The Evolution of Imagination, one of the latest attempts to grapple with it, focuses on improvisation, characterising this as spontaneous creativity and arguing it is the fundamental process behind the artistic and scientific imagination.

It’s hard to disagree with philosopher Stephen Asma’s view that imagination is good for us, individually and as a society. But should we really let it “off the leash” to run free in the uncertain future we face? Donald Trump’s impromptu tweets suggest such behaviour is best avoided for the sake of world peace.

While Asma does cover politics towards the end of his book, his touchstone is jazz improvisation. Having played with some great musicians, Asma has fascinating insights into how improvisation works. He also weaves together ideas from Eastern and Western philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, archaeology and everyday life, often drawing on his experiences of having lived in a variety of cultures.

On Eastern philosophy, I can only take Asma at his word. But in my own area of expertise – prehistoric archaeology and human evolution – I fear his imagination has run riot. My main worry is Asma’s allegiance to the idea of the “triune brain”: the notion that our brain evolved in distinct layers, beginning with an ancient, motivational “reptilian” brain to which evolution added an “emotional” brain (the limbic system) and then a “rational” brain (the neocortex).

As Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made and other books make clear, neuroscientists have long rejected the idea that emotion and rationality can be easily separated in the brain, while accepting that evolution has involved reorganisation of core circuits, rather than simply the addition of new layers.

Asma believes that early humans (by which I think he means any prior to Homo sapiens, although the Neanderthals are left hanging) lived by their emotional brain alone. They relied on “hot cognition”, their imaginations unconstrained by rationality, the “cold cognition” provided by the expanded neocortex of modern humans. Those early hotheads were unable to control their imaginations, leaving minds fixed in what we would see as a dream-like state.

If so, one wonders how Homo erectus and the rest could have searched for carcasses on the savannah, made symmetrical stone tools or built social alliances. Also, how much cortex does it take before cold cognition kicks in? Early humans had relatively large neocortices compared with other primates, as do living non-human primates compared with other animals. The idea that imagination evolved from the dream-like and uncontrolled to being domesticated by the rationality provided by an expanded neocortex is imaginative but lacking in credibility.

“Evolution has reorganised core circuits in the brain, rather than simply adding new layers”

Equally unsubstantiated is Asma’s idea that spoken language might have evolved around the time of the first Upper Palaeolithic cave painting, serving to decouple hot from cold cognition. And the evidence simply doesn’t support his assertion that children’s artistic development recapitulates that of graphic art in the archaeological record.

Elsewhere, Asma’s imagination seems to fail him. Drawing on his experience of safaris in Tanzania and Rwanda, he suggests that early life on the savannah would have been one of constant fear. My own imagination suggests those who grew up there most probably loved it and would have feared our urban environment.

Whether it deals with the role of imagination in education, politics or jazz, much of Asma’s book is compelling. So while I profoundly disagree with his view of how the imagination evolved, I greatly appreciate how his imagination fuelled and helped shape my own, and I feel much better for that.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Evolution, jazzed up”

“Music seems to be imitating itself. Each note appears to be derived from what went before”

JEAN CLOTTES has been looking at and thinking about the cave paintings of ice age Europe for almost half a century. I can’t imagine anyone has a greater knowledge about the paintings, carvings, sculptures and their associated archaeology than this great prehistorian.

It’s not just greater knowledge, but an emotional response: I’ve seen tears come into his eyes as he was describing a painting that he must have seen and talked about many times before, and that still tugged at his heart as much as his brain. Clottes’s enormous depth of learning and affection emanate from every page of this book, originally published as Pourquoi l’art préhistorique?

The presumably deliberate mistranslation of the French title by the publishers into What is Paleolithic Art? is misleading to the reader and does Clottes a disservice. Within the first few pages Clottes is quite clear that his intention is to address the “why” not the “what” about cave art. Indeed, the book assumes that the reader already has a grasp of what the art is about.

Without any preliminary description of the art, Clottes immediately steps into the multitude of interpretations that have been proposed since the first engraved objects were discovered 150 years ago. He does so partly because he is adamant that there can be no description untouched by theory: what one believes influences what one sees, whether on the cave wall or in the ground.

