Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – Oliver Sacks

Summary: Referring to psychological studies, case studies from the literature, and the experiences of his own correspondents and patients, Oliver Sacks explores how the human brain responds to, processes, and creates music. Many distinct neural processes are involved in making sense of music.

Thoughts: I found this book worthwhile but not earth-shattering. Even as Sacks writes about his “patients”, he makes a point emphasising their individuality and humanity rather than treating them as “subjects”. The chapters on synesthesia and Williams syndrome interested me most.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Sacks, Oliver. 2007. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Alfred A. Knopf.

Preface

• x: Debate about whether music or speech evolved first has been ongoing since the 19th century. Among early thinkers on the topic:
  • Darwin believed music arose first, for courtship and to express moments of passion, and that speech arose secondarily.
  • Herbert Spencer believed that speech came first, and music arose from emotional speech.
  • Rousseau believed that speech and music arose in tandem, and later became separated.
• xiii: historical musical case histories are rare. Sacks speculates that patients were rarely asked about disorders of musical perception (whereas disorders of language were clearly apparent), or that there was no neuroscience to describe music before the 1980s, so neurologists were less likely to write up case histories which they couldn’t draw on existing theory for.

Part I: Haunted by Music

1. A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia

• Summary: Sometimes, a person can develop musicophilia (a deep engagement, obsession with music) without suffering any other disorders.
  • e.g. Tony Cicoria, who was hit by lightning and, after a few weeks, began to have constant piano music running through his head and subsequently learned to play and to notate piano music.
• 13: Autoscopy: stereotyped out-of-body experience: usually, one has the sensation of looking down on themselves from 8-9 feet above, can inspire fear or joy or detachment, described as vividly “real”, not a dream or a hallucination

2. A Strangely Familiar Feeling: Musical Seizures

• Summary: some people have epileptic seisures during which they hear music. In the two cases Sacks describes, neither person is able to recall specific melodies/rhythms of the music they hear.

3. Fear of Music: Musicogenic Epilepsy

• Summary: Some people have epileptic seizures that are brought on by music. In some people, they are brought on by sounds with particular acoustic properties (e.g. church bells of a particular pitch and timbre), while in others, they are brought on by particular emotional associations (such as traditional Sicilian music)

4. Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination

• 31: Sacks states that for musical performers, running through a piece/passage in one’s head is nearly as effective as practicing it on your instrument
• 31-32: Robert Zatorre et al. have shown that imagining music “can activate the auditory cortex almost as strongly as listening to it”
• 32: Sacks cites Alvaro Pascual-Leone: a combination of physical and mental practice leads to more performance improvement than physical practice alone
• 36: we can form mental associations between pieces of music and all manner of other stimuli, for example lyrics, an object, the taste of a particular food… Very often, these associations act subconsciously, the connection becoming explicit after the fact (if at all)
• 37: to read: neuroscientist Rodolpho Llinás’s book I of the Vortex
  • in it, he states that “the neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality”
    • j: how best to combine the benefits of rationality with such unconscious, irrational processes?
• 39: to read: psychiatrist Anthony Storr’s Music and the Mind

5. Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes

• 43: To Read: Mark Twain’s story, “Punch, Brothers, Punch!” - centers around an infectious earworm
• 45: people with autism, Tourette’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder may become taken by the sound of a word and repeat it to themselves over the course of weeks
  • j: i tend to do this on shorter timescales - a few days in a row
• 46: many people identify brainworms as being similar to afterimages
  • e.g. of afterimage: me seeing subway maps after spending a while playing Mini Metro (in a particular sense of afterimages: not just the effect of seeing bright blotches after looking at a bright light)

6. Musical Hallucinations

• 53f: Diana Deutch states that she has noticed a pattern in some reports of auditory hallucinations, that they will contract/become shorter/“telescope” over time, sometimes being reduced to one or two notes. She draws a parallel to perceptions of phantom limbs, where it may feel that the limb becomes shorter over time
• 61: musical hallucinations are very common. earlier, it had been proposed that they were caused by temporal lobe epilepsy, but incidence of TLE seems to be too low to account for all musical hallucinations.
• 67: like tinnitus: recruitment, where a sound is perceptually exaggerated/amplified
• 72: Shostakovich may have been injured by shrapnel during the seige of Leningrad, with a piece of it being lodged in his brain. Story has it that he could lean his head to one side to hear a continuous stream of novel melodies, which he would use to compose.
• 74: Hallucinations in one sense can often be brought on by sensory deprivation in other senses, and this is true of auditory/musical hallucinations as well.

