How many times have you heard someone saying ‘music saved my life’? How many musicians have declared ‘without music I would be dead’? It could be also true of any form of art, artistic creation and relating to art have saved us many times, cured us of many aches and unbalances.
Going to a lecture by Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist who directs the USC Brain and Creativity Institute, was so fascinating and made me think about many more things than I could explain here but, in particular, it made me understand something about why we are creative animals. Damasio is someone who has immensely participated into our understanding of consciousness, a field which was reserved to philosophers in the past but which is now the playground of neurobiologists.
Having consciousness is our advantage and our curse as it allows us to make our condition better but also allows us to know when pleasure is missing or impossible to reach.
The brain is an organ which is constantly occupied with balance and regulation, homeostasis as biologists call it. In other words we constantly need to regulate certain parameters, to automatically adapt to new situations in order to survive.
But the consciousness is also not separated from the body, it is completely anchored in the brain, even in the more primitive part of the brain, the brain stem, making our consciousness deeply concerned by life regulation, and this is where he proposed something I had never thought about in these terms: life is difficult, this regulation is complex and hard to reach, and biological regulation may be good at solving automatically problems like heartbeat variation or other bodily functions but not good at all at solving troubles regarding social problems and human relationships.
So this is when our conscious impulse intervenes, we invent solutions, we invent art, music and literature and painting, in order to make life possible in a system where life was not: our consciousness is taking care of problems that biology cannot take care of.
Being conscious animals, we have higher goals than other animals and than our biology mechanisms are able to achieve, we want well-being and happiness that nature cannot necessarily provide; so we trick biology, we are spending our time at doing things that are not immediately essential to our survival, as we could survive miserable all our life (not too miserable though), and we spend time creating or listening, reading, observing others’ creations.
So if we apply this to music, a form of art everyone or almost can relate to, music becomes an extension of our consciousness outside of our body, a system of regulation we have created outside of our brain, to make life more bearable and reduce the suffering. Music is part of what Damasio calls the socio-cultural homeostasis that includes all our culture. It soothes the pain when the body itself can’t, and so far we are the only species doing it.