Re: Innate responses to sound (Jan Schnupp )


Subject: Re: Innate responses to sound
From:    Jan Schnupp  <jan@xxxxxxxx>
Date:    Thu, 22 May 2008 10:10:30 +0100

Hi Ross, I would agree with Brian that you may find it very hard to find much, particularly on humans, that you can root properly in hard science. There are of course dozens and dozens of papers from numerous labs which have looked at the consequences of manipulations or early auditory or multisensory experience in various laboratory animals, (Merzenich, Kilgard, Grothe, Knudsen, Withington, King, to name but a few - apologies to the many of our colleagues who I should also have mentioned here...) and they mostly find that, surprise surprise, early experience can influence auditory development substantially, changing many things from psychophysical performance to cortical map organization and right down to the "neural cabling" in the brainstem and midbrain. My worry with your proposed thesis would be that you may have a terribly hard time just to pin down what you mean by "innate". All hearing is innate because if you are born without ears you don't have any, but all hearing is also environmental because how the innate potential will unfold critically depends on countless environmental variables, many of which you cannot easily control or observe. When I started as a grad student, Andy King advised me to try to stay clear of nature vs nurture type debates. It was the first of many good pieces of advice I got from him. Everything is ultimately nature AND nurture, and trying to tease these two apart often ends up as a slippery kind of exercise which is not really that insightful. I hope I don't sound too discouraging. I think asking why people, or other animals, react to particular sounds the way they do could be very worthwhile, but if you say a priori that anything that is not "essentially and demonstrably innate" does not interest you then you might be painting yourself into a corner. Best wishes, Jan 2008/5/22 Ross Rochford <digiology@xxxxxxxx>: > > Hi, > > > > > > I am considering for my thesis an exploration of innate responses to sounds, that is, unlearned and presumably having evolved to serve some function. The idea of the evolutionary lag where we have evolved to adapt to an environment that existed thousands of years ago interests me, I wonder what the implications of this are for how we respond to sound and how music affects our mood. > > > > I am looking for papers (or books) on responses to sound that are likely to be innate in humans. Also papers that discuss the evolutionary origins of our responses to sound and music and how our past environment (and tasks therein, e.g. hunting) have shaped them. I am hoping for the kinds of explanations that have been proposed for arachnophobia, that a fear of spiders had survival advantage as we may have evolved among poisonous spiders. > > While researching, I found a suggestion that our response to nails on a blackboard is because of the similarity (of its spectrum) to the warning call of macaque monkeys. Although I don't believe this is an adequate explanation (the warning calls don't produce the same response as nails on a blackboard in humans), it is similar to what I am looking for. > > > > > > Any suggestions on where to start are greatly appreciated. > > > > > > > > Ross -- Dr Jan Schnupp University of Oxford Dept. of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics Sherrington Building - Parks Road Oxford OX1 3PT - UK +44-1865-272513 www.oxfordhearing.com


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Electrical Engineering Dept., Columbia University