Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play Insights into the Evolutionary Origin of the Arts • Ellen Dissanayake The author considers the biological basis of the arts in human evolution, which she holds to be grounded in ethology and interpersonal neurobi- ology. In the arts, she argues, ordinary reality becomes extraordinary by attention-getting, emotionally salient devices that also appear in ritualized animal behaviors, many kinds of play, and the playful interactions of human mothers with their infants. She hypothesizes that these interactions evolved in humans as a behavioral adaptation to a reduced gestation period, promot- ing emotional bonding between human mothers and their especially help- less infants. She notes that the secretion of opioids, including oxytocin, that accompany birth, lactation, and care giving in all mammals is amplified in human mothers by these devices, producing feelings of intimacy and trust that engender better child care. The same devices, exapted and acquired culturally as arts, she argues, became prominent features of group ritual ceremonies that reduced anxiety and unified participants, which also offered evolutionary advantages. Key words: artification; ethology; interpersonal neurobiology; mother-infant play; origins of the arts F or more than five decades, I have investigated and pondered the biological basis of the arts. When, where, and how did the arts begin in human evolution? Why did they arise and become an enduring part of the human repertoire on every continent and in every environment and cultural group, and evident even in every toddler and child? Is there a common feature that characterizes all art? My first (and continuing) point of departure is ethology—the biology of behavior. Because the way of life (behavior) of any animal has evolved to help it survive in a particular environment, ethologists observe animals in their natural habitat. Because the human species has spent more than 99 percent of its time 143 American Journal of Play, volume 9, number 2 © The Strong Contact Ellen Dissanayake at [email protected] AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 143 5/2/17 3:12 PM 144 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • WINTER 2017 on earth living as hunter-gatherers, my focus (on the human animal) has been on pre modern or traditional ways of life. When looking for universal features of the arts, contemporary ideas about arts and aesthetics are misleading. Traditional societies often have no word for art, even though they practice arts in forms such as decorating (bodies and objects), carving, singing, dancing, drumming, chanting, playing instruments, speaking poetically, giving dramatic presentations, enhancing their surround- ings—and have words for all these activities. Such societies also have words for beauty, skill, and even aesthetic value, but they do not discourage or prohibit beginners and bunglers from attempts to display them. Nor do they always expect art to be harmonious, spiritual, or even creative—the usual characteristics that Western aesthetics require to call something art. I wondered whether the common denominator for art should be sought not in one or another quality (noun or adjective) but in what art makers and participants did (a verb). My first question then became: “What do people— ordinary people, including children, as well as artists—do when they engage in art?” Emphasizing behavior—what people do, rather than what art is—was a new and appropriately ethological approach to the subject of art. My answer has emerged over the years, influenced by what I learned—often accidentally from something I happened to read or hear. Crucial pieces of my thinking about art concern the two subjects covered in this special issue of the American Journal of Play: play and interpersonal neurobiology. It began with the former (Dissanayake 1974) and some two decades later incorporated the latter (Dissanayake 1999). An unexpected new hypothesis (the artification hypothesis) emerged from my work in these two fields. Additionally, in my quest to understand how art began, I discovered a plausible evolutionary explanation for how and why interpersonal neurobiology in humans itself began in the common, ordi- nary playful interactions between ancestral hominin mothers and infants. No one else has proposed this, which I describe in this article. “Hominin,” here, refers to the group that consists of modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors—that is, members of the genera Homo Aus- tralopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus. It replaces the older, and more comprehensive label, “hominid,” which today includes all modern and extinct great apes—that is, modern humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans plus all their immediate ancestors. AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 144 5/2/17 3:12 PM Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play 145 Crucial Components of the Artification Hypothesis Play In the 1960s, when I began my investigation of human art making, little had been written about art as a universal biological endowment of evolution except for an influential book by ethologist Desmond Morris. In The Biology of Art (1962), he described painting by captive primates, and he traced mark making to play. An ethological study of play in mammals by a German ethologist (Meyer- Holzapfel 1956) described characteristics of animal play that struck me as similar to some characteristics of the arts. First, animal play is not serious, which