Mother–infant attachment,musical idol worship,and the origins of human behaviour

Introduction

Idol worship (idolatry) and superstition were constant and recurring features of human behaviour throughout history (e.g. Sheehan, 2006) – presumably, in all cultures (e.g. Bacci, 2005). Today, news media are dominated by stories about pop stars, famous actors, revered sportspeople, beloved royals, and their countless admiring fans.

The pervasiveness of idol worship raises interesting questions. What exactly do people get out of it? What are the costs and benefits? Why do humans so often invest so much time and energy into idol worship without any clearly tangible reward? The aim of this paper is to consider different possible explanations. In particular, I will ask how idol worship may be based on the special relationship between a mother and an infant, from the infant perspective.

The paper begins with a survey of literature on idol worship, both musical and otherwise. I then consider possible existing evolutionary explanations. There follows an account of mother-infant behaviours and their possible relevance for transcendental emotions in music and religion, and theories of the origin of language and consciousness.

Evolutionary origins of idol worship

The simplest evolutionary foundations of idol worship may be found in everyday behaviours of human and non-human animals. Many animals live in groups, because staying together reduces the chance of being killed by predators, and enables individuals to support each other in the search for food (Lima, 1995). An optimal group size is one that optimises the probability of survival and reproduction for individuals. The evolutionary question then becomes how best to coordinate behaviours within such a group – again, to optimise survival and reproduction.

Dominance hierarchies within groups result from competition among individuals for limited resources – food for survival, and mates for reproduction. Acquiring such resources increases the reproductive fitness of individuals. The division of individuals into leaders and followers in both humans and non-human animals is a strategy to solve social coordination problems and reduce conflict and violence within groups (van Vugt et al., 2008). That can explain why some human personalities are more likely to be perceived as leaders or leaderlike – a trait that correlates positively with extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness, and negatively with neuroticism (Judge et al., 2002).

In primates and other animals, the position of an individual in the dominance hierarchy is mainly determined by duel, the result of which depends mainly on size and strength. The outcome may depend on complex situational factors such as the relative amount each dueller has invested in the resource being defended and/or the relative value of the resource for the duellers (e.g. Tricarico & Gherardi, 2007). The outcome can also depend on skill (Briffa & Lane, 2017) and kin relationships (Plourde, 2010). In humans, dominance relationships depend additionally on wealth (possession of prestige goods) and office. There may also be a gender asymmetry: among heterosexuals, dominant behaviours by males increase their sexual attractiveness for females but not vice-versa (Sadalla et al., 1987). In humans, the situation is especially complex: in a group of high-school children, ‘sociometric popularity’ based on cooperative behaviour can be distinguished from ‘consensual popularity’ based on being interesting and wearing fashionable clothes (de Bruyn & van den Boom, 2005). For both humans and non-human animals, a high position in the pecking order has the advantage of greater resources (food, sexual partners), but there are also costs, including the constant risk of challenge from lower levels. Alpha males (males at the top of dominance hierarchies) must be more vigilant than other conspecifics to maintain their position, which increases their energy needs and metabolic rate (Muehlenbein & Watts, 2010).

A strong dominance hierarchy may increase the fitness of an entire group by increasing their chances of success in competition with other groups for limited resources, or in violent conflicts – in addition to the effect of dominance hierarchies created by pairwise interactions between individuals. However, clear evidence for such an additional effect is lacking. Although altruistic behaviours among kin may promote group survival (Hamilton, 1964), a human group whose members blindly obey an idolised leader is not necessarily more likely to win a battle or prevail in a non-violent competitive situation than a more democratically organised group. The decisions made by an autocratic leader may suffer from a lack of informed collegial feedback and discussion. The initial military successes of the Nazis were primarily due to an innovative approach (‘Blitzkrieg’) and ended in Russia due to limited personal and economic resources (Bartov, 1992). Collins (2008) argued that to understand violence we must instead consider the details of the situation in which emotions of fear, anger and excitement interact.

The evolutionary theory of dominant versus submissive behaviour accounts for one part of the phenomenon of idol worship, but leaves another part unexplained. The theory can hardly explain parasocial behaviours in which fans worship their idols, feel empathy for them, or identify with them. Nor can it explain the altered states of consciousness experienced by fans when interacting with idols (or imagining such interactions).