Part II: A Range of Musicality

7. Sense and Sensibility: A Range of Musicality

• 94: 1995 paper by Schlaug et al. showing that the corpus collosum (connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) is enlarged in professional musicians; Schlaug and other went on to demonstrate that there are a range of correlations in brain structure for professional musicans.
• 94: the degree to which there are changes in brain structure is strongly correlated with the age the person started playing music, also with the intensity/duration of their practicing
• 94: Pascual-Leone has shown that changes to the brain’s structure can be observed after only a few minutes of musical training.
• 97: Sacks summarizes what will be discussed in the coming chapters: musicality is made up of many different sub-skills, each of which can be stronger or weaker independent of the others

8. Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia

• 99: similar to the critical period in language acquisition, six-month old infants can detect changes to many types of rhythms, but by the time they reach twelve months, they start losing the ability to detect some changes in rhythms that aren’t relevant to the music they regularly hear.
• 100: “true tone deafness is present in perhaps five percent of the population” -j: this is a much higher figure than I expected
• 108: “dystimbria” - the inability to distinguish between different timbres. Can occur with, or separately from, tone deafness.

9. Papa Blows His Nose in G: Absolute Pitch

• 121: entomologyst Olavi Sotovalta found perfect pitch incredibly practical in identifying insects by their sound in flight.
• 124f: perfect pitch can shift over the course of a lifetime: piano tuner Mark Damashek consistently perceives pitches as ~150¢ sharp compared to their actual pitch.
• 126: perfect pitch is strongly associated with early blindness - one study found that ~50% of children born blind or blinded in infancy developed perfect pitch
• 126-127: “native speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin show very precise absolute pitch in reading lists of words” - deviations are almost always 50¢ or less.
• 129: in a test where participants had to memorize a series of tones, infants relied much more heavily on absolute pitch, vs. adults who relied on relative pitch.

10. Pitch Imperfect: Cochlear Amusia

• 132: Sacks states that the range of hearing spans ~10 octaves, from 30-12000 Hz, and that the average ear can discriminate among 17 pitches within the span of a whole tone.
• 135: the representations of body parts in the cortex can grow or shrink depending on how much the body part is used - the cortical representations of certain fingers tend to be larger in Braille readers, violinists, etc.

11. In Living Stereo: Why We Have Two Ears

• 144: Daniel Levitin talks about each sound having multiple dimensions/attributes. Commonly recognized dimensions are tone, pitch, timbre, loudness, tempo, rhythm, contour. Less recognized dimensions include spatial location and reverberation
• 148: “Perception is never purely in the present—it has to draw on experience from the past” - everything we perceive is some combination of the stimulus itself and our interpretation of it, based on our memories of earlier similar situations

12. Two Thousand Operas: Musical Savants

• 157: the abilities of savants appear to be present in most people when they are young, but are inhibited in mature brains. But they seem to live on, to a limited extent, beneath consciousness in a significant portion of the population (as shown in experiments where the left temporal lobe of the brain is inhibited)

13. An Auditory World: Music and Blindness

14. The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music

• 165: Color Organs, which turn on a light of a specific color when a key is pressed in addition to playing a tone, have been around since the early 18th century
• 169: composer Michael Torke sees colors associated with various keys. The qualia of the colours of certain keys is different from colors present in the visual world: “Some keys have strange hues which he can hardly describe, and which he has almost never seen in the world about him.”
• 170: Torke needs enough musical information for his synesthesia to kick in: a single tone or a perfect fifth isn’t sufficient - he needs a full triad or a scale
• 170: Torke’s synesthesia is context dependent: a movement in G minor, excerpted from Brahm’s second symphony, is in the color of G minor, but it’s in the color of D major when heard in the context of the entire symphony.
  • cf. what I’m learning in Schenkerian Analysis, where modulations can be thought of as proper modulations, or as temporary tonicizations that relate back to the key of the entire movement/piece

Part III: Memory, Movement, and Music

15. In the Moment: Music and Amnesia

• 203: even if you have no conscious memories of the first years of your life, you’re left with deep, emotional memories in your basal ganglia, which can influence your behavior throughout your life.
• 206: useful to think of two kinds of memory: episodic (conscious memory of events) and procedural (unconscious) - in amnesia, episodic memory is impaired, but not procedural memory.