does not contradict the reminder by many authors that play is serious business but instead makes the point that it is not directly concerned with survival—finding food, seeking a mate, or desperately fighting a foe. A related feature is that play is nonfunctional (but spontaneous and labile) when compared to goal-directed, survival-related behavior. It is autotelic (self-rewarding), generally social, com- posed of repeated exchanges of tensions and releases, related to exploration and the seeking of stimulation (i.e., an attraction to novelty and surprise), pleasur- able, and metaphorical (as when, for example, a suitable toy becomes “prey”). Although the play of human children does not fit these characteristics in all details and has additional characteristics, the subject of play in human evolution seemed worthy of more thought, especially when I realized that the children of our remote hominin ancestors would surely have played. My first published article (Dissanayake 1974) was an investigation of the similarities between play and art in an evolutionary context. I would not write that article in the same way today, having since incorporated other subjects that at the time I could not have foreseen. Importantly, the evolutionary connection between art and play is now supported and enhanced by much more recent information about another kind of play, the universal human behavior of mother-infant interaction (as it plausibly originated in our remote ancestors) and its neurobiological underpin- nings. Later in this article, I will refer again to correspondences between play and artification and between mother-infant interaction and a behavior of artification. Interpersonal Neurobiology in Mother-Infant Interaction Studies of what is now called interpersonal neurobiology grew out of the work of developmental psychologists of infancy, stemming from the pioneering work on attachment by British child psychiatrist John Bowlby. Bowlby, incidentally, was the first psychologist of infancy whose perspective was based, like mine, AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 145 5/2/17 3:12 PM 146 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • WINTER 2017 on ethology (Bowlby 1969). He observed the reactions of young children who for various reasons—illness, death, wartime dispersals, abandonment—had been separated from their mothers, and proposed that there is a positive need for infants to form what he called “attachment” with caretakers. By the age of about eight months, especially in circumstances of uncertainty, children in all cultures do similar things to attract and sustain their mothers’ attention: they cry when separated, lift their arms to be picked up, cling to her body, stay near her, and even when playing happily look at her frequently. They do this whether or not a mother has shown them affection. Bowlby suggested that the evolutionary value of attachment was that it helps prevent the hunter-gatherer’s helpless baby from wandering off and ensured that, when frightened or alone, it would cry, reach out, move toward, or otherwise try to resume contact with a specific protective figure. This made the human baby less vulnerable to predators and accidents. Many helpless young birds and mammals exhibit similar behaviors. In the years since Bowlby’s formulations, research with much younger infants has enriched his pioneering work, showing quite remarkable and unex- pected early abilities and proclivities for interaction and intimacy. These suggest that attachment—which in Bowlby’s scheme appears at about the time a baby moves around on its own and is concerned primarily with the infant’s physical safety—should be viewed as a late-appearing consequence of a prior, equally innate, and universal adaptive predisposition to engage in relationship and emo- tional communion, over and above the need for protection. Infant psychologists Daniel Stern (1971, 1974), Beatrice Beebe (with others, 1977, 1979), Colwyn Trevarthen (1979), and Edwin Tronick (with others, 1979, 1980) were among the earliest investigators of the remarkable abilities of very young infants to engage with their mothers in a mutually improvised interaction (sometimes called “baby talk”), the psychological importance of which had been for years overlooked if not altogether dismissed. Long before the attachment that Bowlby described takes place, this common pastime, which may appear inconsequential, provides enjoyment and intimacy for both participants and significant developmental benefits for the infant. Further research by a growing number of scientists has demonstrated that in this familiar and ordinary face-to-face play, both mother and baby are doing something quite specialized, based on inborn competencies and sensitivities. Using rhythmic head and body movements, gestures, and facial expressions as well as vocal sounds, the pair create and maintain communicative sequences that AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 146 5/2/17 3:12 PM Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play 147 are exquisitely patterned over time. Even newborns show sensitivity to temporal sequence and pattern and engage in behavioral turn-taking as early as eight weeks of age (Beebe 1986). By this age also, they expect social contingency—predictable back-and-forth interactivity (see also “interpersonal sequential dependency” in Miall and Dissanayake [2003, 339]). If a positive ongoing interaction is experi- mentally manipulated so that one partner’s signals are delayed only a few seconds, the other partner becomes