musical brains

Two Books about Music and the Brain

2007 Nov 22; 19 Qudrat, 164 BE

My present audio book is Oliver Sacks' latest work, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain." Wiki does not yet have an article on this book, but you can see a televised lecture where Sacks discusses it at:

It gives a strange feeling to listen to Sacks, who is not only an essayist and migraine sufferer like myself, but also a neurologist with many stories to tell, some of his own but mostly of his patients and correspondents. Dr. Sacks continues here as in the past with his anecdotal or case study methodology, but at the same time he seems to be doing a good job keeping up with the huge discoveries made over the past decade mapping the regions and machineries of the brain.
His stories demonstrate that when a part of the brain shuts down, be it by poison or lightning strike, other parts take over, and when they do not, strange things happen. Victims lose parts of their musical abilities selectively, their ability to discern pitch, or harmony, or timbre, etc. It is really amazing how selective abilities corresponding with the parts of music can go wrong. After decades of investigation, Sacks has begun to suspect that auditory hallucinations are more common than was thought in neurology. Listening to the case studies I realized that I have experienced auditory hallucinations too; but they were always of voices, not music, and always after long conversations and during the reverie that precedes sleep.
My impression from Sacks' stories about weird and wonderful brain malfunctions is that our brains are not so much machines as radio towers. Brain regions are a set of receptors and transmitters that pick up songs of spirit and deal with them as they happen wire themselves up. What we call "natural abilities" or "brain damage" are just ways the brain happened to connect its wires. Each region acts as a sub-antenna to pick up signals from somewhere else, or sometimes to transmit and broadcast elsewhere. When we say someone is "intelligent," "inspired," or "spiritual," does that just mean that their brain is plugged into a sort of unseen Internet behind worlds this world? How else to explain cases like the non-musical fellow who is struck by lightning and suddenly appreciates music, and even feels impelled to write and perform the piano?
Overall, the feeling I get from hearing Sacks' musings about brain breakdowns is hope, hope that we can rewire ourselves in more effective ways to overcome intractable problems. If we systematically introduced music, along with reflection, meditation and prayer, into our daily lives as part of a problem solving methodology we could resolve any number of quandaries we now think of as permanent to the human condition.
A couple of months ago I audited another popular book about music and the brain called "This is Your Brain on Music," and the findings described there supplement Sacks' book quite well. Talking about the latter book, not long after I read "Brain on Music" a rather deadly overall criticism of the author's thesis struck me.
"Brain on Music" starts off by saying that only recently in our evolution has music become a professional activity where most people passively sit back in silence and listen to a tiny minority of gifted experts who alone write and perform. Until a few centuries ago, it says, everybody sang and made music as a part of their daily routine. Music making, not music listening, filled a void in our auditory world. Now, of course, that void is filled to overflowing by any number of electronic media.
But then the book forgets this fact of human evolution and assumes that the regions of our brain that musical instruments stimulate developed under the stimulus of music as we now conceive of it. Instead, researchers should be testing aboriginals still living close to our oldest traditions. If we watched their brains react to participating in ancient lifestyle songs we would get a more accurate picture of how the brain got to what it is, and to how it naturally reacts, rather than just examining modern, passive listeners or professional music specialists.
What we need, and by we I mean researchers and lay alike, is a more comprehensible way of visualizing the mechanisms of the brain in action. We need a sort of interactive, visual brain game to bring many people together to see it in action, perhaps an online simulation like Second Life. Also, I suspect that the terminology we have for the regions of the brain, words like "temporal lobe" and "corpus callosum," is inadequate to what we now know it to be. Our terms are obsolete and unenlightening. Now that we have an idea of what brain regions do we should give them names to reflect their function.
Actually, maybe that is too conservative.
As our understanding of the brain grows the brain itself could become a model for the optimum human language. Specialists in neurology, linguistics and computer science can cooperate on devising a direct brain based language, perhaps taking advantage of how music effects every part of the brain. An international language might come out of a direct brain-computer interface. As we study how existing human languages light up various brain regions we will understand how how brain evolution can be taken to the next step. Tonal languages, like Chinese, already use an element of music to convey meaning. Much more could be done.