Oliver Sacks' compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In his book Musicophilia, presented here, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people – those struck by affliction, unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning – to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does, but also that it can torment, calm, organise and heal. Always wise and compellingly readable, these stories alter our conception of who we are and how we function, and show us an essential part of what it is to be human.
This book is indeed filled with wonders, and below I excerpt Sacks' Preface to the revised 2008 edition...
A book by Oliver Sacks (2008)
What an odd thing it is to see an entire species – billions of people – playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call "music". This, at least, was one of the things about human beings that puzzled the highly cerebral alien beings, the Overlords, in Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. Curiosity brings them down to the Earth's surface to attend a concert, they listen politely, and at the end, congratulate the composer on his "great ingenuity" – while still finding the entire business unintelligible. They cannot think what goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music, because nothing goes on with them. They themselves, as a species, lack music.
We may imagine the Overlords ruminating further, back in their spaceships. This thing called "music", they would have to concede, is in some way efficacious to humans, central to human life. Yet it has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world.
There are rare humans who, like the Overlords, may lack the neural apparatus for appreciating tones or melodies. But for virtually all of us, music has great power, whether or not we seek it out or think of ourselves as particularly "musical". This propensity to music – this "musicophilia" – shows itself in infancy, is manifest and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species. It may be developed or shaped by the cultures we live in, by the circumstances of life, or by the particular gifts or weaknesses we have as individuals – but it lies so deep in human nature that one is tempted to think of it as innate, much as E. O. Wilson regards "biophilia", our feeling for living things. (Perhaps musicophilia is a form of biophilia, since music itself feels almost like a living thing.)
While birdsong has obvious adaptive uses (in courtship, or aggression, or staking out territory, etc.), it is relatively fixed in structure and, to a large extent, hardwired into the avian nervous system (although there are a very few songbirds which seem to improvise, or sing duets). The origin of human music is less easy to understand. Darwin himself was evidently puzzled, as he wrote in The Descent of Man: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man... they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed." And, in our own time, Steve Pinker has referred to music as "auditory cheesecake," and asks: "What benefit could there be to diverting time and energy to making plinking noises?... As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless... It could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged." While Pinker is very musical himself and would certainly feel his own life much impoverished by its absence, he does not believe that music, or any of the arts, are direct evolutionary adaptations. He proposes, in a 2007 article, that
many of the arts may have no adaptive function at all. They may be by-products of two other traits: motivational systems that give us pleasure when we experience signals that correlate with adaptive outcomes (safety, sex, esteem, information-rich environments), and the technological know-how to create purified and concentrated doses of these signals.Pinker (and others) feel that our musical powers – some of them, at least – are made possible by using, or recruiting, or co-opting brain systems that have already developed for other purposes. This might go with the fact that there is no single "music center" in the human brain, but the involvement of a dozen scattered networks throughout the brain. Stephen Jay Gould, who was the first to face the vexed question of nonadaptive changes squarely, speaks of "exaptations" in this regard, rather than adaptations – and he singles out music as a clear example as such an exaptation. (William James probably had something similar in mind when he wrote of our susceptibility to music and other aspects of "our higher aesthetic, moral and intellectual life" as having entered the mind "by the back stairs.")
We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. This takes many different forms. All of us (with very few exceptions) can perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm. We integrate all of these and "construct" music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music. "The inexpressible depth of music," Schopenhauer wrote, "so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain... Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves."
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 to 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 syndromes – 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.
For me, the first incitement to think and write about music came in 1966, when I saw the profound effects of music on the deeply parkinsonian patients I later wrote about in Awakenings. And since then, in more ways than I could possibly imagine, I have found music continually forcing itself on my attention, showing me its effects on almost every aspect of brain function – and life.
"Music" has always been one of the first things I look up in the index of any new neurology or physiology textbook. But I could find scarcely any mention of the subject until the 1977 publication of Macdonald Critchley and R. A. Henson's book Music and the Brain, with its wealth of historical and clinical examples. Perhaps one reason for the scarcity of musical case histories is that physicians rarely ask their patients about mishaps of musical perception (whereas a linguistic problem, say, will immediately come to light). Another reason for this neglect is that neurologists like to explain, to find putative mechanisms, as well as to describe – and there was virtually no neuroscience of music prior to the 1980s. This has all changed in the last two decades with new technologies that allow us to see the living brain as people listen to, imagine, and even compose music. There is now an enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often bizarre disorders to which these are prone. These new insights of neuroscience are exciting beyond measure, but there is always a certain danger that the simple art of observation may be lost, that clinical description may become perfunctory, and the richness of the human context ignored.
Clearly, both approaches are necessary, blending "old-fashioned" observation and description with the latest in technology, and I have tried to incorporate both of these approaches here. But above all, I have tried to listen to my patients and subjects, to imagine and enter their experiences – it is these which form the core of this book.
[...and now READ the book!]
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By Oliver Sacks, read his last three essays:
See also my posts:
- READING THE FINE PRINT / Profumo di carta (in English and Italian)
- AWAKE! (A review of Awakenings)
- GOD, BRAIN, AND OLIVER SACKS