Brown (2000, abstract) argued that

Music is a powerful device for promoting group identity, cognition, coordination and catharsis, and it has a host of design features that reflect its strong role in supporting cooperation and synchronisation at the group level, features such as the capacity for pitch blending and the use of isometric rhythms.

Kirschner and Tomasello (2010) came to a similar conclusion: active group music-making among children promotes social bonding and group cohesion. Music may even have evolved as a means of evaluating the ability of another group to work together with one’s own group to defeat or suppress a third group (Hagen & Bryant, 2003).

Approaches of this kind may explain aspects of musical idol worship, but open questions remain. Why did music promote social cohesion, originally? What emotional or motivational mechanism was originally responsible for these behaviours? Why do musically typical patterns of pitch, time and movement have their specific emotional effects – and not different or even diametrically opposite effects?

The mother–infant relationship

A promising place to look for the origin of a specifically human behaviour is among pre-existing human behaviours that could have played a causal role. This principle applies to any animal whose behaviour gradually changes to improve its reproductive success: one behavioural change may lead to another, within the same species. For example, successive generations of birds will build larger nests if that increases the number or fitness of offspring, for whatever reason (Jose et al., 1998).

A similar connection may exist between modern human idol worship and the devotion that ancestral infants felt in the presence of their mothers, fathers, or other carers. This devotion may be specific to humans because of the unique fragility (helplessness, altriciality) of human infants: unable to cling to or follow their carers, they developed unique behavioural strategies to maximise their chances of survival, of which devotion is one. In an evolutionary approach, we might expect human infants to devote themselves to carers in a similar way that religious people devote themselves to god(s). This prediction, like any prediction based on evolutionary theory, is probabilistic (Scriven, 1959); given the diversity of biologically determined personalities and early human environments, there are bound to be exceptions.

Such a theory would be consistent with the remarkable ability of human infants to express and recognise diverse emotions (Kasari & Sigman, 1996). Their faces and behaviours can express interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt and fear, as recognised by untrained adults (Izard et al., 1980). These signals help parents respond appropriately to their infants’ needs. Infants may be unable to reflect on their experience in the way that adults can, but the biological foundations of their basic emotions are presumably similar to those of adults. That may explain the emotions that fans feel in the presence of their idols – while contemplating them, or during their performances. The origin of such behaviours may ultimately lie in the instinctive, unreflected, uncompromised devotion of infants toward their carer(s), upon whom their life depends.

Given that emotion in everyday discourse is understood to be subjective and experiential, and given that the human infant lacks reflective awareness – a uniquely human phenomenon that emerges gradually during childhood – we cannot empirically observe emotions ‘experienced’ by the infant beyond procedures for measuring physiological correlates (mainly for arousal) or observing facial expressions (also for valence). However, it may now be possible to safely and non-invasively test whether the physiological correlates of infant devotion are similar to those of adult idol worship by searching for neural correlates of religious devotion in the infant brain (McNamara, 2009).

Prelinguistic or infantile emotions may be triggered and re-experienced later in life by similar stimulus configurations. If memory is defined as the ‘psychological function of preserving information, involving the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval’ (Coleman, 2014), it does not involve reflective consciousness and may be largely independent of it; ‘the hippocampus mediates rapid associative learning with and without consciousness in humans and animals, for long-term and short-term retention’ (Schacter, 1989, abstract).

The duration of human memory is highly variable and infantile memory is no exception (Rovee-Collier & Haye, 1987). Evidence for long durations may be found in psychological research on attachment. The foundations for healthy attachment are laid in infancy and may affect all future relationships (Ainsworth, 1989). The mutually interacting attachment behaviours of the infant and carer promote infant survival by motivating the carer to stay close to the infant, attend to its needs, monitor its physical and psychological state, and keep it out of danger (Glocker et al., 2009). A child will seek proximity to a familiar caregiver, especially if it senses danger such as an unfriendly person, a predator, or impending bad weather; the caregiver protects and supports the child, creating a safe base from which it can explore and play, which is necessary for its cognitive, sensorimotor, social and cultural development (Bowlby, 2008). A child needs at least one such relationship if it is to develop successfully, socially and emotionally; poor early attachment has negative long-term effects.

