Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

[Guest guest]

more evidence on the power of mantra

 

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21059

 

Volume 55, Number 3 · March 6, 2008

The Musical Mystery

By Colin McGinn

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

by Oliver Sacks

 

Knopf, 381 pp., $26.00

 

Music is so ubiquitous and ancient in the human species—so integral to

our nature—that we must be born to respond to it: there must be a

music instinct. Just as we naturally take to language, as a matter of

our innate endowment, so must music have a specific genetic basis, and

be part of the very structure of the human brain.

 

An unmusical alien would be highly perplexed by our love of music—and

other terrestrial species are left cold by what so transports us.

Music is absolutely normal for members of our species, but utterly

quirky.[1] Moreover, it is known that music activates almost all the

human brain: the sensory centers, the prefrontal cortex that underlies

rational functions, the emotional areas (cerebellum, amygdala, and

nucleus accumbens), the hippocampus for memory, and the motor cortex

for movement. When you listen to a piece of music your brain is abuzz

with intense neural activity.

 

Oliver Sacks is fascinated both by the normality of this oddity and by

its abnormal manifestations. Daniel J. Levitin, in his recent book

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession,[2]

deals largely with the normal human response to music —particularly

with the brain mechanisms that underlie ordinary human listening—but

Sacks's interest is more in the pathologies of musical response, not

surprisingly in view of his occupation as a clinical neurologist.

Where Levitin gives us the peculiarities of the everyday, Sacks

ventures into the outlandish and exotic—into the deficits and excesses

of the musical brain. Yet both authors recognize that the normal is

exotic enough in itself, and the abnormal merely variations on a theme

(so to speak).

HUP_Sexual Fluidity

 

In a sense, nothing about music is quite " normal, " except purely

statistically. Sacks's style and method in Musicophilia will be

familiar to readers of his earlier works: he provides us with

descriptive summaries of various cases he has studied or encountered,

which blend the humanistic and the clinical in a uniquely Sacksian

style (the adjective seems warranted). We never lose sight of the

human being exhibiting the pathology, but we are also continually

reminded of the role of the brain in producing both normality and

abnormality. The person, for Sacks, is irreducibly a center of

thought, feeling, and will, yet is also a puppet of the circuits and

nuclei that make up the brain. The brain is our ineluctable fate, but

the person is more than a mere syncopation of brain regions. And you

have to live with the brain you've got, making the best of its

contingent strengths and weaknesses, not the brain you might ideally

have preferred. Accordingly, Sacks's chapters contain little in the

way of theory and explanation, or even systematic taxonomy, dwelling

rather on the details of specific cases, with that unique mixture of

empathy and detachment I mentioned. His prose style has become,

perhaps, more restrained than in his earlier books, less prone to

hyperbole or poetic flights; but the result, especially in this book,

is a more affecting and informative accounting, at least to my mind.

The case studies here are finely observed, judiciously expressed, and

genuinely fascinating.

 

Sacks opens his book with a striking case, rather literally striking.

Tony Cicoria, a forty-two-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was making a

phone call to his mother when he was struck in the face by lightning.

He thought he was dead immediately following the event but sustained

no serious injuries and went back to work a few weeks later. But then,

quite unexpectedly, he experienced an intense craving to listen to

piano music—something he had never felt before. He started listening

to piano music all the time, couldn't get enough of it. Then, a little

later, he started hearing piano music in his head, insistently and

powerfully; he felt the need to write it down, though he had no

training in musical notation. Soon he was teaching himself to play the

piano, playing the tunes that came to him unbidden at all moments. He

played the piano at every opportunity, driving his wife to

distraction. He had a bad case of sudden-onset musicophilia, somehow

triggered by the brain alterations wrought by the lightning. He had

become, in effect, a completely new person, evidently because of

having had his brain electrically rewired.

 

The rest of the first section of the book, aptly entitled " Haunted by

Music, " deals with musical pathologies, great and small. Sacks notes

that not only do human beings listen to music a lot, they also imagine

music constantly; so even if your ears aren't being musically

stimulated, you may be self-stimulating musically the rest of the

time. Sometimes, we voluntarily produce musical images, as when we

sing a song to ourselves for the fun of it, but we can also be subject

to involuntary musical imagery. We are all familiar with that

insistent tune that runs through our head against our will and taste

(I was recently subjected to the chorus of Tom Jones's " She's a Lady "

for about a week—a song I dislike and despise).

