabulary of basic emotions, sadness, happiness, anger, fear, and so on. And you could say that this goes to the structure of the human brain, which is layered.
So the cultural specificity of the brain is due to the neocortex, the most evolved, the most advanced part, which is occupied with learning patterns and experiences. The deeper you dive into the human brain, the more universal one's propensity for music and for emotion goes. If you start with the brainstem, our oldest layer, this is what the simplest organisms have. Brainstems flinch to reflexes in sound, so shocks and loud bangs will trigger the brainstem reflex.
The next layer up, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure, whether a sound is pleasant or unpleasant. This is a reptilian brain. The mammalian brain, the amygdala, is where emotions happen, sadness, happiness, anger, fear. And the most modern layer of neocortex is the point where you process patterns and the complexities of music. So as a rule, the deeper you dive into the brain, the more universal music is. Does music migrate between cultures? So one of the interesting facts about sapiens, so everywhere sapiens travels in the world, he takes music with them. So when Cortez goes to South America to Mexico, he brings Spanish counterpoint.
When the English go to North America, they bring Puritan hymchunes. When the Victorian mission of Christians go to Africa, they again bring Christian hymchunes, which is why most African national anthems sound like Christian hymchunes. Going back to the Silk Road, everywhere the people take their caravans laden with spices or with food, they bring instruments like lutes or violins. They also bring melodies. If you watch what happens to the violin and the lute which I invented in Central Asia, they travel to China, they travel to Japan, they travel to India, they travel to the Middle East.
They eventually travel to Germany and Spain and through there into Central Europe. Everywhere the lute goes, it will change its name. If you look at Lisbon in 1520, 10% of the population of Lisbon was African. And the Africans brought African dances such as chaconas and zarabandas, which will eventually find their way into the Johann Sebastian Bach dance music. So there's even an African cargo in the German composers Baroque compositions.
Once music, or just like cricket, is enculturated by other people, it becomes naturalized. And who is to say that once the Aztec Indians have absorbed the Spanish counterpoint, it's no longer Indian. It becomes Indianized. In a similar way to, and even more dramatically, that Japan has a tradition where every New Year's Eve, they perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And in Japanese eyes, this may sound incredible. Beethoven is a Japanese composer. Why is that? Beethoven but also Mozart and Schubert resonates with a Japanese sensibility for etiquette or formality and respect for tradition. So what Japan is getting from Beethoven isn't necessarily the same thing that we're getting from Beethoven. So Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which for us is very individualistic. For Japanese culture is expressing the opposite ethos of social togetherness and extinction of the ego. It's a much more Zen quality. What is the difference between Western and Eastern music?
A major difference between the West and shall we say the East is that the West has the problem with nature or sonic nature being the sound of the trees or the wind. And we conceptually distinguish notes from sounds. If you look at an image of Confucius, the great Chinese sage, he's typically portrayed playing a zither called a chin in Chinese. It's a flat harp. And Confucius plays this under an apricot tree. And there was a tradition of viewing the very delicate sounds of the zither of the chin as melding into the sounds of the wind and the bamboo and the grass and the water. There was no distinction between music and nature. It's more natural, you could say.
And the West is by the same token rather unnatural. And this goes right back as far as you'd like to go. So one of the great monuments of Chinese civilization are the Marquis Yi of Zeng bells, discovered in 1978. He was the Marquis Yi of Zen. He was a warlord who died in 433 BC. And his tomb contained an extraordinary thing, 65 bronze bells. And what these bells show is that more than 2000 years ago, Chinese acoustic science was infinitely superior to Western acoustics. The kind of acoustic partials that a bell generates are so complex, it can't be captured arithmetically. Which is why we don't have bells in Western music, we exile bells to church towers.
Only the Chinese worked out how to play bells. The understood sound, understood a sonority. And this sensibility for natural sound, it permeates all of Chinese and Japanese music. And the West has lost that. Western music was one of many civilizations. And if anything, he was on the back foot compared to the more advanced musical cultures happening in China, in India, in the Middle East. And then what happens next through globalization is the takeover of the planet.
Because of music notation, that what goes round comes round. And what we see now is that the West has been colonized by two tidal waves flowing across the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans. African music, jazz and rock has become the lingua franca of Western music in American Europe. In a similar way, the most popular band in the world is BTS, K-pop. And the West is re-educated about sound. What misconceptions do Westerners have about music? We in the West have tended to have a misconception that history and music is a history of works or compositions. And a history of composers, people who wrote these works.
