This evening, a friend and I went to “An Evening with Oliver Sacks,” at McGill University. Dr. Sacks is a neurologist and author of many books, including Awakenings (turned into a movie with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He was speaking about topics from his new book: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. It was a sold-out house of around 500 (and overflowing into a second room).

He spoke about relationships between the brain and music. He touched on various special musical gifts but also pathologies, such as amusia (inability to discern or appreciate music), “earworms” (translation of the German term for those annoying songs or jingles that get stuck in your head), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and how they respond to musical therapy, musical hallucinations… It was all very interesting.

No surprise here, but it turns out the brain is highly active, and in many different areas, when music is being listened to, played, composed. It is more “broadly” active than with speech or visual processing; regions of the “upper brain” as well as the older, more primitive/automatic regions of the brain get in on the action. Rhythm, melody, harmony…all help activate different regions.

The bit about musical hallucinations was fascinating, if a bit scary. When it occurs (quite rare), it often seems to be linked to the onset of hearing loss. Not exclusively, though; there are young children who scream and tell their parents to “turn off the radio!” The main point here seems to be that if one of the senses stops getting input, the brain “needs to do something“, and will dig into memory and invent something, giving a kind of internal playlist. And there really seems to be something to that whole “blind piano tuner” thing. There are a disproportionate number of blind people with perfect pitch, compared to the normal population. Especially blind people who never had sight, which means all that free “real estate” in their brains can get diverted into processing other sensory inputs…should be no surprise, then, that they have more developed senses of smell, hearing, taste.

One of the patients he saw at his clinic in NY had severe Alzheimer’s. He was so far gone that he was unaware of what he’d done for a living, where he was, what he’d done a few minutes before…yet he was able to sing at a professional level, in his same beautiful baritone voice. He had been performing with a group for years and still was able to perform, even though he had no idea where he was, how he’d got there, or how to tie a bow tie. This same man had also been an avid tennis player. He could no longer recognize a tennis racquet or guess what it was for. But if you stood him in a tennis court with a racquet in his hand and lobbed a ball at him, he would start playing a “mean game of tennis.”

Another man, a life-long stage actor, is also stricken with severe Alzheimer’s, yet able to perform Shakespeare (in fact is on stage in NY right now). This reminds me of my own grandmother, who is far down the Alzheimer’s road, yet can still appreciate and sing along to the songs my aunt sings. She was an English schoolteacher her whole life, and loved poetry. Even in her current state, if you give her a line from A. A. Milne, she’ll say the next line.

So, these “performances,” these routines people program themselves with for a lifetime, seem to be among the brain’s strongest connections. They remain even when names, dates, words, facts and details are long past the reach of recall. With Alzheimer’s, music therapy generally focuses on emotional connections to childhood memories; songs the person may have heard and enjoyed, say, when they were younger than 20. Music really seems to be one of the “last things to go.” The benefits of a music therapy session may last for several hours after it has ended. I got the impression Dr. Sacks (now 74) was a devotee of classical music. I wonder if, in sixty years, the music therapists will be playing Ice Cube, Skinny Puppy and Shakira, thereby tending to the earliest musical memories of their patients?

With Parkinson’s, music therapy takes a different tack. Here, the most important thing is the music’s rhythm. Parkinson’s is a disease that takes away voluntary movement. Musical rhythms seem to help activate and synchronize the motor skills, to literally “get the patient moving” (for example, dancing). But here, the effect is lost as soon as the music is switched off.

In a similar way, some patients who’ve had strokes that affected the front left lobe of the brain (speech centre), are still able to access language and words — i.e. communicate — through song. There is much more research and possible therapy going on in all these areas.

Dr. Sacks has been on a book tour, but he said it was special for him to be in Montreal, home of Dr. Penfield’s Montreal Neurological Institute, where so much top music/brain research is being done.

In the conversations around me, after the lecture, the main comment I heard was along these lines: “Well, guess tomorrow I need to start singing/learning an instrument/dancing/[insert musical thing you’ve always wanted to do]. Practicing every day. To stave off the dementia, give me a few more years…” And it seems there just may be something to that.

Google Maps keep getting better. Now they’ve released yet another new feature: topo views. Of course, it’s better in the ol’ U.S. of A. Not as high resolution in Canada, Europe, or South America…or anywhere else. But check out the Grand Canyon, below; how “fractally” cool is that?

View Larger Map

Of course, there are “Mapplets” that let you show contour lines, that let you determine altitude at a selected map point, etc. But all the better if Google keeps on building this stuff in…

I’m not talking about the TV show. Instead, I’m talking about the first edition of the Barcelona World Race. Nine teams, of two professional sailors each, are in a non-stop race around the world in 60-foot yachts. The race started on November 11 in Barcelona, and now the teams have cleared the Canary Islands and have caught the trade winds and are headed towards Brazil for a while (via the dreaded doldrums).

You can find out more and keep up with all the latest news here. (RSS feed here) They have daily blog-style reports, satellite video interviews with the racers, and you can follow and review the progress of the boats in special 2D and 3D viewers. You can even sign up to race along with them in a simulation game…

The race covers some 40,000km, and is expected to take a bit less than three months. That’s right, they actually are trying to go “around the world in 80 days…” (Actually, the record on this course, in this class of boat, is 87.5 days.) The usual route for sailing around the world goes through the Suez and Panama canals. Because this is a non-stop race, they more or less have to go the “clipper route,” which passes around the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, across the Indian Ocean, south of Tasmania, threading between New Zealand’s islands, across the Pacific, then around Chile’s Cape Horn and back up to Barcelona. There is plenty of danger from very big and heavy seas in the southern seas, not to mention floating ice.

