Music, the Social Mind, and Language

Working paper of that title now up at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/43655788/Music_the_Social_Mind_and_Language

It's PDFs of the presentation I delivered at the Thirty-first LACUS Forum, July 27 – 31, 2004, in Chicago, at the University of Illinois.

ABSTRACT: To understand how music works, we must think of it as primarily a means of coordinating interactions among a group of music-makers. If we think of rhythm as the foundation of music, then we can think of musical interaction as a being grounded in coupled oscillation, which has been studied in the case of firefly blinking and in the case of audience applause. Thought of in this way, music-making links several nervous systems together into a single dynamical system. Following the research of William Condon, I will argue that such coupling seems to be necessary for language as well. In particular, I will suggest that such coupling is necessary for the so-called Theory of Mind Module to operate. Without that, we are unable to regard one another as appropriate speech partners and so experience language as elaborate noise.

Introduction 2
Brain to Brain Communication 2
Neural Live in the World 4
Music and Coupling 6
Collective Decisions 12
Interpersonal Synch and TOM 12
Vygotsky: Inner Speech and the Neural Self 15
History and Evolution 19