16. Speech and Song: Aphasia and Music Therapy

• 210: A. R. Luria noted that when there is damage to the brain (e.g. stroke or injury), there are two levels of disturbance: a “core” area where the neurons have been destroyed, and a “penumbra” that surrounds it, with neurons that are depressed/inhibited. Things like speech, music therapy work in part by cajoling the neurons of the penumbra into participating in larger neuronal patterns, eventually allowing them to regain function.

17. Accidental Davening: Dyskinesia and Cantillation

18. Come Together: Music and Tourette’s Syndrome

19. Keeping Time: Rhythm and Movement

• 239: both “rhythm” and “rhyme” come from the same Greek root: associations with “measure, motion, and stream.”
• 240: Humans’ abilities to entrain to a beat are remarkable: as soon as we hear one stimulus, we expect another, meaning we can entrain to a beat after only two stimuli. Daniel Levitin and Perry Cook have shown that humans’ memories for tempo, rhythm are very accurate.
• 240f3: Galileo measured the rate of rolling objects on inclined planes by humming a tune to himself, allowing him to get much more accurate results than could have been obtained with timepieces available in his day. (j: or was it Galileo’s father? I feel I’ve heard this story multiple ways)
• 241: athletes can entrain to an imagined tune, allowing the motions of their body to be brought into better alignment. Sacks offers the example of Malonnie Kinnison, who slipped into flow state posted a personal best in cycling when they heard Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld”
• 242-243: A. Patel argues that entraining to a steady beat cannot have been derived from speech, so that specific aspect of human musical ability must have evolved for a purpose not speech-related.
• 243f: Iverson and Patel have quantitatively studied how the music of French composers tends to match the melody, rhythm of French speech, when compared to music by British composers and British English speech.
• 243f: Leos Janacek was very deliberate about incorporating the pitch and rhythm of Czech speech when setting Czech texts
• 246-247: to look up: Merlin Donald’s book Origins of the Modern Mind - argues that most apes have mostly episodic memory, but that humans evolved “mimetic” culture, allowing them to express emotions/events/stories through movement, posture and sound (but not language), and that human culture still rests on that bedrock.

20. Kinetic Melody: Parkinson’s Disease and Music Therapy

• 249: Characteristic of parkinsonism is the inability to initiate actions, but people with Parkinson’s often retain their ability to act in response to things around them.

21. Phantom Fingers: The Case of the One-Armed Pianist

22. Athletes of the Small Muscles: Musician’s Dystonia

• 273: Leon Fleisher (for years, lost the ability to play piano with his right hand) admonishes: “pianists should not work through pain or other symptoms. I warn other musicians about this. I warn them to treat themselves as athletes of the small muscles. They make extraordinary demands on the small muscles of their hands and fingers.”

Part IV: Emotion, Identity, and Music

23. Awake and Asleep: Musical Dreams

24. Seduction and Indifference

25. Lamentations: Music and Depression

• 297: To look up/listen to: Jan Dismus Zelenka’s The Lamentations of Jeremiah - Czech composer, contemporary of Bach - shook Sacks out of a depressive episode after the death of his aunt

26. The Case of Harry S.: Music and Emotion

27. Irrepressible: MUsic and the Temporal Lobes

28. A Hypermusical Species: Williams Syndrome

Summary: Children with Williams syndrome tend to be “extraordinarily responsive to music” (319), have an “unusual command of language” (322), and are “friendly and loquatious (322)” - all traits that persist into adulthood.

• 323: Sacks observes that “in some ways, Williams seemed to be the exact opposite of severe autism” - children with Williams syndrome are “hypersocial” and acutely aware of others’ emotions, but “indifferent” to the non-human parts of their environment, often struggling with simple tasks
• 328: Sacks suggests that the attunement to music displayed by people with Williams syndrome lends credence to Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (or at least the “musical intelligence” part of it)
• 329: The brains of people with Williams syndrome tend to be smaller than average, but only certain parts of the brain (the occipital and parietal lobes) are smaller.
• 330: People with Williams syndrome employ “a much wider set of neural structures to perceive and respond to music, including regions of the cerebellum, brain stem, and amygdala which are scarcely activated in normal subjects”

29. Music and Identity: Dementia and Music Therapy

• 345: in contrast to Parkinson’s disease, in which the benefits of music therapy appear to dissipate quite quickly, in people with Alzheimer’s disease, “improvements of mood, behavior, even cognitive function… can persist for hours or days after they have been set off by music.”