7 Simple Questions That Scientists Still Can't Answer

4. Why Do We Like Music?

Music is one of those things that pretty much every hearing human will have experienced, it's so common that we don't often stop to question how weird it is. Like, there are certain ways of putting certain sounds together that sound good (or bad, lookin' at you Skrillex) to humans and can even elicit an emotion response. Like so many of the questions we can't answer, everyone seems to have a theory, but no one seems to be able to agree on an answer. There is one idea that music, in the words of the great Bard himself, really is the food of love. In the same way that many of our excessive behaviours stem from some kind of evolutionary pressure (i.e. live long enough to bonk something and pass on your genes) and that music evolved as a kind of mating call, like the audio equivalent of a peacock's tail. This would explain why musicians, no matter how greasy, turn so many heads. This, however, doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. For example, you're probably able to enjoy a rousing chorus of Jerusalem without wanting to climb every choir member like a tree (well, unless they're these ones). It seems that there is something much deeper going on, and that's likely to be something extremely primal or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, associated with a highly-evolved mind. However, the existence of Insane Clown Posse would seem to contradict that second theory.