perplexed and distressed. Even though one partner produces the appropriate signals, something seems wrong because they are not coordinated in real-time with the other’s behavior (Murray and Trevarthen 1985, Nadel et al. 1999). This mutual temporal coordination is truly remarkable in a baby so young. It heralds our later social lives, whether in conversation, social play, lovemaking, and—as I will show—music, dance, and other performance arts. In 1995 neuroscientist and psychiatrist Allan N. Schore published the first of three monumental treatises that brought together hundreds of scientific studies demonstrating the psychobiological underpinnings of social-emotional functioning that develops during right brain-to-right brain communication in the caretaker-infant interaction. This is a far different focus from the (still) reigning neuroscientific emphasis on the development of cognition, language, and memory. Schore’s work also referenced studies of mammalian maternal behavior by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, whose Affective Neuroscience (1998), systematized the neurology, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and functions of the emotional brain. A reader interested in Panksepp’s scientific trajectory (in which he, like Schore, has developed revolutionary theoretical perspectives that are still not widely enough recognized) might wish to consult an interview with him in the winter issue of the American Journal of Play (2010), in which he makes clear the influence of ethology in his formative thinking. Among other core emotional systems in all mammals, including of course humans, Panksepp’s work elucidates the brain systems for play and maternal care. What is Artifying? As I have described, because of the bewildering cornucopia of ideas about what art is and what art does, I considered ethology the most helpful starting place to examine the arts’ biological origin and original functions. That is, I came to con- ceptualize art as a behavior (or behavioral predisposition), rather than an object (work of art) or quality (beauty, skill) or cognitive capacity for symbolization. AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 147 5/2/17 3:12 PM 148 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • WINTER 2017 Ethologically speaking, art is something that people evolved to do (like play, display, court, mate, mourn, establish territory and hierarchy, form families, practice aggression and ethnocentrism, and so forth). Because there is no verbal form of the behavior (e.g., “to art”), I looked for a descriptive label for what art- ists do. In my earliest thinking, I called the activity “make special” (Dissanayake 1974; 1988), which artists seemed to understand but scientists said sounded simplistic and unclear. I next called it “making the ordinary extra-ordinary” (Dissanayake 1992: 49), then “elaborating” (Dissanayake 2000), and in subse- quent publications “artifying,” which embraces all these terms. Artification and artifying refer to the behavior, observed in virtually all human individuals and societies, of intentionally making parts of the natural and manmade environment (e.g., shelters, tools, utensils, weapons, clothing, bodies, surroundings) extraordinary or special by marking, shaping, and embellishing them beyond their ordinary natural or functional appearance. I used the same term for behaviors that occur in vocal, gestural, and verbal modalities—that is, in what we call song, dance, poetic language, and performances of various types. By their nature, these arts take place in time and are easily conceptualized as behaviors, in contrast to visual arts, which are static—the result of behavior. The archaeological record reveals that from the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 780,000–127,000 years ago), ancestors of our species recognized some objects, such as unusually shaped, marked, or colored stones, as special (Bednarik 2011; Dissanayake 1988). From at least 250,000 years ago and earlier, they displayed a mental capacity (and motivation) deliberately to make ordinary things extraordi- nary, as seen in three stone tools that were fashioned with a centrally embedded fossil (illustrated in Dissanayake 1988, 54 and 2000, 133). Other found objects were artified by means of coloring or engraving as well as being set in unusual places. We cannot know the motivations for doing these things, but such actions indicate that the object (or perhaps the occasion or place) was thereby situated in a nonordinary world or awarded a nonordinary status—thus possibly regarded as giving access to, or even hoping to, attract spirits from that world (see my description of ceremonial ritual to come). Pieces of shaped colored ochre from three hundred thousand years ago sug- gest that body decoration may have been the earliest visual artification. In recent and contemporary premodern societies, ornaments that come from the bodies of rare, beautiful, powerful creatures—feathers, shells, teeth, carapaces—or the use of colorful minerals and other inorganic substances indicate that the wearer is or has become extraordinary, special. AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 148 5/2/17 3:12 PM Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play 149 The extraordinariness of artification is achieved by means of at least five devices or operations: formalization (a term that includes shaping, composing, patterning, organizing, schematizing, and simplifying), repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and—in some instances—manipulation