“It appears, due to the nerve canalization that supports complex speech, that language was a late side-development catalyzed by the existence of previously established assets. What were these assets ‘for’?

Interestingly, the features of the right hemisphere that correspond to those involved in language in the left, are largely dedicated to activity related to musical sensing and production.

Apparently, language had a complex precursor whose development was hijacked — and not just in evolution — because our own development echoes this. What was this strange precursor that representational language co-opts for its own development? It is lost to most moderns — but it was a way of music. Not music as we know it, however; a mode of musical communication. And it involved other sophisticated cognitive and relational assets, some of which probably had nonordinary elements, effects, and sources.

This can be tested, in a sense, because, unbeknownst to scientists, you are still carrying these assets, and the ‘spirit songs’ of certain indigenous healers (sometimes known as icaros) are, approximately, the ‘fossilized remains’ of this ‘universal language’ that was sacrificed to produce literal representation. Inside you, the answers to these questions are not only hidden, they are alive.

In our time, these assets are often buried or co-opted by the forces surrounding what we call ‘music’, but still develop throughout our lives in such a way that, should they be discovered they will be found to have been in secret presence and development since birth. Any who discover them will be both shocked and propelled far beyond any idea of mind held by those who are merely sophisticated language users. Representation is little more than the fingernail of the mind. The old music? That was the hand. And the wing.”

— an anonymous informant