“Music is a universal language, and needs not be translated. With it, soul speaks to soul.”
Berthold Auerbach
We now enter the core section of the book: The Evolutionary Impact of Music on the Brain. Chapter 3 explores the brain’s innate capacities for music, skills so fundamental and beneficial that they have become embedded within our genetic inheritance. The first stop is the musical lives of babies. Studies of the youngest among us reveal that hearing is significantly more developed than vision at birth, an infant’s earliest smiles are in response to mother’s voice, and babies are able to recognize and respond to rhythm and melody. Continuing on, we come across several medical conditions that reveal built-in brain capabilities for music by causing overexpressions or underexpressions of music. The chapter then turns to the relationship between music and language. Pop psychology tends to separate the two entirely, with music residing on one side of the brain and language on the other. While there is a grain of truth in that, both are highly complex operations that activate both sides of the brain. Ultimately, the relationship of music and language hinges on the brain’s response to the nature of sound itself.