of the perceiver’s expecta- tion (thereby leading to surprise). These five operations are, interestingly, used by some animals, especially birds, in what ethologists call “ritualized behaviors”— courtship behaviors used by peacocks or birds of paradise are a good example. And notably, artists use the same operations to make things special—thereby drawing people’s attention to the object or behavior, sustaining their interest, and evoking and shaping their emotions. The operations and their effects play a role in other behaviors that I subsequently describe. Before saying more about art or play, I turn now to a more detailed discus- sion of the origin that I propose for the behavior of artification in the interper- sonal neurobiology of mother-infant interaction. Evolutionary Origins of the Operations of Artification in Mother-Infant Bonding In my ethological scheme, artifying arose from a seemingly unlikely source, mother-infant bonding, which I propose was a consequence of two early adapta- tions in hominin evolution. The first is bipedality—walking upright on two legs (Potts 1996). Over evolutionary time, many anatomical changes were necessary to convert a four-legged creature into an upright bipedal strider. These changes included the reconstruction of the rib cage and the bones of the inner ear, reshap- ing of the spine, relocation of the opening of the spinal cord, alterations of the lower limbs and feet, reconfigurations of joint surfaces, and the reshaping of body musculature. A second significant trait, brain enlargement, took place concurrently so that by the time of Homo habilis, between 2.0 and 1.5 million years ago, the brain had doubled in size from that of earlier four-legged forms. Another spurt of brain growth and doubling in size occurred around a half million to two hundred thousand years ago (Mithen 1996). Among the many anatomical concomitants of bipedality was a reshaped pelvis that became shortened from top to bottom and broadened from fore to rear to center the trunk over the hip joints and thereby reduce fatigue during upright locomotion (Klein and Edgar 2002). This reconfiguration secondarily AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 149 5/2/17 3:12 PM 150 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • WINTER 2017 resulted in a serious obstetric problem (Washburn 1960; Trevathen 1987)—giv- ing birth to an increasingly large-brained baby through a narrowed birth canal. In others words, these conflicting adaptive trends (bipedality and brain expan- sion) resulted in a life-threatening problem for ancestral mothers and babies that itself required further anatomical adaptations. We all know that a newborn’s skull is compressible—with a fontanelle (or soft spot) aiding passage through the birth canal. Additionally, as birth approaches, hormones soften the cartilage that joins a female’s pelvic bone in the middle, so that it will separate slightly during parturition. In addition, changes in the timing of infant brain growth gradually occur so that significant expan- sion takes place outside the womb: by age four, the modern infant brain is three times larger than at birth (Portmann 1941). Finally, the gestation period in humans has been reduced so that, compared to other primates, babies are born in an immature state. (Actually, selection did not so much shorten the period of gestation as prevent it from increasing as much as it would have otherwise [Chisholm 2003]). It has been estimated that to conform to the general primate fetal developmental pattern, a human baby should be born at around eighteen months (Tomasello 2003) and weigh twenty-five pounds (Falk 2009; Gould 1977; Leakey 1994; Portmann 1941). Obviously, there have been drastic changes. After only nine months gestation, a newborn human is quite helpless, requiring assiduous care from adults for much longer than any other primate (Falk 2009). Researchers have posited “intense maternal care” or “intensive parenting” as early as 1.8 million years ago (Falk 2004, 2009; Flinn and Ward 2005; Leakey 1994; Rosenberg 1992), and I propose that mother-infant interac- tion became part of this care. The usual labels for the interaction—“baby talk,” “infant-directed speech,” or “motherese”—do not sufficiently emphasize two of its most important features: its dyadic nature, where both partners influence each other, or its multimodality. Perhaps this is because caretaker vocalizations have been studied primarily with regard to the subject of child language learning. However, frame-by-frame microanalyses of video-taped mother-infant inter- actions, which show the faces and upper torsos of both partners side by side, reveal that facial expressions and head and body movements are as significant in the interaction as vocalizations (Beebe et al. 1985; Beebe and Lachmann 2014; Murray and Trevarthen 1985; Stern 1971). It is important to recognize that in the baby-talk or motherese interaction all three sensory modalities or languages of the engagement (body, facial, vocal) are processed as a whole in the infant’s brain (Beebe and Lachmann 2014; Schore 1994; Stern et al. 1985). AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 150 5/2/17 3:12 PM Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play 151 Evidence that mother-infant interaction is an evolved adaptation comes from the well-established observation that infants are born ready to recognize, respond to, and coordinate their own behavior with these transformed affinitive signals. They are unresponsive to adult-style discourse that is directed to them but reward extraordinary signals with beguiling wriggles, coos, and smiles. It is important to appreciate that babies are not taught to engage with caretakers in this way. If anything, they are the teachers: by their positive and negative reac- tions, they let others know which movements, expressions, and sounds they like best (Chisholm 2003). Indeed, they can be said to elicit, shape, and otherwise influence the pace, intensity, and variety of signals that adults direct to them. It seems warranted to propose that mother-infant interaction be recognized as a shared, cocreated, evolved, adaptive communicative behavior that provides benefits to both infant (survival) and mother (reproductive success). That is, like the adaptive anatomical changes that aided the birth of immature infants, it was a behavioral adaptation that after birth aided their subsequent survival. Although infant-directed sounds, facial expressions, and movements have been well described, no one has pointed out before that they are all derived from common adult vocal, facial, and gestural expressions of social receptivity, affinity, and intimacy described by ethologists such as Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) and Grant (1968, 1972). Once pointed out, we all recognize that we give and receive affinitive signals to our friends and associates every day. Looking at something or someone with open eyes expresses interest; raised eyebrows (eyebrow flash) and backward and upward head raising (bob) indicate familiarity and receptiv- ity; head nods show accord; an open mouth or smile shows receptivity, pleasure, liking, or appeasement; a mutual gaze expresses intimacy; a soft voice indi- cates the absence of a threat or submission (Puts, Gaulin, and Verdolini 2006); and physical gestures such as touching, stroking, patting, hugging, and kissing communicate sympathy and devotion. However, when used with infants, the original function and motivation of these signals—expediting ordinary adult social life—changes. They are simplified or stereotyped, repeated, exaggerated (made more conspicuous), and elaborated (dynamically varied to become louder, softer, faster, slower, larger, smaller, higher, or lower)—that is, they are made more distinct and noteworthy, more likely to attract an infant’s attention, sustain her interest, and create and manipulate her emotional response. I suggest that artists use these same operations when artifying. Although mother and baby enjoy each other’s company and loving feel- ings, a mother’s intensified signals of friendly interest, unknown to her, augment AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 151 5/2/17 3:12 PM 152 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PLAY • WINTER 2017 the release of prosocial hormones (endogenous opioids such as oxytocin) that foster maternal behavior in all mammals (Miller and Rodgers 2001; Nelson and Panksepp 1998). Emphasizing these signals also reinforces her brain’s neural circuits for affiliation and devotion, creating tender and loving feelings toward her infant, ensuring more attentive care (Carter 1998; Carter, Lederhandler, and Kirkpatrick 1999; Nelson and Panksepp 1998; Panksepp, Nelson, and Bekkedal 1999) and ensuring that she will want to care for a demanding, helpless creature for months and years (see the social biofeedback model of Gergely and Watson 1999). Compared with other Pleistocene mothers who did not make emphatic affinitive signals that instilled and reinforced such devotion, a baby-talking mother was more likely to have reproductive success. By calling forth such sig- nals from its mother and encouraging her to keep making them, an interactive baby (compared with a less responsive one) inadvertently helped ensure maternal care and therefore his or her own survival (Chisholm 2003; Dissanayake 2000). At the hub of the intricate network of mammalian adaptations for caring for others is oxytocin (Carter, Lederhandler, and Kirkpatrick 1999; Churchland 2011), an ancient hormone from at least seven hundred thousand years ago that predates mammals (Porges and Carter 2011). It is present in all vertebrates, but the evolution of the mammalian brain adapted oxytocin to new jobs in caring for offspring and eventually for wider forms of sociality. Interestingly, oxyto- cin is critical not only to maternal emotion, but it plays an important role in positive social interactions (Churchland 2011; Panksepp and Biven 2012) that include pair bonding in adults (Bjorklund and Pellegrini 2002 104; Flinn and Ward 2005; Miller and Rodgers 2001; Stringer 2011; Wade 2006), social empa- thy (Porges and Carter 2012), and ritual behavior (Dissanayake 2008; Freeman 2000; Oubré 1997). Apart from the importance of mother-infant interaction in human evolu- tion, developmental psychologists today describe a number of psychological (emotional and cognitive) benefits to babies that come from this behavior. Compared with babies who do not have reliable maternal input, they learn to regulate their emotions better, participate in social interactions, become familiar with the sounds of the language they will eventually speak, acquire the culture of their parents, and in other ways develop their minds. The con- sequences of deficient interaction are starkly evident in a study of children who were brought up from birth in Eastern European orphanages before the fall of the Soviet Union. Although they received adequate physical care, they spent up to twenty hours per day unattended in their cribs. After adoption, AJP 9.2_TEXT_3.indd 152 5/2/17 3:12 PM