Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Aniruddh Patel

2020; Elsevier BV; Volume: 30; Issue: 23 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2020.09.065

1879-0445

Aniruddh D. Patel,

Diverse Musicological Studies

Aniruddh Patel is Professor of Psychology at Tufts University, USA, where he studies the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of music. He studied Biology at the University of Virginia (1983–1987) and did his PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard (1996) with Edward O. Wilson and Evan Balaban. He then joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, a basic research institute led by the Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, where Patel was a Senior Fellow before joining Tufts. He is the author of Music, Language, and the Brain and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. A member of CARTA (a scholarly organization studying human origins), Patel is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, where he is writing a book on the evolution of human musicality. What led you to study the biology of music? My path was circuitous. In college my studies of biology (largely focused on cell biology) felt completely separate from my deep connection to music. Then in my senior year I took courses in animal behavior and evolution, and I was hooked. Late one night, walking alone through campus, the idea that I should try to study music as a biologist came to me like a flash. This led me to read Promethean Fire, which argued that biology and culture are intertwined in human evolution. One of the authors, Edward O. Wilson, came to speak at my university that year, and I asked to talk with him. A couple of years later I was his graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. From there, things got non-linear because I had absolutely no idea how to actually do research on music and evolution (this was before music neuroscience had emerged as a field), and also because I had broad interests in animal behavior and evolution that swept me in other directions. Where did these interests take you? Wilson’s lab was an incredibly exciting center for research on ants, so I dove into that topic, doing lab studies of ant behavior at Harvard and fieldwork in northern Australia on ant community ecology. I loved the work (especially the fieldwork), but my interest in music kept resurfacing. In my third year I sat down and wrote to Wilson from the Outback, saying that, though I had a clear path to finishing a dissertation on ants, my mind kept returning to music and questions about its underlying biology. A few weeks later, I got his reply, for which I’ll be forever grateful. He said that I had to be true to my interests, so I should “come back to Harvard and we’d give it a shot”. How did you get from ants to music? I spent my first months back grappling with how to study the biology of music. This was around 1990, and human brain imaging was in its infancy and wasn’t being applied to music, so that wasn’t an option. Fortunately, Wilson gave me a lot of freedom and encouraged me to reach out to researchers whose work was relevant. I quickly realized that much more was known about the biology of language than of music. Given that both were complex, sound-based human communication systems, I focused on learning about language and the brain to find concepts and methods that I could apply to music. This led me to researchers who studied speech and language at other institutions, including MIT, Tufts, Haskins Labs, and The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. These people became mentors or colleagues in my thesis work on language–music relations in the brain. I was also fortunate to do research with one of the founders of music neuroscience, Isabelle Peretz, based in Montreal. Back in my home department, I was lucky to be co-advised by a wonderfully open-minded junior faculty member doing pioneering studies of avian behavioral neuroscience, Evan Balaban, who did his PhD with Peter Marler and Donald Griffin. So would you say that you were an oddball within your department? Yes, certainly, given that everyone else studied organismal biology and evolution, not cognition and human brains. But I felt deeply rooted there due to my passion for evolutionary biology. I took courses with Wilson, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and others; it was an amazing place to be a grad student. I also loved having an office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), where I was nestled among fossil insects and nearly fossilized professors, like Frank Carpenter, an insect paleontologist born in 1902 who had been E.O. Wilson’s advisor. Frank was an incredibly kind man who always wore a rumpled suit to work (although he had retired decades ago) and who fed squirrels that climbed to his window on the fourth floor of the museum, two windows down from me. We had lunch occasionally, and he would show me huge fossil dragonfly wings and guide me in his own gentle way. I still remember his telling me that long-term contentment as a scientist has more to do with enjoying your day-to-day work than with whether or not it brings you acclaim. His advice was part of why I allowed myself time to enjoy learning about topics that fascinated me but that had no obvious connection to my dissertation. As a result, some of my best intellectual experiences in grad school had nothing to do with biology, such as conversations about ethnomusicology with Kay Shelemay in the Music Department and lectures on poetry by Helen Vendler in the English Department. Of course, later I realized that what I learned from these remarkable scholars was relevant to my project of exploring how language and music are related in the mind. And while I was an oddball in the MCZ, to my delight I’ve just learned that I’m not the first biologist from there to study human music. In a fascinating book called Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening by Rachel Mundy, I found that I had a forerunner at the MCZ. Jesse Walter Fewkes was a zoology PhD student of Alexander Agassiz in the MCZ in the 1880s and later became an anthropologist who was the first to use phonograph recordings in research on Native American music. What are the most surprising things that you have discovered? The neural relationships my colleagues and I found between the processing of language and music were quite surprising at the time (late 1990s) and helped fertilize a line of comparative music–language research that continues to grow across a number of labs. Happily, this research not only teaches us about human cognition, it also informs clinical research on the use of music-based training to enhance language processing in people with language disorders. But what surprised me most came later, when I began to explore differences and similarities in how humans and other animals process aspects of music, such as rhythm and melody. Darwin thought that our sense of musical rhythm and beat was rooted in ancient widespread aspects of animal biology, but modern work suggests otherwise. Others have shown that non-human primates don’t seem to process beat the way that we do. My colleagues and I found that parrots and humans show striking similarities in musical beat processing, which is surprising since parrots are more closely related to dinosaurs than to humans. I think this is because parrots share a key trait with us that we don’t share with other primates, namely complex vocal learning. While this work on rhythm has drawn attention due to the charisma of dancing parrots (such as Snowball — a true rock star with a personality to match), equally surprising results came from research on animal melody perception. My colleagues and I found that humans and songbirds perceive melodies in very different ways. These kinds of findings have made it clear to me that exploring the similarities and differences between human and non-human music perception is a powerful way to study the evolution of human musicality, and to discover new things about animal cognition. Do you have any suggestions for new faculty members starting their careers? Success in academia requires tremendous specialization, but beware of the intellectual inertia that can result from a narrow focus on certain ideas and methods. To spark your imagination, seek out programs that support new collaborations between researchers in different departments. (It’s thanks to such a program at Tufts that I started collaborating with a wonderful avian neurobiologist, Mimi Kao, to study rhythm perception in songbirds.) Also apply for sabbatical fellowships that bring you shoulder to shoulder with people from different disciplines. A stellar example is the Radcliffe Fellows program, where an idea that changes the way you think about your research could come from an anthropologist, astronomer, or composer. And do you have any advice for graduate students? In his Nobel Prize speech, Gerald Edelman said that “science is imagination in the service of the verifiable truth”. I love this definition. Unlike the vast majority of definitions, it emphasizes the role of imagination in the scientific enterprise. One thing that I learned at his remarkable institute was that imagination needs long stretches of uninterrupted time to flourish. I think that this is true whether you’re a novelist or a scientist. So this is what I try to do: carve out three hours for research in the morning before checking e-mails, the phone, the news, and so on. (Today’s technology makes this hard.) I encourage students to try this, starting with one day a week and then increasing if possible. On weeks when I manage to do this for days in a row, I notice an expansion of my scientific creativity. The other thing that I tell students is to think of hypotheses as tools, not pets. I often see grad students who are comfortable testing hypotheses proposed by others but are reluctant to formulate testable hypotheses of their own for fear of being wrong and having their hypothesis get ‘hurt’. That’s like mountain climbers who won’t ascend a peak because they don’t want their tools to get damaged. If your hypothesis proves to be wrong, that’s fine as long as testing it leads to learning something new and interesting. Climbers replace broken tools with new and improved ones, and you can replace a broken hypothesis with a better one. So, hypothesize and get climbing.