Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man

Praise for Mark Changizi and Harnessed

“The theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi has a dazzling ability to change the way we think by providing compelling answers to big, important questions that had never occurred to most of us in the first place.”

—Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist and co-author of SuperCooperators

“In this remarkable book, Mark Changizi performs surgery on the mind, revealing nothing less than the origins of the abilities that make us human. And his conclusions are both provocative and surprising: The uniquely human facility with language and the universal human propensity to create and enjoy music came about not through biological adaptation, but through cultural evolution. Human culture harnessed what our brains already did well—perceiving physical events and human movements. Changizi’s carefully constructed evolutionary explanation of language and music promises to revolutionize thinking about what separates us from apes.”

—Dan Simons, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla

“Among the abundant theories on the origins of language and music, Mark Changizi’s book is unique in proposing a very precise hypothesis that leads to many testable and surprisingly accurate predictions. Bold, speculative, highly stimulating and entertaining, this book might hold a key to one of humanity’s longstanding mysteries.”

—Stanislas Dehaene, author of The Number Sense and Reading in the Brain

“Mark Changizi is always daring and original, and his theory of how we learned language and music from nature is truly unique, opening up our ears and eyes to a whole new vision of humanity.”

—David Rothenberg, author of Survival of the Beautiful and Why Birds Sing

“Harnessed is one of the most interesting and original books I’ve read in the past few years. Changizi is an excellent writer, a compelling theorist, and relentless and ingenious in seeking evidence to back his theories. His approach to music is at once quite different from other work in the field and yet accessible and intelligible. He has answers where others don’t even know how to ask questions. What I like about his approach is that he shows how a brain that has been shaped in certain ways has latent capabilities that can be harnessed to tasks that are different from those that shaped it. That is an important idea and is certain to yield further insight.”

—William Benzon, author of Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture

“A rich tapestry of hypotheses about why language and music sound the way they do.”

—Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, and author of Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind