Thinking Beyond Science

Listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well: “We listen to music with our muscles,” as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the “narrative” of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes.

Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is “played in the mind.” The imagining of music, even in relatively nonmusical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and tempo. Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one’s early years may be “engraved” on the brain for the rest of one’s life. Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music. How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself-its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious way in which it embodies emotion and “will”—and how much to special resonances, synchronizations, oscillations, mutual excitations, or feedbacks in the immensely complex, multilevel neural circuitry that underlies musical perception and replay, we do not yet know.

William James referred to our “susceptibility to music,” and while music can affect all of us-calm us, animate us, comfort us, thrill us, or serve to organize and synchronize us at work or play—it may be especially powerful and have great therapeutic potential for patients with a variety of neurological conditions.

Such people may respond powerfully and specifically to music (and, sometimes, to little else). Some of these patients have widespread cortical problems, whether from strokes or Alzheimer’s or other causes of dementia; others have specific cortical syn-dromes-loss of language or movement functions, amnesias, or frontal-lobe syndromes. Some are retarded, some autistic; others have subcortical syndromes such as parkinsonism or other movement disorders. All of these conditions and many others can potentially respond to music and music therapy.

Patients with degeneration of the front parts of the brain, so-called frontotemporal dementia, sometimes develop a startling emergence or release of musical talents and passions as they lose the powers of abstraction and language.

Deliberate, conscious, voluntary mental imagery involves not only auditory and motor cortex, but regions of the frontal cortex involved in choosing and planning. Such deliberate mental imagery is clearly crucial to professional musicians.? The rest of us frequently call upon our musical imagery, too. Nevertheless, it seems to me that most of our musical imagery is not voluntarily commanded or summoned but comes to us apparently spontaneously. Sometimes it just pops into the mind; at other times it may play there quietly for a while without our even noticing it. And though voluntary musical imagery may not be easily available to the relatively unmusical, virtually everyone has involuntary musical imagery. “Every memory of my childhood has a soundtrack to it,” one correspondent wrote to me; and she speaks for many of us here.

Our susceptibility to musical imagery indeed requires exceedingly sensitive and refined systems for perceiving and remembering music, systems far beyond anything in any nonhuman primate. These systems, it seems, are as sensitive to stimulation from internal sources-memories, emotions, associations-as to external music. A tendency to spontaneous activity and repetition seems to be built into them in a way that has no analogue in other perceptual systems. I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not re-present themselves as “pictures in the mind.” Nor do I hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even though I am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it-its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.

There are attributes of musical imagery and musical memory that have no equivalents in the visual sphere, and this may cast light on the fundamentally different way in which the brain treats music and vision. This peculiarity of music may arise in part because we have to construct a visual world for ourselves, and a selective and personal character therefore infuses our visual memories from the start-whereas we are given pieces of music already constructed. A visual or social scene can be constructed or reconstructed in a hundred different ways, but the recall of a musical piece has to be close to the original. We do, of course, listen selectively, with differing interpretations and emotions, but the basic musical characteristics of a piece its tempo, its rhythm, its melodic contours, even its timbre and pitch-tend to be preserved with remarkable accuracy.

Source : Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1297985.Musicophilia