The interaction between a child and its carer operates in both directions: the carer is sensitive to the physical and emotional state of the child and vice-versa (Trevarthen, 1985). Both carer and child are motivated to engage in attachment behaviours to a degree that depends on the situation. Mehr and Krasnow’s (2017) point that ‘parental behaviours are thus expected to have been subject to strong selection pressures’ (p. 677) applies also to infant behaviours. Given that the carer is obviously in a better position to solve everyday problems than the child, the best survival strategy for the child is to trust the carer and motivate her/him to care for it, which can explain why infants are so sensitive to maternal emotional states (Hatzinikolaou & Murray, 2010). The infant needs somehow to understand what the carer wants, and then – as far as reasonably possible – to do that or at least not impede the carer.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, behaviours that affect chances of survival in life-and-death situations are generally adaptive. If some infants choose behaviour A in a given situation and survive, and others choose behaviour B and die, behaviour A may be passed to future generations. In this scenario, behaviour A probably involves successful empathic interaction with a parent or carer; additional options may be available to older, more independent children. This line of argument is consistent with high child mortality rates in hunter-gatherer societies (Hill et al., 2007).

An important aspect of maternal motivation is the infant schema of Lorenz (1943). Babies and children with round faces and large eyes (relative to the size of their head) are perceived as cute, which motivates adults to look after them and interact with them in a way that helps them develop cognitively, emotionally, and socially (Saint-Georges et al., 2013). Because attachment behaviour is a two-way phenomenon, and because of the extreme asymmetry of the infant-carer dyad, the process works differently in each direction. The analogous inverse of the infant schema is the mother schema (Parncutt, 2009): the mother as perceived by the foetus or infant, along with associated perceptions, emotions, cognitions, and behaviours. When infants perceive carers as friendly and caring, and can easily understand the signals they are sending out (e.g. via the exaggerated contours of motherese: Fernald & Simon, 1984), the mother schema is activated, and the infant is motivated to interact (play) with the carer. The infant schema of the mother drives maternal attachment behaviours, whereas the mother schema of the infant drives infant attachment behaviours.

The theory that music is a cultural transformation of the mother schema (Parncutt, 2009; Parncutt & Chuckrow, 2017) predicts that musically typical emotions are evoked in children and adults by stimulus patterns that resemble the mother as perceived by the foetus or infant (in motherese). More generally, we recognise emotions in music because of resemblances among music, the speaking voice, bodily gestures, facial expressions, and postures (Kivy, 1980). Similar patterns occur in both religious and musical rituals, which can account for their psychosocial functions such as mood regulation and everyday coping (Saarikallio & Erkkilä, 2007), catharsis and spiritual well-being (Wlodarczyk, 2007), maintenance of self-identity and interpersonal relationships (Hargreaves & North, 1999), distraction and entertainment (Dibben & Williamson, 2007), conflict resolution (Bergh & Sloboda, 2010), and skill development (Hallam, 2010).

When musical virtuosos seem to perform technical or emotional miracles, as reflected by words such as ‘maestro’ or ‘genius’ to describe the person, or ‘dazzling’ or ‘profound’ to describe their performance, they may be activating the mother schema in their fans more directly. The infant perceives her mother, the fan his idol, the music lover her virtuoso, and the pious worshipper his god, as all-loving, all-knowing, and/or all-powerful (or all-capable). We have no episodic memory of infancy, so we are unaware of the origin of these feelings when admiring our virtuosos, idols, or gods.

Both the mother schema and the infant schema can be activated by diverse stimulus patterns. The infant schema can be evoked by cute animals or pets (Borgi & Cirulli, 2016). An infant’s mother schema may be evoked by any adult producing motherese in a manner convincing for the infant. Evidence for this claim includes the sensitivity of infants to the details of adult faces and voice patterns (Bahrick et al., 1998), and their preference for motherese-like speech to regular adult speech, regardless of the speaker (Fernald, 1985).

An ecological approach to early psychological development

Early environmental interactions fundamentally and permanently influence brain and behaviour (Kolb & Gibb, 2011). The word ‘early’ may refer to prenatal, infant, child or adolescent interactions; for the purpose of this theory, there are no clear psychological boundaries between these stages. Physiologically, birth represents a sudden and fundamental change, but from a psychological viewpoint (perception, emotion, cognition), it does not. For this reason, and because human infants are so fragile, the first three months of life are sometimes referred to as the fourth trimester (Jennings & Edmundson, 1980).