So, who to cheer for? Knowing little about the technical aspects, the technological advantages and disadvantages of the various boats, having only read the short sailor profiles on the website, I find my heart wanting to cheer for these three teams:

• Educación sin Fronteras, featuring a Barcelona native paired up with one of only two women in the event; at 26, she’s also the youngest person in the race.
• Estrella Damm, featuring another Bcn native, a very experienced circumnavigator paired up with an American (Olympic gold medalist).
• Temenos II has a six-time circumnavigator paired with the only other woman in the race, who of course is also a very experienced sailor (they all are, obviously!). Also, this boat’s name keeps making me think: “We have two,” (i.e. sailors) because I keep misreading it as tenemos dos, although the word is actually temenos, which means something like “the domain of kings” in Greek. Oh yeah, turns out it’s also a banking software company.

Hmm. Only problem is that these three are currently…in the last three positions! Well, not all hope is lost. There’s still the all-Spanish team to cheer for: Mutua Madrileña, featuring two guys who live in the Baleares. And they’re in…well, okay…so they’re in fourth-last place. Sigh. But anything can happen, right? — there’s still about 85% of the race to go…

Seriously: Go, everybody, and have a safe race. What an adventure!

Once again, the “birthday” of this blog passed without fanfare, without me even noticing until it had passed. Anyhow, two years and still going, though hardly “strong”: my frequency of posting seems to have tapered off in the last few months… So, here are a few random notes to stir things up again:

Hats off to Gabriela Montero. I just discovered her — she’s a classical pianist from Venezuela who is doing something “shocking” and “revolutionary” in the staid classical world: improvising. It’s what used to be done a lot more, by folks you may have heard of, like Mozart, Beethoven… Her latest album is Baroque (if it ain’t), and she has this to say about it:

It has taken a few years for people to understand and believe the inexplicable mystery of free improvisation, which is what I do and have always done since a very young child. I would like to make clear that every piece on this record was created on the spot, based on themes that are well known of the Baroque period, and every free improvisation was born without any influence of an external theme.

The CBC wrote a little article about her recently, because this past week she played at Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.

To take a 90 degree turn, and speaking of other “gifted” Latinas, yesterday I remembered why people aren’t handing out any hard-hitting news awards to news site 20 minutos. One of their top headlines yesterday was about los pechos milagrosos de Salma Hayek. Assuming she was not quoted out of context (or perhaps joking…please?), apparently in junior high she asked God for larger breasts, so kids would stop teasing her. She dipped her hand in the holy water at church and said: “God, give me breasts.” And then: “He gave them to me!” A few months later she developed a real pechonalidad (this does not translate to English; it’s a wordplay on “breasts” and “personality”). I guess a miracle is a miracle, but it’s really too bad she didn’t ask God for world peace, an end to poverty, or something…useful. (Though evidently those breasts are currently “useful” for her newborn daughter.)

Even bigger news in Spain this week — you know, besides Salma’s miraculous breasts — was the Spanish king’s comment to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, at the Ibero-American summit in Chile: “¿Por qué no te callas?” (”Why don’t you shut up?”) You can now buy this slogan on t-shirts; the internet domain is up for sale on eBay (latest bid: 10,000 Euros); someone invented a popular new tapa by that name (it’s topped with a Spanish flag). In the meeting, it’s obvious Zapatero was trying to stay respectful, even defending his politically-opposite predecessor Aznar, but the king had a shorter fuse, and just couldn’t take Chávez’s comments any more. My question: whatever happened to diplomacy in international politics? (Answer: Screw that! — we can make more money and bigger headlines with confrontation, patriotism and pride.)

Oh yeah, one more thing. I saw the movie “Once” on an airplane last week. Simple, authentic, moving. Yes, it’s a musical, but…I liked it a lot. Go figure. No, there are no “show tunes.” The actors actually composed and sang the songs. Now you can stop “figuring” and just go see it.

“Fall back.” Or “fall in line?” That’s what we did last night; later than usual this year, because we have to copy whatever the Americans do. Actually, why does the magic have to end? I wish we were on Daylight Savings Time all year round.

Winter is coming, and I guess we’re all depressed and miserable, because apparently we’re no longer interested in “saving daylight.” Some may fight to save seals, whales or the entire planet (keeners!), but “daylight” is just not worth the effort? Sorry, Sun, you’re just not cute and cuddly enough.

Personally I’d rather save as much of it as I can, especially in Montreal, where too many of our hours are “wasted” due of our ridiculous positioning at the eastern end of a huge time zone — we already have sunset about an hour too early for our latitude. Who really needs it to start getting light at 4:30am in June? Barcelona is only about four degrees south of here, so its day is of pretty similar length, yet sunrise and sunset are about an hour later than here, year-round.

Sigh.

Speaking of Barcelona, I’m still waiting for news on my visa (”supposed” to be processed in three months). I spoke to the Consulate again this week, and this time I got some real news. First of all, turns out I’m only one of two people waiting for a residence visa (at this office). Actually, only one of one, because the other guy finally got his visa this week. And he applied at the start of June… I applied near the end of June, so hopefully I’ll hear something this month. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Fingers crossed that the darkest time of the year will bring me some happiness.