The Science of Discworld II

him another look, and it was the look of a person with no sense of humour who nevertheless suspects that there’s some joke somewhere that is on them.
    â€˜Why should you help us?’ she said. ‘You told me to consume your underthings!’
    â€˜Well, it’s not as though this world is important enough to fight over,’ said Ridcully.
    â€˜One of you isn’t here,’ said the Queen. ‘Where is the stupid one?’
    â€˜Rincewind?’ said the Archchancellor, with an innocent air that would not have fooled any human for a moment. ‘Oh, he’s doing pretty much the same thing, you know. Helping people imagine things. Which, I think, is what you want.’

TWENTY-FOUR
THE EXTENDED PRESENT
    A RT ? I T LOOKS SUPERFLUOUS . Few of the stories we tell about human evolution, the Homo sapiens bit, see music or art as being integral to the process. Oh, it often comes in as a kind of epiphenomenon, as evidence of how far we’d got: ‘Just look at those wonderful cave paintings, statuettes, polished jewellery and ornaments! That shows that our brain was bigger/better/more loving/nearer to that of the Lecturer in Recent Runes …’ But art has not been portrayed as a necessary part of the evolution that made us what we are; nor has music.
    So why are Burnt Stick Man and Red Hands Man dabbling in art, and why does Rincewind want to encourage them?
    We’ve been told the story of The Naked Ape doing sex, we’ve had Gossiping Apes and Privileged Apes, various kinds of apes becoming intelligent on the seashore or running down gazelles on the savannah. We’ve had lots of development-of-intelligence stories culminating in Einstein; we have given you the privilege/puberty ritual/selection story that culminates in Eichmann and Obedience to Authority; but we have not presented a version of our evolution whose culmination is Fats Waller, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or even Richard Feynman on the bongo drums.
    Well, now we will.
    Music is an important part of most people’s lives, and this is continually reinforced by film and television. Background music is constantlyinforming us of imminent screen events, of tension and release, of characters’ thoughts and, particularly, of their emotional states. It is very difficult for anyone brought up in the muzak environment of the twentieth century to imagine what the ‘primitive’ state of human musical sense can have been.
    When we listen to the music of far peoples, of ‘primitive’ tribes, we have to appreciate that their music has had as long to develop as Beethoven, and much longer than jazz. Like the amoeba or the chimpanzee, their music is contemporary with us, not ancestral, though it sounds primitive, just as they look primitive. And we wonder whether we are listening for the right things in the right way. It is tempting to think that popular music, going for instant appeal, might illuminate whatever inner structure of our brains ‘fits’, and is satisfied by, a musical theme. If we were orthodox geneticists, we might have said ‘genes for music’ there. But we didn’t.
    In recent years, neuroscientists have developed techniques that allow us to look at what brains do when we carry out various actions. In particular, they reveal which bits of brain are active when we enjoy music. At the moment, with the terribly poor spatial and temporal resolution that we get from MRI and PET scans, all we can see is that music excites the right side of the brain. If we are familiar with the music, then the brain’s memory-regions turn on, and if we analyse it or try to pick up the lyrics, then the verbal-analysis parts light up. And opera picks up both of them, which could be why Jack likes it: he enjoys having his brain put through a blender.
    Our affinity with music starts early. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that if we hear music in the womb, then it can affect our later musical preferences. Psychologists play music to babies as soon as they start kicking, and have discovered that they can categorise it, like we adults do, and into the same categories. If we play them Mozart, they stop kicking for a bit, about fifteen minutes; then they start kicking again, perhaps with some relation to the rhythm. The evidence is claimed, but it isn’t very persuasive. If we then continue with a different bit of Mozart, or Haydn or Beethoven, then the kicking pauses, but it resumes