The foetal ear begins to respond to sound at about 20 weeks’ gestation (Hepper & Shahidullah, 1994). It then begins to process invariances and variations in maternal vocalisations, becoming increasingly sensitive to pitch contours and rhythmic patterns, which thereby acquire meaning (Mastropieri & Turkewitz, 1999). A theory of the prenatal origin of music (and perhaps aspects of the origin of language and consciousness) might begin with an account of prenatal learning of internal sounds of mother’s body (voice, heart, footsteps, digestion), the development and preparation of sensory systems, and preparation for postnatal bonding. All prenatally perceptible sound and movement patterns that originate inside the mother’s body can acquire emotional meaning if they depend on the mother’s emotional state. These primitive relationships between sound and emotion might then contribute to the more specific meaning of sound/movement patterns in motherese (Parncutt, 2009).

The perceptual abilities of the foetus gradually improve as it interacts with its prenatal environment (Joseph, 2000). These abilities include discrimination, attention, and the processing of relevant environmental information. Environmental information includes ecological invariances such as typical and predictable features of the sound of the mother’s voice, heartbeat, and footstep patterns. Evolutionary theory predicts that the foetus develops auditory and proprioceptive sensitivity to maternal gesture and olfactory/gustatory indicators of maternal emotional state. All sensory modalities are involved plus corresponding emotions, cognitive processes, and the perception and production of body movements.

The theory can be understood in the broader context of J. J. Gibson’s (1979) ecological psychology. Like any animal, the foetus interacts constantly with its environment. Stimuli are attended to if they represent affordances, defined as ‘what (the environment) offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ (Gibson, 1979, p. 127). The internal sounds and movements of the mother’s body are affordances insofar as they reflect her physical and emotional state, upon which foetal (and later infant) survival depends.

The theory is consistent with E. J. Gibson’s (1969) ecological approach to perceptual learning. Perception is seen as an active, exploratory process. Meaningful information is continuously picked up as the organism interacts with its environment. Perception, motor control, and learning are overlapping parts of a single complex system. Behavioural responses and their corresponding biological foundations change continuously as the organism acquires environmental knowledge. The organism is constantly adapting to its changing social and physical environment. These points apply equally to foetuses, infants, children and adults in both human and non-human animals. In research on gesture and embodiment in music (e.g. Gritten & King, 2006), for example, all musical action and interaction is intrinsically corporal (Schiavio et al., 2014).

Transcendental emotions in music and religion

Musical emotion and religious emotion are strongly interlinked (Atkins & Schubert, 2014). A characteristic transcendental musical and religious emotion is awe – an overwhelming feeling that paradoxically combines fear (dread) in the presence of (presumably mortal) danger with admiration (veneration, wonder, reverence, respect) in the presence of a greater (powerful, majestic, grand, sublime) being, whether humanoid (authority, king, god, genius, beauty) or natural (the universe, a massive mountain). Awe generally involves ‘perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures’ (Keltner & Haidt, 2003, p. 297).

The first time a young human ‘experiences’ awe, or something akin to it, may be when the infant perceives the mother. A kind of admiration is appropriate given the mother’s status – from the infant perspective – as all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. Infantile awe is not emotion in the everyday adult sense, but a precursor of it – a proto-emotion that can be as strong and salient as adult emotion (Sroufe, 1997). The infant cannot reflect on this ‘experience’, but consciousness is not a prerequisite for learning anyway (Reber, 1989); emotion may be more important than consciousness as a co-requisite for learning (Panksepp, 2005). Combinations of stimuli that become associated with this early ‘experience’ may evoke a similar emotion when repeated later in life by a process similar to classical conditioning.

Infantile awe may be related to infanticide as practiced in ancient societies (reviewed by Mehr & Krasnow, 2017; Williamson, 1978). Adult male primates kill infants to gain sexual access to their mothers (van Schaik & Kappeler, 1997); neonaticide by human mothers may follow denial of pregnancy (Spinelli, 2001). Confronted with an angry adult, the best strategy for an infant – incapable of fight or flight – may be to freeze (Kalin et al., 1998). In this state, the infant might ‘experience’ (without reflection) awe, that is, a combination of fear and admiration in the presence of something much larger than itself. Admiration (veneration, respect) would be part of this emotional reaction given that the survival of helpless human infants always depends on their attachment to adults – even in mortally dangerous situations. But if the aim of infanticide was to increase the survival chances of stronger siblings, the best strategy for an infant might be to cry loud and long enough to demonstrate its strength and resilience (Lummaa et al., 1998).