Clottes swiftly takes the reader through the many ways of interpreting and decoding the art. There’s the art for art’s sake idea, the totemic, hunting, fertility, sympathetic or destructive magic approaches, and the structuralist one. His favourite is the shamanic theory, one that he eventually shows to embrace elements of all the other interpretations.

After reflecting on the risks and contributions of ethnography – the study of peoples and customs from the point of view of those being studied – Clottes leads us on a journey to rock art sites in the Americas, Australia, Africa and Asia. This embraces not just the art but also the indigenous people who maintain the traditional knowledge about and ways of behaving around it.

Emphasising the need to see the art first-hand and in its landscape setting, Clottes recounts his own journeys to the sites and his encounters, surprises and shocks en route. We follow as he develops his understanding, not just about the rock art but about the commonalities of the mindset of the hunter-gatherers who create it. He finishes this journey with the lovely understatement that his “rich and multiple experiences had a far from negligible influence” on his way of thinking about ice age art in Europe.

Then, about midway, Clottes’s book takes us to his home territory – the caves of France and Spain – to look at the paintings through the mindset of a hunter-gatherer. That mindset, he argues, has four major components that cannot be easily separated: the “interconnection of species”; the “fluidity of the living world” (animals can transform into humans and vice versa); the unequivocal acceptance of the “complexity” of the world (for example, the Sami have 600 words relating to reindeer, referring to a particular age, sex, colour, antlers, fur and so on); and “permeability”, the constant intervention of spirits and supernatural forces in the world. It is this mindset, so very different from Western mindsets but traces of which, he claims, can be found across the globe with specific cultural variations, that will allow us to better understand the people of the Palaeolithic.

As Clottes takes us into the painted caves, he explains how that mindset helps us understand not only what was painted and engraved, but why certain caves and walls were selected and others ignored, why the natural relief, cracks and crevices were of such importance, and the true significance of many facets which have often been seen as merely incidental.

“The experience of viewing cave art in situ would have been quite different to seeing glossy pictures“

For instance, we are all familiar with hand stencils in which pigment is blown over a hand placed on the rock face, which Clottes interprets as a means to create contact with the spirit world. But we are less familiar with the meandering finger traces and the signs of people touching the wall – practices that Clottes saw all over the world and interpreted as a way to connect with the power contained within. For him, they are as informative as spectacular images of bison and horse. Similarly, many caves have fragments of bone and animal teeth inserted into crevices and the ground, which Clottes compares not only to gestures made by recent hunter-gatherers to contact the spirit world but with how Orthodox Jews deposit rolled pieces of paper into gaps between the stones of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Throughout the book, and no doubt his life, Clottes wrestles with the frustration of not knowing the myths that must have lain behind the paintings: how and where can one draw the limits of acceptable scientific interpretation?

He provides three examples for which it might be possible to, as he says, “detect the transposition of a myth in which the broad strokes become apparent, even if the details will forever remain beyond our grasp”. The first is a composite image of a woman and a bison, painted on a tapering hanging rock in Chauvet cave. Then there is the Lascaux painting of a spindly bird-headed man, falling backwards with an erect penis, faced with a charging bison whose guts are spilling from its wounded belly, with what appears to be a broken barbed spear and a stick on which a bird is perched. Last is a young ibex giving birth, turning its head to peer at a bird perched on its hindquarters, a theme repeated in several carvings from the French Pyrenees.

For each, Clottes provides intriguing interpretations, drawing not just on the imagery but on their locations, which would have made the experience of viewing these images in situ quite different from seeing them as glossy pictures in a book – as most of us do today.

He brings his fascinating book to a close by explaining how the clues within the paintings, engravings, carvings and caves point to a shamanic type of religion, one with similarities to those that he found among more recent hunter-gatherers across the world. This is an inclusive theory, one that pulls together elements of the earlier theories.

It rests on almost half a century of looking and learning by Clottes and concludes with the modesty only great minds possess: “At the end of the day, if we have only very few certainties, by exercising caution and building on what is known and what is probable, I feel that we are able to approach these distant hunters of the Paleolithic with somewhat greater success.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “The shadows on the wall”

We come into the world ready to sing, play and appreciate music (Image: Franck Courtès/Agence VU/Camera Press)

Music makes us smarter because it lets us practise living with uncertainty, argues Jay Schulkin in Reflections on the Musical Mind

FOR neuroscientist Jay Schulkin, music provides an enjoyable but at times testing workout for the brain, much as sport does for the body. Indeed, for him, listening to music is a microcosm of living one’s life.