This tends to reduce music to an object, into an exhibit in an imaginary museum. It also overvalues of all of the composers, compared to most people who are innately musical. So in some ways, you need to take music away from the musicians and give it back to the people. The West has a misconception that music is in the hands of geniuses who receive their inspiration from a divine authority. And then when God dies, as it were, in the 19th century, they turn the composer themselves into a divine figure with divine authority.
This authority extends to every note enshrined in the score. And this then met the role of a performer into simply reproducing what the great Bach with the great Beethoven in their divine wisdom legislates. But actually, because of that, we can have a pretty good idea of exactly how a Beethoven snot would have sounded in 1800. Such was the authority of this divine figure.
But the more you get away from the authority of the composer when you drift eastwards or southwards in world history, the less you can be sure about what the composer would have wanted a few centuries ago. Part 3, The Brain on Music. What effect does music have on our brains? What makes human music so distinctive is our link between sound and motion, which is due to the connections in the human brain between the motor regions controlling our motion, and the regions controlling hearing and sound, the auditory cortex.
Birds, as a rule, don't have that link with the possible exception of sulfur-crested cockatoos. So as long as you want to go back, there is this link between rhythm and motion. If you rock a baby to a particular rhythm that baby will come to like that particular rhythm, we also love to imitate rhythm, and that's due to the existence of mirror neurons in our brains.
So when the brain sees an action, a physical action in somebody else, you don't have to move to experience that motion in your brain because the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically. We've always had an instinctive faculty to imitate. We call it mimicry. And we see that in all walks of life, yawns are contagious if I see you yawning on your back, but also emotions are contagious. If you're sad, I instinctively cleave to your sadness.
I mirror it. I emote with you. And that's the same with music. When I feel sad, when I hear a sad song, my body, my mirror neurons are instinctively sympathizing, mimicking, mirroring, the human sadness encoded in that sad song. Another vivid example of emotional contagion, which is related to our mirror neurons vibrating sympathetically to the perception of somebody else moving, I once attended a concert with my infant toddler. And there were a thousand toddlers all jumping up and down instinctively to the sound of the orchestra playing the lone ranger. Now they had never heard the lone ranger before.
It's the William Tell Overture show by Rossini. But they had an instinctive response to that rhythm. And we're born for that. And even when you do an experiment on babies who aren't sitting on their parents' knees, you could perhaps argue that these two parents, while prompting their children to jump up and down, they do the same thing.
So it's within the baby, not within the adult. Why do we get the chills when listening to music? There's an extreme reaction to music which has been called the chills or frisson or the sublime. There are moments in music which are so intense, and they're often triggered by breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity.
They're different for every person. It's interesting because you have the same parts of the brain which respond to that as response to fear, which is why the chills give you goosebumps or piloerection, the hairs on your skin naturally stand on end, like when you're getting goosebumps. But you enjoy this fear, and it's very strange.
One of the definitions of musical aesthetics is that you learn to take the danger out of extreme experience. I may have the same experience when we get on a fairground ride or when we're watching a volcanic eruption, the safety of an observation platform. It's almost as if music is violence without the danger or the natural sublime without the danger. Are there any connections between evolution and music? Darwin was the first to observe that emotion had an adaptive role in the field, that animals and people, they experience emotion in relation to goals which helped them survive. So happiness is when you achieve a goal, anger is when the goal is blocked.
Sadness is when you lose a loved one. Fear is the most archetypal emotion. When you're exposed to a threat from a snake, you have an instinctive response to either a freeze or to fight or to flee. And music is full of similar responses. Music is made of patterns, and patterns can either be allowed to run the course that can be frustrated through shocks. And when we hear a shock in music, it can be a bang or the interruption of a pattern. That engages the same faculties in our brain as danger out in the field.
Of course, nobody dies in music. This is only a derived effect of that. But this is why we think that music is able to express emotion in a very visceral way. And emotions are also processed at different levels of the brain, starting with the brain stem, which flinches two shocks, and then the reptile brain, the basal ganglia, responds to pleasure or displeasure.
The mammalian amygdala responds to emotions, happiness, sadness, and the neocortex processes emotions through pattern. So when you're listening to music, it's a kind of mental time travel. You really are, when you're absorbed in a work, you're traveling back through layer upon layer of your brain, almost biologically, which is why I call music a sort of umbilical cord back to mother nature. It's mental time travel. How does creating music rewire our brain? The astonishing fact is musical training rewires the brain.
Most of us are right-brained. If we train a musician, they become left-brain. They hear music through the same temporal lobe which processes language, which makes sense because complex music is as complex as language. There are so many skills which fall out of the discipline of learning to play an instrument. You learn discipline. You learn how to practice, how to organize your time. You learn how to work together in a team. To play in orchestra is team-building. You learn how to pay attention. You learn how to focus on sounds. These are all highly transferable skills. What benefits can music have on mental health?