Implications for the origin of religious emotion

Religion is a human universal, involving diverse combinations of ritual, supernatural beings, holy men and women, specific beliefs (afterlife, other worlds, magic, myths) and ethics (Segal, 2006). In the present context, two questions are of interest, First, is the human tendency to idolise group leaders psychologically related to the tendency to believe in or worship supernatural beings? Second, are both grounded in the infant–mother relationship? The following points suggest that the answer is ‘yes’ in both cases.

The evolution of human mother–infant bonding

Roughly two million years ago, the larger brain (head) and upright gait of humans led to an obstetrical dilemma (Dissanayake, 2000; Wittman & Wall, 2007). Infants that were born at an earlier gestational age than previously were more likely to survive, as were their mothers. Infants became more fragile and infant mortality increased. Over many generations, mothers and infants co-adapted, optimising their interactive behaviour to ensure optimal maternal care. This was especially important during the first few months of life, during which humans, unlike other animals, can neither locomote nor cling to adults. As attachment behaviours became increasingly important for infant survival, they were increasingly selected for.

In this evolutionary scenario, infants were more likely to survive if they had a better ‘knowledge’ in the following areas:

Infants with superior-such ‘knowledge’– developed by classical conditioning, enabling later operant conditioning – could better adjust their postnatal behaviours to elicit optimal responses from carers in life-threatening situations. A theory of this kind can explain why neonates are so sensitive to the emotional states of their mother or carer (e.g. Field et al., 1982).

This complex evolutionary development may have been crucial for the emergence of specifically human behaviours including music, language and reflective consciousness, all of which depend on human social interaction (Mead, 1934). When asking exactly why and how these specifically human traits emerged, it makes sense to consider uniquely human biological developments. Early birth leading to infant fragility is a promising candidate; it promoted new behavioural adaptations to increase the probability of infant survival (Dissanayake, 2000). The process also may also have involved early prenatal development of audition, proprioception, balance, olfaction and gustation (Piontelli et al., 2015).

Relevance for the origin of language and consciousness

Episodic foresight – the ability to imagine possible future events – is biologically similar to episodic memory (Addis et al., 2007). Both forms of ‘mental time travel’ have fitness benefits (Suddendorf, 2010); ‘natural selection cannot work on accuracy of past recollections per se, but only on what episodic memory does for present and future survival and reproduction’ (p. 99). That is why ‘episodic memory has a range of future-oriented adaptive characteristics’ (p. 104). According to Marks (1999, abstract), ‘a primary function of consciousness is the mental rehearsal of adaptive, goal-directed action through the experimental manipulation of perceptual-motor imagery’.

What might have motivated early humans to imagine the past and the future while acting in the present (Seligman et al., 2013)? The human mother–infant relationship offers a possible answer. Accidents are the leading cause of death for children, so parents must be constantly vigilant (Morrongiello et al., 2008). Parental vigilance involves not only careful observation but also the prediction of future events in novel situations. Carers must create cognitive representations of possible future situations (prospection). As gestation became shorter and human infants became increasingly fragile, their carers adapted by becoming more proficient at predicting and hence preventing potentially fatal accidents. This argument applies only to humans, with their unique combination of large brain and helpless (altricial) infants.

These considerations have interesting implications for the origin of language. Carer–infant relationships are based on gesture and vocalisation (Masataka, 2008). How might that combination, together with a larger brain and the subsequent shortening of gestation, have contributed to a larger vocabulary and more complex grammar? Human reflective language may have emerged as mothers learned to use vocalisations to control their infants (Falk, 2004). Infant survival was also promoted if the infant could successfully predict the mother’s changing physical and emotional states so as to make appropriate demands and not to create dangerous situations – a hypothesis that becomes more credible with increasing age. In this scenario, both mother and infant/child were trying to predict the future, albeit in different ways.

