"As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once. Compared with vision, language, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged"

The above is a paragraph from "How The Mind Works" by neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

I know music does us real good at times, and it treats the soul and whatever, but that only lasts for like 2 minutes, you know, the effect or whatevs that.

What y'all guys think about music as in spiritually/mentally speaking...

Mental note: never party with neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

On a survival level as a species I guess he's right but, I'm reminded of a quote from the MC5 documentary. Rob Tyner is talking about a documentary he saw about a tribe from Indonesia where they chew these drugs and stay up all night and dance in the fire and beat on drums, that kind of stuff. The anthopologist asks one of the guys, why do you do all this partying? And the guy from the tribe says "of course we have parties - we want our souls to be happy. If our souls weren't happy, they would leave us and go back to the Gods and we would DIE."

What's wrong with pleasure? Does that not inspire food for thought?
I can't imagine a dance party without music, or church for that matter (don't have to be dancing).

And I don't see how music is that far separated from the neurologist's highly valued "language" anyway. Music is expressive even when it is instrumental.

I think he oughta look at that video where they play old jazz music to some seniors in a vegetative state, and examine how they respond. Certainly, science has undervalued music.

Anyway.. I say the same thing about sports.

Music is never useless and has always served several important needs in the history of mankind, from tribal gatherings and celebrations to soothing spiritual music.

This being said, I think people these days no longer listen to music the way previous generations (70s, especially 80s and 90s) used to, i.e they listen to music with their headphones or in their cars but people who turn up the volume of their home stereo system are rare these days. Everybody´s going for that thin, limited sound it seems.

Except for my DJ friends when they practice at home.

Music/rhythm came before writing or math, in a time when necessity was king, so obviously somebody felt the need for it. Doesn't it build or stimulate neurons? I'd think that's important, expanding the capacity of the mind.