 

Sacks calls these " brainworms " and the term is appropriate: musical

imagery can be remarkably intrusive and annoying, subverting our

ability to control our own imaginative lives. It gets in there and it

won't let go. That is the " normal " case, but it can get much worse in

abnormal cases. For some people, involuntary musical imagery crosses

the line into outright musical hallucination, with loud and unwelcome

music assaulting the sufferer's consciousness from dawn till dusk.

Sacks describes a number of cases of musical hallucination, one of

whom, a certain Mrs. O'C., eighty-eight and slightly deaf, suddenly

started hearing Irish songs from her youth, so loudly and clearly that

she thought the radio had been left on; they stopped, just as

unaccountably, after a few weeks. Gordon B., a professional violinist,

could not stop his oppressive musical hallucinations, but he could

control their course, shifting from one theme to another. Generally,

such hallucinations were not welcome.

 

Then there are those who suffer from musicogenic epilepsy, in which

convulsions are brought on by musical stimulation. What is remarkable

is that the stimulus can be extremely specific; only particular types

of music will provoke an epileptic seizure—it might be Frank Sinatra

songs. In these cases, musical sensitivity is not a gift but a

curse—the musical brain running amok, without regard for the

well-being of its owner. Maybe, Sacks speculates, there is too much

music these days, with the advent of recorded sound; maybe the human

brain simply can't deal with this degree of musical bombardment and

develops strange pathologies in reaction. Or maybe the music is just

too good—in the sense of its power of psychological penetration.

 

The range of human musicality is also remarkable, descending from the

musical genius to the completely amusical. (Vladimir Nabokov once

confessed: " Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary

succession of more or less irritating sounds.... The concert piano and

all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger

ones. " ) Some people have perfect pitch, naming notes as easily as the

rest of us can name colors, though they may lack musical taste and

aesthetic appreciation. There are musical savants with unusually low

general intelligence and poor linguistic capacity; Sacks recites the

case of Martin, who was a retarded man but who knew by heart some two

thousand operas (I didn't know there were that many operas). Some

people are deaf to melody but can appreciate rhythm, and some have the

reverse problem (Che Guevara apparently fell into the latter

category). I myself have a very good rhythmic sense, being a drummer,

but I cannot carry a tune, to my great chagrin. Blindness can often

lead to unusual musical talent, as with Stevie Wonder, suggesting that

the lack of visual stimulation allows the brain to develop in the

auditory sphere.

 

Then there is the phenomenon of musical synesthesia, in which

particular notes are associated with visual impressions: Sacks reports

that for the composer Michael Torke, say, D major is associated with

the color blue, and G minor with ochre. It has been speculated that

infants are natural synesthetes, their senses not yet properly

differentiated, and that we lose this capacity as we mature (at least

most of us do). It may even be that musical talent is more widespread

than we realize, because the brain works actively to suppress it; when

the inhibition is released, the natural ability is free to flow.

 

The human memory for music is generally excellent; people can remember

songs from their childhood, for example, with striking accuracy. The

case of Clive Wearing provides a dramatic illustration of the

resilience of musical memory, since he suffers from extreme and

debilitating amnesia, yet retains a remarkable amount of his old

musical memories. He has little long-term memory in general but he

also cannot acquire new memories from his passing experience, so that

everything seems unfamiliar from second to second. It is a deeply

disturbing predicament that Wearing is in, but at least he can still

play and conduct music (he was an accomplished musicologist before the

brain infection that destroyed his memory).

 

Wearing retains his musical " procedural memory, " i.e., the kind that

is manifested in practical skills, but he also retains his musical

taste and appreciation. This suggests that musical memory is a

distinct subsystem in the human brain, possibly widely distributed,

and strongly resistant to degradation. Strange as Clive's case is, it

reminds us of something we all know from our own experience: that

musical memory has a power all its own. Moreover, musical memory

connects with our sense of self, since musical taste and experience

are closely linked to personality and emotion. The music we remember

is, without exaggeration, part of who we are.

 

Perhaps this is why music therapy works as well as it does—another

theme of Sacks's book. It taps into the deeper regions of the psyche,

where emotion, memory, and self intersect. Musical therapy can help

patients suffering from aphasia and Parkinsonism; and music can also

modulate the ticcing behavior characteristic of Tour-ette's syndrome.

Music can trigger movements that other stimuli cannot, sometimes

producing coordination out of chaos. Sacks cites Tourettic jazz

drummers who can channel their motor cascades into coherent rhythms,

and therapeutic drum circles that bring together such individuals to

synchronize their Tourettic energy.

