Science Friday - A Neurologist Investigates His Own Musical Hallucinations

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

Imagine sitting at home and then all of a sudden you hear a men’s choir belting out “The Star Spangled Banner.” You check your phone, computer, radio. Nothing’s playing. You look outside, no one’s there. That’s what happened to neurologist Bruce Dobkin after he received a cochlear implant. He set out to learn everything he could about the condition, called musical hallucinosis.In a story from August, Host Ira Flatow talks with Dobkin about his decision to publish his account in a medical journal and why the condition is more common than he realized.Guest: Dr. Bruce Dobkin is a neurologist at UCLA Health.Transcript is available at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hey, it's Flora Licksman, and you're listening to Science Friday. We're revisiting some of our favorite conversations from 2025, and you're going to love this one. It's a conversation Ira had about musical hallucinations. Here we go. Imagine you're sitting at home, and then all of a sudden, you hear a men's choir building out the Star-Spangled Banner. You check your phone, your computer, radio, nothing's playing.

You look outside. No one's there. This scenario is not a hypothetical. It's what happened to my next guest after he received a cochlear implant. But he's not just a patient. He's also a neurologist. So of course, he had to learn everything he could about his condition called musical hallucinosis. And he recently published an article in a medical journal about his experience to raise awareness about this surprisingly common condition. Dr. Bruce Dobkin is in a neurologist at UCLA Health, based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. You know, Dr. Dopkin, what a story. It almost sounds like a tale out of an Oliver Sacks book. Actually, Oliver Sacks wrote about musical Lufusinosis. He suffered with it, as his hearing got worse over time. So were you surprised what had happened to you then if you had heard about it in Oliver Sacks' book? Well, I'm listening to the Star-Spangled Banner

being sung by tenors and baritones every 62 seconds on a loop nonstop for three and a half weeks. And like you said, I was looking all over the place to where it might be, and then it suddenly struck me, do I have musical hallucinosis? And then, interestingly, in hours of the last sung stanza, new tunes, childhood songs came into play.

Yankee Doodle, Old McDonald, Mary had a little lamb, Go Down Moses, and dozens of others, always sung with gusto and lyrical clarity every waking hour. And whenever I woke up overnight, there was another medley. And then it changed about eight months later. So I no longer heard either the Star-Spangled banner, or nursery rhymes, I began to hear nonsense lyrics with the same four to six notes. And one went like this, a rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth.

And just all kinds of lyrics pop in there. I can't interrupt them. I can't alter them. I can't unplug the squire's jukebox. And why do you think these unusual phrases were changed? chosen. Do you have any idea? Well, the brain is always trying to make sense of nonsense. It's always trying to take what's within your expectations or your experience and come to a kind of neural agreement that

what you're hearing is this or that. And so in the face of noise coming up through the brainstem, it turns out that music has certain rules that allow for regularity of sounds and familiar words to sort of come together. The drive from below, from this neural noise, forces some of these regions to begin to take this ambiguous input and place it in a sense within the powerful properties of music and reinforces it. and that becomes the sounds that were hearing, the musical hallucinosis. Now, this all started way back when you started progressively losing your hearing when you were 45 and then got a cochlear implant. What happened after that? Take us what happened following the implant. Your hearing didn't come back right away, did it? No. Well, what you hear initially with a cochlear implant is, at least in my case, was truly bizarre. The people whose voices I knew, I couldn't recognize their voices. All voices sounded like they were frying in bacon grease. You know, syllables just kind of sizzled in those first days and weeks of the cochlear implant. And I'm doing rehabilitation trying to convert these.

odd sounds due to direct stimulation of the nerve as opposed to going through the cochlearum and hair cells. Suddenly, I am dependent on electrical inputs and they're very inexact. And so that probably contributed to perhaps the musical hallucinosis, this odd sense of sounds that weren't anything light, normal hearing, and yet our brains are so clever that we can eventually learn and appreciate what's coming in. Voices now sound to me like the voices I remember. I couldn't hear my grandkids speaking, and now I can if they're right in front of me. So all that distracting music and noise, it's worth it? It is. What's it like being a neurologist looking at your own brain and figuring this out.

There's a mix, a real dissonance here, between the repetitiveness of the song and the way it can especially interrupt in quiet places, like when you're laying in bed, and how fascinating it is that this is happening. And so, of course, I went and looked into a lot of the literature, contacted some fellow scientists, looked at brain imaging,

to try to get a handle on it. For example, in musical hallucinosis, the same parts of the brain are active as when you actually are hearing a song, all the auditory cortex, musical-related cortex, rhythmic-related cortex. And how do you keep from going crazy hearing that same song over and over again for how long?

I tried to mask it. I tried to cope with it. So, for example, I'm talking to you, if there's a moment of utter silence, the lyrics will, and the melody will kind of leak through. And my wife said, I suddenly shouted out, Mary, get your lamb out of my pasture. Mary had a little lamb. It was driving me crazy. Interestingly, the majority of people who have this, when they're serving. say that it doesn't particularly bother them.

You know, there's no paranoia associated with it. And it turns out that when, let's say, a survey's done by audiologists who are asking their patients with hearing impairment, whether they've ever experienced musical hallucinosis, sometimes as many as four to 20 percent will say they have experienced this. on occasion, and some have it rather persistently. And almost none of them have ever mentioned it to another person. That's amazing. I don't know if they're embarrassed by it or think it's make them sound crazy,

or it just doesn't annoy them enough. You know, there are plenty of blame mechanisms that allow us to reduce our sense of angst about it and just come to accept it. Because there are no real treatments for it, you just have to accept it. Yes. And I, of course, like many people, didn't initially accept it. I looked through the literature. I found some various medications that might work.

As a researcher myself, my area has been in motor neuroplasticity. How do we improve reaching and grasping or walking after a stroke or spinal cord injury or traumatic brain injury? And so I had more than most people a rather good understanding of adaptations that the brain makes under various circumstances. My case is, and musical hallucinosis is one of the relatively rare ones. Has this experience changed your understanding of how the brain works? Yes, it has complemented my understanding. I mean, we're in a world where there's so much ambient visual input and ambient talking and noises in the environment. All these sensations are just constantly coming into the nervous system.

It's constantly trying to recognize what in all this information that's coming in is likely to be important. And all of that probably developed a million more years ago as our hearing apparatus became more attuned to danger. What are the sounds around us? We want to be aware of them. So the brain is always taking in all this remarkable information, and yet we don't have to process much of it. It's just been a decision, in a sense, made by the brain under a lot of input. I want to thank you for sharing your experience with us. Fascinating discussion and good luck with you and your cochlear implant.

Me and my choir. Thank you. You're welcome, Dr. Bruce Dobkin, a neurologist at UCLA Health, based in Los Angeles, California. This episode was produced by Shoshana Bucksbaum. Check out some of our other favorites from 2025 at Science Friday.com slash 2025. Thank you for listening. I'm Flora Lichtenen.