In Reflections on the Musical Mind, he reminds us that we live in a world of uncertainty, always needing to predict the future with imprecise, or absent, information. So evolution has honed us to make judgements based on aesthetics, and to find slight deviations from the familiar – especially in music – both interesting and attractive.

A few minutes of listening to music allows us to exercise the gamut of our mental machinery, none of which evolved for music itself, says Schulkin. Indeed, the “musical mind” at times appears to be no more than a fortuitous accident; a by-product of neurotransmitters, neural circuits, vocal apparatus and motor actions that evolved for unrelated roles.

Schulkin claims that because cognitive science has taken such huge strides over recent decades, it is now capable of producing an understanding of music. That is open to debate, but neuroscience has undoubtedly made enormous progress. This comes not just from using brain-scanning techniques such as fMRI to probe the specific functions of parts of the brain, but also from our enhanced understanding of the role of what Schulkin calls information molecules – chemicals that regulate a vast array of our mental and physical activities. They are ancient molecules, found in many species, but they play a key role in our relatively recently evolved musical sensibilities.

“Ancient molecules, such as oxytocin, play a key role in relatively recently evolved musical sensibilities”

Take dopamine. When we expect to hear music, and also while hearing it, this neurotransmitter is released in regions of the brain critically involved in the organisation of action: increased dopamine boosts our ability to attend to important matters and disregard trivia. As such, by affecting the flow of dopamine, music prepares us for intelligent action in the world.

Conversely, if our basal ganglia (a group of nuclei located at the base of the forebrain and linked with voluntary motor actions) are deprived of dopamine, we get worse at discerning rhythms.

The role of oxytocin is equally intriguing. It is sometimes known as the “love hormone” because it regulates sexual arousal, pair bonding and maternal behaviour. Listening to music releases oxytocin. People with Williams syndrome, which results in excessive sociality, typically have an especially strong love of music and high levels of circulating oxytocin.

There is still much to learn about the nexus between musicality, sociality and oxytocin, along with the role of the other information molecules, but Schulkin’s clever exposition of our current understanding is one of the most fascinating among his reflections on music.

“Reflections”, by the way, is a most appropriate word to include in the book title because Schulkin does not profess any new theory for the origins or function of music, and his themes have been well worked elsewhere over the years. And recently there has been a flurry of books about music and the brain, including This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin, Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel.

That said, Schulkin has lots to add, and provides a largely easy-to-read overview with an excellent bibliography for those wanting to explore in depth. His treatments are unassailable and absorbing – even if we are familiar with the arguments. He highlights the fundamentally social context for the evolution and role of music, the deep connections between music, memory and movement, and the plasticity of the brain in response to music. And he reminds us about the extraordinariness of the manner in which we arrive in the world ready to sing, play and appreciate music.

Schulkin has plenty of novel thoughts, too. I especially liked his comparisons between music and science. For instance, he notes that having a feel for music is as critical to being a good musician as having a feel for a chosen area is to a good researcher. He also compares musical instruments to telescopes and microscopes, in that they all expand human capabilities. And he argues there is no difference between music and science in terms of creativity, experimental sensibility and problem-solving.

“There is no difference between music and science in terms of creativity and experimental sensibility”

Some of Schulkin’s asides are not only entertaining but thought-provoking. When he writes about how we enjoy creating variations on musical themes, he draws parallels with what we do with place names, such as New York – adding the “New” to “York” – or with food, such as when a parent adds a familiar ketchup to help introduce new food to their kids.

Schulkin also poses interesting questions, such as, do birds enjoy singing as much as music-making humans do? And he leaves us with some dilemmas: if music’s origin and role is fundamentally about social interaction, why are listening and making music so enjoyable when we do them alone?

That has been part of my experience: Mozart must have generated plenty of oxytocin in my brain while writing this review, because I am willing to forgive Schulkin and his editor for many unintelligible sentences, and for far too much repetition. A more concise work would have better delivered what I found to be the take-home message: music makes us more intelligent in the world because it enables us to practice living with uncertainty.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The accidental musicians”