If improved infant–mother attachment (including carer–infant communication and carer predictive vigilance) reduced high infant mortality rates, those behaviours were passed to future generations. Other evolutionary theories of the origin of language or music are less plausible if they are associated lower rates of mortality (Parncutt & Chuckrow, 2017). Silent gestural communication between hunters (necessary to trick and trap prey) is a less likely candidate for the origin of language, because humans are omnivores and can survive without meat. Similarly, communication for the purpose of tool-making (Montagu, 1976) was less crucial for survival that the mother–infant relationship.

The evolutionary emergence of maternal foresight may have accompanied and enabled the emergence of a more general phenomenon – what Tulving (1985) termed autonoetic (self-knowing) consciousness – a ‘kind of consciousness that mediates an individual’s awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future’ (p. 1). The probability of infant survival increases if its mother or carer regularly tries to guess what the infant is about to do in the immediate future, that is, to guess its goals or intentions. Similarly, infant or child survival is promoted if the infant or child regularly tries to guess what the mother is about to do (for example, to assess what demands can reasonably be made on her attention and resources). In this way, pre-human mothers and their young children may have boot-strapped a rudimentary, implicit, mutual ‘theory of mind’ (compare to Bretherton et al., 1981; Call & Tomasello, 2008; Leslie, 1987), reflected by the simultaneous development of motherese (Fernald & Simon, 1984).

Pitch contours in motherese have reflective, lexical meanings (arousing, warning, prohibiting, eliciting attention, encouraging a turn, encouraging visual contact, encouraging joint attention, encouraging imitation, closing a turn/approving, monitoring infant state, soothing) that help the mother or carer to regulate or modulate infant behavioural–emotional states (Papoušek, 1996). Similarly, certain adult vocalisations have quasi-universal emotional meanings, analogous to corresponding facial expressions, but depending also on characteristic combinations of valence and arousal and other behaviours: cheers for achievement, laughs for amusement, growls for anger, retches for disgust, screams for fear, moans for sensual pleasure, sighs for relief, sobs for sadness, sharp inhalations for surprise (Sauter et al., 2010). Such sounds may represent the oldest associations between sound and meaning.

The mother-infant relationship combines meanings of this kind with strong motivations to engage in ‘mental time travel’ and develop a ‘theory of mind’, making it a candidate for the origin of human reflective language and even consciousness. This scenario is consistent with universal foundations of grammar such as the presence of nouns and verbs in all human languages (Langacker, 1987; motherese distinguishes between objects and actions) and the role of cooperation, reciprocal altruism and honest communication in the emergence of language (Smith, 2010; neither mother nor infant can benefit from deceiving the other).

Comparison with competing theories

Darwin’s theory of the origin of music, based on sexual partner selection, is supported by the high incidence and importance of love songs across cultures, but it is an unlikely candidate for the origin of reflective consciousness. Today, males are more interested in the physical appearance of prospective female partners than vice-versa, whereas females are more interested in the capacity of potential mates to earn money (Wiederman & Allgeier, 1992). The failure of an early human to find a partner corresponding to given criteria does not prevent reproduction (dominance hierarchies may represent a bigger hurdle), nor is this problem unique to humans. But a problematic infant–carer relationship can easily lead to the death of the infant – more so in humans than other species.

The present theory is consistent with the idea that music was selected for because it promoted social cohesion and group solidarity (Huron, 2001). The theory is more specific in confining social cohesion in the first instance to the mother-infant relationship and positing that this represents the ultimate origin of music’s power to strengthen social bonds, group identity and intragroup empathy (Clarke et al., 2015).

Prenatal psychology and mother–infant bonding cannot explain why idols are more often male and fans female. The late foetus (3rd trimester) and early infant (4th trimester) have no concept of gender; infants and toddlers learn gradually to differentiate the two sexes and associate them with stereotypical attributes (Martin et al., 2002). Although Darwin’s theory of the origin of music offers a possible explanation for male musical dominance, another explanation involves sexism in general, whose origins mix nature (inborn personality traits) with nurture (social, political, and cultural aspects; Pratto et al., 1994). A theory based on the mother–infant relationship suggests conversely that women played a more important role than men in the origin of music, language, consciousness, and human culture.

