For more writing from Discover blogger Carl Zimmer, see his new
ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. When
Charles Darwin listened to music, he asked himself, what is it
for? Philosophers had pondered the mathematical beauty of music
for thousands of years, but Darwin wondered about its connection
to biology. Humans make music just as beavers build dams and
peacocks show off their tail feathers, he reasoned, so music
must have evolved. What drove its evolution was hard for him to
divine, however. “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of
producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to
man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be
ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed,”
Darwin wrote in 1871. Today a number of scientists are trying to
solve that mystery by looking at music right where we experience
it: in the brain. They are scanning the activity that music
triggers in our neurons and observing how music alters our
biochemistry. But fa