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Originally Posted by Burning Down
Wow, the correlation between music and evolution was the topic of discussion in my Psychology of Music class this morning. I'll come back to this thread once I've read through it.
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Looking forwards to this in particular.
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Originally Posted by jackhammer
It is far too late in the night for me to write a huge post regarding this subject but the simple fact that there is a specific area in our brains that produces and/or digests music is enough for me to regard it as a massively important part of evolution.
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Music is processed by many regions of our brain at once. Some of these regions overlap with the regions that process language and speech, which is where the bit about "piggybacking on language" came about.
Appendix A of the book provides a visual aid and lists the following involved regions of the brain.
Motor cortex: movement, foot-tapping, dancing, playing instruments.
Prefrontal cortex: Creation of expectations, violation and satisfaction of expectations set by music.
Cerebellum: Movement as covered by the motor cortex, also involved in emotional reactions to music.
Visual cortex: Involved in reading music, or watching a performer's movements (including one's own).
Auditory cortex: The first stages of listening to sounds, the perception and analysis of tones.
Sensory cortex: Tactile feedback from playing an instrument and dancing.
Nucleus Accumbens: Emotional reactions to music.
Amygdala: emotional reactions to music.
Hippocampus: memory for music, musical experiences, and context.
As you can see, music is processed far and wide throughout the brain, and all of these regions are responsible for performing many other operations in the mind, so in that manner, I don't think it's fair to say that music has its own developed region.
The book spends many chapters going in to greater depth about all of these sections and what tasks they perform in regards to music, and I regret that I can't just copy them out for the information of anybody interested. I couldn't even find a PDF of the book, I typed all this out manually, haha.