Oliver Sacks has a new book coming out next week called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which collects a series of case studies looking at different ways in which music has affected neurological patients, or vice versa. Thanks to a link from Conversational Reading, I read an excerpt from the book in last week’s New Yorker and it was both heartbreaking and fascinating. The article is about Clive Wearing, a former musicologist who suffers from the most extreme case of amnesia ever recorded: he can only remember a few seconds at a time; if he blinks or turns his head, it’s as if he’s just woken up all over again. Everything is on constant reset. Worse, his pre-amnesiac memories—everything prior to 1985—have been slowly deleting themselves from his mind. From the article:
His constantly repeated complaint, however, was not of a faulty memory but of being deprived, in some uncanny and terrible way, of all experience, deprived of consciousness and life itself. As Deborah wrote:
Desperate to hold on to something, to gain some purchase, Clive started to keep a journal, first on scraps of paper, then in a notebook. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements “I am awake” or “I am conscious,” entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: “2:10 P.M: This time properly awake.... 2:14 P.M: this time finally awake.... 2:35 P.M: this time completely awake,” along with negations of these statements: “At 9:40 P.M. I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims.” This in turn was crossed out, followed by “I was fully conscious at 10:35 P.M., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks.” This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry.
This dreadful journal, almost void of any other content but these passionate assertions and denials, intending to affirm existence and continuity but forever contradicting them, was filled anew each day, and soon mounted to hundreds of almost identical pages.
What’s interesting, though, is that he can still play the piano, can still read music, and can still remember that he loves his wife. He can’t really describe any of it, but he can experience it. The article is stunning and I definitely plan to pick up the book when it comes out next week. Wired (via bldgblog) also has a Q&A with Sacks (and a look at his metaphorical iPod). There are also videos of Sacks at Amazon.
Finally, I picked up the latest issue of Seed last week and it too had an interview with Sacks. The article gives a good sense of how Sacks brought science writing to a new level. It’s not online, but when I went to Seed’s website to see if it was, I found this instead: a conversation between David Byrne and Daniel Levitin, another scientist who has also studied music’s relationship with the brain. I’ve heard great things about his book This is Your Brain on Music, and I might just make it a twofer when I hit the bookstore next week. From their conversation:
David Byrne: When somebody tells us what this song is about, or what this painting is about, we're kind of stuck because talking about the art, and the art itself, are almost separate areas. The music seems to have straight access to the so-called "reptile brain," and we feel it immediately. But often it's also touching all kinds of other parts of the brain. If it has lyrics, there's language in it. If it has a strong rhythmic element it's touching what you would call the motor parts of the brain and muscle. All kinds of stuff is involved. How do you think this all happens?
Daniel Levitin: My guess is it starts with trying to unite rationality with irrationality.
DB: I'll bet you get resistance too from people who say you can't analyze this.
DL: Well, I remember a quote from Allan Watts, the philosopher. He wrote a number of books on Eastern philosophy in the 70s. He said that the problem with science is that when it wants to study the river, the scientist will go to the river with a bucket, take a bucket of water out, bring it to the shore, sit there, and study the bucket of water. But of course that's not the river.
And you know a lot of people have tried to study music by getting rid of everything except pitch or everything except rhythm. Or by using very strange, computer-generated sounds, to see what the brain does in response to them.
There's always this tension in science that you want to control your variables and you want to know what it is you're studying. And yet you want to have what we call ecological validity, which is just a fancy way to say it has to be like the real world. There's a tension between these two, and I've erred on the side of having ecological validity in my own experiments because I want to see the real phenomena.
You can read the edited conversation here, or you can watch the hour-long video here.
Previously on pgwp: Noise Solution—researchers in London are using MRI scanners to measure "positive soundscapes" within the urban environment: what could this mean for urban design and/or public sound art?
Yeah, this does resonate a bit with This Is Your Brain on Music, which has several really interesting observations (it's light reading that will hit you with a pretty amazing insight each chapter), including "neuroplasticity," which means that after trauma, your brain can relocate operations to other regions of the brain. There was also something in there about a sort of "body memory" that allows musicians who suffer a stroke or other brain trauma to "remember" how to play pieces automatically (I have a pretty acute sense of this "memory" myself, since I can sometimes play songs whose melodies I may have forgotten totally automatically.)
Posted by: Dave | October 11, 2007 at 10:25 AM
Interesting - I think the two books will make a nice pairing. Sacks's New Yorker article gets into the different kinds of memory as well. I find it all pretty fascinating.
Posted by: scott pgwp | October 11, 2007 at 11:16 AM