 

The capacity of melody to soothe and rhythm to excite is obvious to

anyone with musical sensitivity. Music is so intimately connected with

emotion and movement that its power can be tapped to elicit both sorts

of response. Music is known to excite the motor cortex even when the

listener isn't actually moving, so closely linked are musical hearing

and bodily movement. This is why sitting still at a concert goes so

much against the grain for most people. Yet the propulsive power of

rhythm, so evident in our everyday experience of music, is actually

quite puzzling. Why should the mere regularity of a beat cause the

body to jerk so? What is the precise relation between the temporal

sequence of heard sounds and movements of the limbs and trunk? We

don't respond that way to language and other sounds—so why to musical

sounds?

 

The last part of Musicophilia discusses depression, dementia, and

Williams syndrome. In severe depression, say after bereavement, music

may lose its appeal, sounding flat and pointless. Yet, as Sacks

reports from personal experience, it may also be the trigger that

lifts profound depression. In dementia, dormant musical powers can be

released, as the more cognitive functions deteriorate. In people with

Williams syndrome, caused by a highly localized genetic defect, we

find a combination of hypermusicality and cognitive limitation; such

people also exhibit extreme friendliness to strangers combined with

indifference and ineptitude with respect to the inanimate environment

—being often unable to draw simple geometrical figures or even tie

their own shoelaces. They show a unique blend of psychological

strengths and weaknesses, with a corresponding divergence from normal

in their brain structure (smaller than normal visual cortex and larger

auditory cortex). Here brain physiology maps neatly onto psychological

profile, thus dem-onstrating that the brain is indeed fate.

 

At one point in his discussion of music and the emotions Sacks has

this to say:

 

States of ecstasy and rapture may lie in wait for us if we give

ourselves totally to music; a common scene during the 1950s was to see

entire audiences swooning in response to Frank Sinatra or Elvis

Presley—seized by an emotional and perhaps erotic excitement so

intense as to induce fainting.

 

I was struck by that " perhaps " : not much perhaps about it, I would

have thought. Sacks generally confines himself to classical music in

this book, saying little specifically about jazz and rock music—unlike

Levitin, who favors the latter over the former. Anyone would think

Sacks had never seen the kind of response elicited by the Beatles and

other rock bands: the raw power of music to excite and move

(literally) is at its clearest in the case of these more recent

musical forms—and its connection to the sexual never more

unmistakable. But Sacks tends to treat all music as psychologically

equivalent; at any rate, it might have been useful to ask how

different musical forms affect the mind and brain. The increasing

dominance of rhythm in popular music, at its starkest in rap music,

must surely tell us something about how the human brain responds to music.

 

In Levitin's book there is a subtle and instructive discussion of the

creation of groove in rock music, involving considerations of the

listener's expectations and playing with the mental beat set up in his

or her mind; it is not a simple matter of metronomic exactitude ( " In

the Midnight Hour " by Wilson Pickett, for example, has a powerful

groove, resulting from several interleaving aspects of the song's

sound). This is specific to one genre of music, and must involve

special brain mechanisms. I doubt very much, based on introspection,

that my brain responds the same way to classical and rock music— as is

evident from my tendencies to movement in the two cases. People can be

made to sit still at a classical music concert, but try doing that at

a live rock concert and you would have a riot.

 

Sacks generally eschews theoretical speculation in Musicophilia, but

he does raise one theoretical possibility that has influenced thinking

about mind and brain from the great British neuroscientist Hughlings

Jackson on, namely the notion of disinhibition. Sacks writes:

 

Normally there is a balance in each individual, an equilibrium

between excitatory and inhibitory forces. But if there is damage to

the (more recently evolved) anterior temporal lobe of the dominant

hemisphere, then this equilibrium may be upset, and there may be a

disinhibition or release of the perceptual powers associated with the

posterior parietal and temporal areas of the non-dominant hemisphere.

 

This is an extremely intriguing theory, because it suggests that the

brain contains untapped potential that is released only in unusual

conditions. With damage to the left hemisphere, in which language is

primarily located, the right hemisphere tends to come into its own.

Blindness and deafness can result in an access of musical achievement,

as the brain devotes itself to activities other than seeing and

hearing. Strokes can result in newfound talents precisely because they

turn off the inhibitory mechanisms in the brain. Synesthesia may be

lurking within all of us, if only our brain weren't tamping it down

all the time. Savants may get the way they are simply because they

don't have the brain circuits that put clamps on the natural abilities

we all share.

 

In other words, the brain is forever reining itself in, slowing itself

down, suppressing its natural powers—all in order to preserve that

precious equilibrium. Remove the abstract rational and linguistic

structures and the suppressed portions of the brain can break free and

flower. In the case of music, it may be that, despite our obvious

musicality, we are potentially far more musical than we appear—if only

our musical brain wasn't being held in check by the rest of our brain.

