And, more specifically, what if, just as writing looks like nature, these two auditory capabilities—speech and music—have come to sound like nature, and thereby to harness ancient, highly efficient brain mechanisms that were never intended for language or music?
But what in nature might speech and music sound like? That’s the topic of the book. Before getting into speech and music, however, we must discuss in more detail the general nature-harnessing approach that I believe explains writing, speech, and music—and explains who we are today. And that’s the topic of Chapter 1.
Chapter 1
Nature-Harnessing
Deep Secrets
It isn’t nice to tell secrets in front of others. I recently had to teach this rule to my six-year-old daughter, who, in the presence of other people, would demand that I bend down and hear a whispered message. To my surprise, she was genuinely perplexed about why communicating a message only to me, in the presence of others, could possibly be a bad thing.
Upon thinking about it, I began wondering: What exactly is so bad about telling secrets? There are circumstances in which telling secrets would appear to be the appropriate thing to do. For example, if Dick and Jane are over for a formal dinner at my house, and in order to spare my wife some embarrassment I lean over and whisper, “Honey, there’s chocolate on your forehead,” is that wrong? Wouldn’t it be worse to say nothing, or to say it out loud (or in a published book)?
The problem with telling secrets is not that there aren’t things worth telling others discreetly. Rather, the problem is that when we see someone telling a secret, it taps into a little program in our head that goes, “That must be very important information—possibly about me. Why else keep it from me?” The problem with secrets is that we’re all a bit paranoid, and afflicted with a bad case of “me, me, me!” The result is that secrets get imbued with weighty importance, when they mostly concern such sundries as foreheads and sweets.
Not only do we tend to go cuckoo over the covert, attributing importance to unimportant secrets, but we also have the predisposition to see secrets where there are none at all. Our propensity to see nonexistent secrets has engendered some of the most enduring human preoccupations: mysticism and the occult. For example, astrology, palm reading, and numerology are “founded” upon supposed secret meanings encoded in the patterns found in stars, handprints, and numbers, respectively. Practitioners of mysticism believe themselves to be the deepest people on Earth, dedicated to the ancient secrets of the universe: God, life, death, happiness, soul, character, and so on. Astrological horoscopes don’t predict the morning commute, and palm readers never say with eerie omniscience, “Don’t eat the yogurt in your fridge. It’s moldy!” The secrets are not only deep, but often personaclass="underline" they’re about ourselves and our role in the universe, playing on our need for more “me, me, me.”
Even those who pride themselves on not believing in mystical gobbledygook often still enjoy a good dose of deep ancient secrets in fiction, which is why Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code did so well. In that novel secret codes revealed secret codes about other secret codes, and they all held a meaning so deep that people were willing to slay and self-flay for it.
Secrets excite us. But stars, palms, and numbers hide no deep, ancient secrets. (Or at any rate, not the sort mystics are searching for.) And stories like the The Da Vinci Code are, well, just stories. What a shame our real world can’t be as romantic as Dan Brown’s fictional one, or the equally fictional one mystics believe they live in. Bummer.
But what if there are deep and ancient secrets? Real ones, not gobbledygook? And what if these secrets are about you and your place in the universe? What if mystics and fiction readers have been looking for deep secrets in all the wrong places?
That’s where this book enters the story. Have I got some deep secrets for you! And as you will see, these ancient secrets are much closer than you may have thought; they’re hiding in plain sight. In fact, as I write these very words I am making use of three of the deepest, ancientest secret codes there are. What are these secrets? Let me give you a hint. They concern the three activities I’m engaged in right now: I am reading (my own writing), listening to speech (an episode of bad TV to keep me awake at 2 a.m.), and listening to music (the melodramatic score of the TV show). My ability to do these three things relies on a code so secret few have even realized there’s a code at all.
“Code, schmode!” you might respond. “How lame is that, Changizi? You tantalize me with deep secrets, and yet all you give me are run-of-the-mill writing, speech, and music! Where are the ancient scrolls, Holy Grails, secret passwords, and forgotten alchemy recipes?”
Ah, but . . . I respond. The secrets underlying writing, speech, and music are immensely deep ones. These secret codes are so powerful they can turn apes into humans. As a matter of fact, they did turn apes into humans. That’s deeper than anything any mystic ever told you!
And it is also almost certainly truer. So shove that newspaper horoscope and that Dan Brown novel off your coffee table, and make room for this nonfiction story about the deepest ancient secret codes we know of . . . the ones that created us.
To help get us started, in the following section I will give you a hint about the nature of these codes. As we will see, the secret behind the codes is . . . nature itself.
Mother Nature’s Code
If one of our last nonspeaking ancestors were found frozen in a glacier and revived, we imagine that he would find our world jarringly alien. His brain was built for nature, not for the freak-of-nature modern landscape we humans inhabit. The concrete, the cars, the clothes, the constant jabbering—it’s enough to make a hominid jump into the nearest freezer and hope to be reawakened after the apocalypse.
But would modernity really seem so frightening to our guest? Although cities and savannas would appear to have little in common, might there actually be deep similarities? Could civilization have retained vestiges of nature, easing our ancestor’s transition? And if so, why should it—why would civilization care about being a hospitable host to the freshly thawed really-really-great-uncle?
The answer is that, although we were born into civilization rather than melted into it, from an evolutionary point of view we’re an uncivilized beast dropped into cultured society. We prefer nature as much as the next hominid, in the sense that our brains work best when their computationally sophisticated mechanisms can be applied as evolution intended. Living in modern civilization is not what our bodies and brains were selected to be good at.
Perhaps, then, civilization shaped itself for us, not for thawed-out time travelers. Perhaps civilization possesses signature features of nature in order to squeeze every drop of evolution’s genius out of our brains for use in the modern world. Perhaps we’re hospitable to our ancestor because we have been hospitable to ourselves.