By comparison to other theories of the origin of music, a theory based on the human mother–infant relationship has the following advantages. It is founded on concrete biological facts, including the evolutionary growth in human head size, and its effect on gestation period and infant altriciality. It is also based on observable behaviours including foetal perception, foetal memory and motherese. Evolutionary arguments refer only to behaviours associated with relatively high mortality rates. The theory does not rely on abstract, poorly operationalised or unmeasurable concepts.

Predictions of the theory

The transcendental quality of musical emotion and the universal association between music and religion are predictions of the theory and not merely phenomena that are consistent with it. These and other predictions follow logically from the assumption that the mother–infant interaction is active in both directions (Murray & Trevarthen, 1986), driven simultaneously by the mother’s infant schema and the infant’s mother schema. Consider the following specific predictions:

Discussion

If these claims are true, at least in their general direction, they have interesting implications for a psychological and musicological understanding of virtuosity, talent and genius. Such concepts are always subjective – sometimes highly so. Our idolisation of the best music performers and composers clouds our ability to evaluate the quality of their individual performances and compositions. The best musicians are not necessarily those that dazzle their fans with a combination of music, appearance and behaviour, both on the stage and off it.

The theory predicts that anyone who evaluates the performance of a musician or the music of a composer – whether the evaluator be a teenage fan, eminent musicologist, music lover, critic, educator, jury member or agent – has a mother schema that can be activated by strong musical experiences or impressive performances and thereby interfere with the objective analysis of musical quality. It might therefore be interesting in a qualitative study to explore relationships between the language used by fans to describe their idols, that used by music jurors to describe brilliant performances, and that used by children to describe their parents.

The theory is consistent with the phenomenon of musical idol worship, both in general and in certain details. For example, even the most careful and reserved of critics and musicologists may exaggerate the talent, genius, or virtuosity of their idols and overlook their shortcomings.

By privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the canon of works attributed to the composer is being decimated beyond historical recognition, the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention [being] invested in his singular accomplishments [i.e. musical skills]. (Higgins, 2005, abstract)

A better awareness of the psychological nature and origins of fan worship might objectify judgments of the originality and aesthetic value of the artistic contributions of composers and performers. For another example, consider the idolisation of rebellious or anti-establishment performers. Children often admire their parents for their uniqueness or differentness and despite clear differences between them and other adults (Amato, 1994).

The theory has interesting implications for practising musicians. Ambitious young artists must consider not only their performance but also their appearance and behaviour – especially in an age of internet and social media. Musical careers may (regrettably) benefit from a kind of musical populism – presenting oneself as interesting, suffering or sexy, with the aim of activating irrational idol worship responses in fans.

The theory assumes that the average mother is more caring and dominant that the average infant, whereas the average infant is more helpless and submissive. That may not always be true. Personality is to a considerable extent inborn (Bouchard & McGue, 2003). The extent to which an infant or mother represents each of the five main personality factors (Digman, 1990: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neurosis) is partly biologically determined. Moreover, offspring (including the foetus) manipulate their parents to provide additional resources (Trivers, 1974).

These observations do not undermine the theory. The theory is probabilistic, assuming typical behaviours of mothers and infants. Some infants indeed dominate and control their mothers, and some mothers indeed adore their infants as they might adore a god, contradicting assumptions about the infant schema, the mother schema, and the interaction between them. The infant is nevertheless always small and helpless by comparison to the mother, and infant survival in ancient nomadic societies always depended on the mother–infant relationship.

Empathy plays an important role in the mother–infant relationship, consistent with the ability of music to promote empathy (Clarke et al., 2015). Cohen (2001) identified empathy (sharing feelings) as one of four dimensions of the identification of fans with idols, the others being a cognitive aspect (sharing perspective), a motivational aspect (sharing goals), and absorption (loss of self-awareness). This theory does not, however, predict that more empathic fans are more likely to exhibit fan-worship behaviours. Empathy for others may correlate with self-empathy, which in turn may inhibit seemingly irrational or counterproductive aspects of fan worship.

All theories of the origin of uniquely human behaviours – music, art, language, consciousness – are limited by a lack of reliable data about early human (musical) behaviour. Modern non-invasive research techniques can enable the detailed study of prenatal perception and postnatal infant–mother communication, but it may never be possible to reconstruct the details of infant–mother communication in ancestral settings. The theory is consistent with individual and cultural differences in idol worship, but cannot predict their detailed content.