This is why damage to the inhibitory parts of the brain can result in

the release of our musical potential.

 

Admittedly, this theory is still rather speculative, and there is

little direct physiological evidence in its favor, but it certainly

has a prima facie appeal. After all, the structure of the human brain

is the outcome of millions of years of evolutionary accretion,

stretching back to our prehominid ancestors, and the newer portions

may well have needed to dampen down the excesses of the earlier brains

they augmented, in order to maintain the right kind of balance of

psychological functions (Freud's special notion of repression is a

version of this basic idea of cerebral inhibition and its release).

 

Although Sacks endorses the notion of a music instinct, he says little

about why such an instinct might have arisen; but Levitin devotes an

entire chapter to the subject. The answer he proposes, adapted from

Darwin, is that musical performance works as a courtship display, thus

falling into the category of Darwinian sexual selection (as distinct

from natural selection). Musical ability is like the peacock's tail: a

trait that advertises fitness and health, without directly aiding in

the serious business of survival—a luxury that only the most vital can

afford to possess.

 

The ability to sing and dance well, in particular, serves to attract

mates, because it signals intelligence, agility, and emotional

quality—though it may not always go with a propensity to long-term

child-rearing commitment. Levitin conjectures that this is why male

rock stars and their music are so erotically appealing, despite the

poor prospects of such performers as dedicated husbands: they are

tapping into the primordial power of sexual selection through musical

display.

 

From this point of view, unusual musical ability looks like an

evolutionary advantage, despite its oddity when considered purely as

an adaptation to the environment. The reason we are a musical species

is that our success in the mating game depends upon it. In that

respect, we are not so different from birds. The erotic power of

music, so tentatively alluded to by Sacks, is therefore central to its

prevalence in the human species. Why, after all, is the love song the

most popular form of music in the world? Because love songs are about

the very thing that the music instinct is designed for—the selection

of mates.

 

Oliver Sacks's great success as a popular writer might seem to need

some explanation. He writes mainly about people with neurological

damage, and he can be dry and clinical, as well as technical. No doubt

his fine literary style is part of the explanation—and there is in his

work always a natural interest in the strange and abnormal.

 

But I think it goes deeper than that. He reminds us of our extreme

psychological complexity, and of the fragility of the human mind. From

the inside, the mind can seem simple and automatic, like a pearl in an

oyster, but actually it all depends on the complex orchestration of

the millions of neurons that compose our brains: and if anything goes

even slightly amiss in the machinery the mind can be altered beyond

recognition. This realization gives us the feeling that we are

suspended over an abyss, totally reliant on the mechanics of the

physical organ that sustains the self. That organ is marvelously

impressive, but it is also alarmingly prone to breakdown and

malfunction; just deprive a tiny part of it of oxygen for a few

seconds and all hell can break loose at the level of the conscious

self. It makes you feel nervous about your nerves, does it not?

 

Sacks is an expert at making the reader feel queasy in this way. But

there is also, I think, a tacit ethical message in everything he

writes: namely, that even in the midst of tremendous neurological

upset there is still a human self throbbing within. The aphasic or the

Touretter or the amnesiac or the catatonic is still a center of

consciousness, capable of feeling and thought. The human mind can take

many forms, Sacks is saying, and some can indeed appear bizarre and

threatening, but there is always a self that underlies these myriad

forms—and that self can sometimes enjoy virtues and powers not found

in the normal.

 

His implied message is therefore one of tolerance and understanding.

At one point he shows a flash of this moral sense, when discussing a

book about Alzheimer's disease called The Loss of Self, by Donna Cohen:

 

For various reasons, I deplored the title (though it is a very

good book as a resource for families and caregivers) and set myself to

contradicting it, lecturing here and there on " Alzheimer's Disease and

the Preservation of Self. "

 

The preservation of self: that could be the motto for all of Sacks's

writing on neurological disorders. The so-called normal case is highly

contingent, he seems to be saying, depending on the physical integrity

of the brain beneath, and in what we refer to as the abnormal case we

are still dealing with a self in the fullest sense. There is always an

" I " there, someone to whom things matter; so long as there is

consciousness at all, there is a subject of that consciousness. Even

if you can't tell your wife from a hat, there is still a you that must

deal with this disability. Ultimately, then, Sacks's clinical case

studies are exercises in love and respect.

Notes

 

[1] The functions of music and dance in the evolution of the human

species have only recently been seriously studied. Notable works in

this vein include William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance

and Drill in Human History (Harvard University Press, 1995), and

Steven J. Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music,

Language, Mind, and Body (Harvard University Press, 2005).

 

[2] Dutton, 2006.