Appreciating music purely as a form of relaxation or entertainment does a massive disservice to all the things that music helps you with. Let's listen. Music can bring people together. The biggest draw to mental health is loneliness. You don't have to actively make music with somebody else. Just listen to music, plugs you into a social network because every note of music is formed of social conventions.
Music lowers stress by reducing cortisol. It gives you pleasure, makes you happy by flooding the brain with neurotransmitters like dopamine. Music is an excellent way of tagging memories of remembering the past. Music is a fantastic way of expressing your deepest emotions and your identity which can't be captured by language. Why is that? Because music is far too precise for words to capture what's going on.
There's a reason why teenagers imprint their taste in music with songs they learn at that time because music has always come to define identity of who you are. All these things increase your mental health and ultimately music becomes a mode of mindfulness of contemplation. It's not purely relaxing because there's too much going on when you're listening and the word relaxation gives a sense of passivity whereas to listen is a very active and creative activity. Can music have a negative effect on the brain?
Music of course can also harm the brain. It can be militarized as we know from examples of Guantanamo Bay when the army plays certain kinds of music to inmates. As a rule, any sound you dislike can harm you. So I may be into metal but you might not be. So if I play metals very loudly that will increase your stress levels. And similarly, much as we know about the health benefits of music, you have to be extremely cautious in how you prescribe it clinically.
So for instance, Alzheimer's patients don't do well listening to baroque music. It's too repetitive for them. And certain conditions respond better to softer music or to music with greater variety If you're suffering from depression, then you don't want to hear a kind of music which reinforces that condition. So it's fine to argue for music to be a prescribed drug but you have to educate the doctors in the kinds of music to prescribe. Part 4, the future of music. Will music ever become homogenized? It's a possibility that with this incredible ubiquity and accessibility of music through the internet that eventually all our music will become homogenized into a single thing, into a grey homogeneous object. I don't think that will happen for one very important reason. Every artist wants to be distinctive.
There's a competitive drive which forces people to always turn their back on fashion and create something new. That's always been the way. A second reason is that with the proliferation of genres, there are thousands and thousands of genres and some genres. Music has always been an extraordinary tool to express human identity. As long as people have an identity and are different, they will create music to reflect their personality.
So I think there's no danger of music becoming homogenized. What might the future of music look like? If you were born in Beethoven's time, it would be lucky if you heard a symphony twice in your lifetime, whereas today, it's as accessible as running water, we're drowning in music. The future of music, how can you predict it? I think one of my caveats is that, given that we've had music for at least a million years, it will be foolish to be pessimistic about its future. We might worry about the next decade, the next century, but this is only a pinprick, you know, in the great scale of things. But I would forecast two main developments. One is that music will become ever more instrumentalized or to have a function. I could often imagine somebody prescribing and injecting you with the exactly the right kind of sound to treat a condition, depression, or some other kind of emotional disorder. It'll be bespoke, as bespoke as anything else in life would be.
My other prediction would be an ever greater integration with technology. Now, we see that already accelerated under COVID. COVID has served to accelerate a cultural change, and we see that in the extraordinary role of the Internet as a way of taking music away from musicians, giving it to normal people. So through various digital stages and platforms, we can both create music in our homes and to share it. And we're regaining the participatory condition of music, which was the norm thousands of years ago, where we all had an equal stake in creating and enjoying music.
The other side of that is physical connectivity or technology that necessarily have to have an implant because you're holding an iPhone in your hand. You're already a symbiotic relationship between yourself and the music you're consuming, typically K-pop, which is almost evolved out of the interaction between consumers and digital culture.
We shouldn't forget that technology is not sinister. That all musical instruments are tools. The original bone flute was a piece of technology. It serves to extend human capacity. It extends the voice or the fingers. So Watson Beat, which is a computer program which allows musicians to create the sonic possibilities. That's no different really to any other musical instrument which extends our, in this case, imagination.
But once the instrument or the machine has thrown up these possibilities, it's the role of the human subject to make decisions, to pass, to edit, to select, to shape all the things that the computer has given us. So I see that relationship between humans and machines and ever more integrated and ever more imaginative in the future. And I would like to add one rather bold prediction is that in the future, music may not be just about sound. It may involve tastes and colors and our bodies and frequencies currently not available to our quite narrow spectrum of hearing.
We'll be able to amplify to extend our hearing range. I think it's fair to say that just as, you know, watch Tochausen or Beyonce is achieving today, it would have been completely out of the can, out of the comprehension of a Mozart or a Beethoven a few centuries ago. We can't even begin to imagine the possibilities of waiting us in the future.
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