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.
