McGilchrist has a startling and reasonable thesis. That language arose not from the need to communicate, but rather hijacked already actively developing modes of communication in order to establish a referential mode. This would be the first order of formal abstraction, and grew out of roots in gestural signaling and pseudo-musical activity.

But what is startling is his observation that music -encodes something like transmissible gestures-(!!!). More still, he hints at a ‘universal language’ in which rhythm-patterns comprised a form of non-representational communication where the signal recipient would imagine or mimic the production of the signal — and thus experience the physical activity of the signaler (i.e. a distant drummer) as their own. This highly emotional process would result in them ‘understanding’ the communication’s content and meaning through the emotive embodied experience of repeating the signal.

This particular aspect of McGilchrist’s presentation, which comes from research in Africa, has deep personal significance for me in relation to my own development. Strange though this may sound, I was a devoted ‘air guitarist’ during my teens (eventually, I became a guitarist). This period gave me a direct experience of the issues at play here, because I was ‘sensing the physical activity of the signaler’ and, by -actually mimicking it-, I would immediately experience a rush of sensorial communion that … contained inexpressible relational and emotive content. This activity would at once organize and deepen my active understanding of the rich nonverbal associations encoded in the music as suggestions of emotions coupled with gestures, and re-express this in an emphasized form to any local onlookers, who might undergo a similar if less pronounced experience.

Consider how sophisticated such a form of communication might have been amongst distinct tribes who shared no common representational language. Perhaps more importantly, I wonder if you can imagine the exaltation of those who signaled, those who received and repeated, and then returned signals — across the distances — in the darkness — like the living voice of the world’s nascent mystery of consciousness calling to itself in the future. Reminding us, here, that we are carrying assets whose power is vastly richer than any of their modern abstractions, indeed, these lost and obscured faculties, often briefly visible during our own infancy, comprise the predecessors and foundations of those abstractions whose concrete shadows tower like tyrannical inhibitor’s over identity’s inherent richness and diversity. One day, the light of remembrance will dispel those shadows, and what will be revealed will not be these old ways I hint at here, but their next evolutionary aspects. I wonder if you can imagine how astonishing such faculties could be, and how easily their emergence will be inhibited or prohibited by our feverish fascination with machines.