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Your Brain's Architecture Includes Evolved Music Modules
Consider your body’s architecture. You have many physical body parts, external and internal—hands, feet, lungs, heart, etc. You can easily identify numerous sub-parts as well: each of your hands has fingers, fingernails, knuckles, a thumb, palm, muscles, ligaments. Every normal human is born with these physical internal and external body parts.
The same applies to your brain’s architecture. Even though you can’t see your brain’s modules, they’re as real, and as different from each other, as your hands and your liver. And, like the rest of your body parts, you have these brain structures at birth.
All other humans on the planet are born with the same brain modules as you, just as they’re born with the same internal and external body parts that make all of us identifiably human. And that means, as discussed later in this chapter, humans show remarkable similarities in behaviour in every culture globally.
Brain modules or faculties vary slightly from individual to individual, just as other body parts do. The feet you were born with, for example, have the same basic structure and anatomy as everybody else’s feet. While easily identifiable as “feet,” your feet vary slightly from everyone else’s; they’re identifiably yours.
Same with the mental faculties or modules you were born with. While each one performs the same specialized function in every human brain, your modules vary slightly from everyone else’s. But, like your feet, your mental modules still perform in a recognizably human way. That’s why human culture shows so much similarity everywhere in the world. And that includes musical similarity, discussed in more detail later in this chapter.