Music as a Spandrel
Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker calls music a “spandrel.” Spandrels are the spaces between arches of a traditional cathedral, an architectural necessity that became useful in their own right as spaces for decoration and painting. Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould coined the term in evolutionary biology to mean one useful adaptation that arose as an unintended result of another. Pinker argues that the human capacity for music arose out of the necessary brain structures and wiring needed to create language. In other words, music is a by-product of language evolution that has taken on its own significance.
< Back to latest Music and Health
