limitations are quite appropriate,however,for the relationship between
brain and musical experience,because it is only at such general levels
that one has good scientific information about the relationship.
Music is psychologically a human phenomenon.To identify the vocal
behavior of other species as musical is,after all,a human activity.We
humans recognize and categorize the songs of birds and whales and the
calls of gibbons and howler monkeys as songs and calls.We create the
vocabulary for describing these acoustic events,and it is we who group
them as musical.Music thus begins as an activity of the human mind,and
to learn more about its biological roots it is appropriate to examine adap-
tations in other species that are related to this mental activity.
Human musical experience is neurologically unique,a fact discovered
a few decades ago with the finding that the brains of professional musi-
cians were organized somewhat differently from those of nonmusicians.
In both groups the neural correlates of the experience are lateralized,
that is,represented to different extents in the two cerebral hemispheres.
In professionals,focal neural activation by music occurs in the left “lan-
guage”hemisphere of the neocortex,whereas in nonmusicians compa-
rable foci are in the right hemisphere.To me,discoveries of this kind
(reviewed by Falk,this volume),as well as the overall evidence on the
localization of cognitive processes in the human brain,epitomize the
peculiarly human nature of music as a cognitive activity,a way of
knowing reality.Its lateralized localization in our brains is evidence of
its cognitive dimension.Nothing like this degree of lateralization is
known in the brain in other mammals with respect to any behavior.Com-
parable lateralization is known only in songbirds and is one of the
reasons why birds are useful animal models for understanding the
biology of music.
Lateralization of music in the human brain reinforces a natural incli-
nation to distinguish between musical expression and musical experi-
ence.There is no real question that we share with other mammals the
basic bodily structures used to vocalize and generate musical sounds and
thus share with other species many aspects of our capacity for musical
expression.We are evidently unique,however,in the way we know (i.e.,
“cognize”) and understand sounds as musical.This is not really an
unusual statement.All species are unique in some ways;that is what dis-
tinguishes them from one another.For humans,one way lies in the nature
of our knowledge of the external world;that is,the nature of human cog-
nitive capacity,or intelligence.That this includes the world of music is
evidenced by the way our neocortex is lateralized when we experience
music.Let me emphasize the point:the biological basis of our musical
experience is related to the biology of human intelligence;that is,to our
capacity to know the external world.178 Harry Jerison