Barry White, the 'walrus of love', might
have been on to something ...
James Blunt has said that he didn't become interested in music until he went to boarding school, because his army-major father wouldn't let him listen to it at home. Any music, that is, not just transgressive teenage-boy metal or hip hop. That makes his old man almost unique, because a love of music is innate in humans, say researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
Music stimulates the same part of the brain that responds to food and sex, which is, of course, what anyone who's into music wants to hear. (How would James Blunt's songs sound if he'd been allowed to hear the odd CD at home? This is surely worth a study in its own right.) What the scientists really want to know now is why - what evolutionary purpose is served by our instinctive response to rhythm and melody?
One hot hypothesis, you won't be surprised to hear, is that it's about sexual selection - it enables men to seduce women (the idea of women seducing men doesn't seem to be considered).
Jimi Hendrix's prodigious success with the opposite sex is used as an example. The psychologist behind the sexual selection theory, Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, says that because Hendrix was able to stimulate that crucial bit of the brain with his guitar playing, girls were putty in his hands. This resulted in hundreds of sexual encounters, out of which came three children. "Under ancestral conditions before birth control, he would have fathered many more," Miller adds dryly.
Let's assume for a moment that music does have that knock-out effect. That would explain why, in the early part of a relationship, smitten swains often make compilation tapes/CDs for their beloved. Compiling songs isn't in the same league as actually creating the music, so it won't give them Hendrix's strike rate, but it is creative enough, perhaps, to score a few points. It also accounts for men's habit of leaving a few groovy CDs casually lying around the living room when entertaining a lady. "What great taste," we're supposed to think. "Come here, you beast!"
But Miller has nothing to say about the opposite scenario - girls using music to have their way with boys. Yet it certainly happens. Personally, I've employed the old "I have a spare ticket for The Killers if you want to come" strategy more than once, with great success.
Do other she-Vultures do this kind of thing? Does it work? Share!
