Science Friday - Oliver Sacks Searched The Brain For The Origins Of Music

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Today, November 8, 2024, marks Science Friday’s 33rd broadcast anniversary. One of the most beloved interviewees on Science Friday over the years was the late neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, who shared his insights into neuroscience, art, and what it means to be human. Recently, Sacks’ long-time collaborator Kate Edgar published a book of Dr. Sacks' letters. And earlier this fall, the New York Public Library announced its acquisition of Sacks’ entire archive.In this segment, Ira revisits a 2007 conversation with Oliver Sacks about his book Musicophilia. They talk about the way music and the brain interact, why music can sometimes remain in the brain long after other memories fade, and why a person with limited language abilities might still be able to sing unimpaired.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Music is an integral part of the human experience. The executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like 20 or 30 different parts of the brain, which are recruited. It's Thursday, November 14th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Music was among the many topics that the late neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote extensively and thoughtfully about. Earlier this month, his longtime collaborator Kate Edgar, who also leads the Oliver Sacks Foundation, released a book of Dr. Sacks's letters. And the New York Public Library recently acquired Sacks's entire archive.

Here's a conversation between Iroflato and Oliver Sacks from 2007 about his book, Musicophilia. Let me start with the first, one of the major points that you make in your book is that our brains are wired. for music the same way we're wired for language. Well, and even more extensively, there's no particular music center, but there are many different parts of the brain, many networks, many systems, in the auditory parts of the brain, the visual parts, the executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like 20 or 30 different parts of the brain which are recruited for musical experience and performance. And this is much wider than for speech, which is a reason why if people lose language and aphasia, they still have music available.

And you quote Stephen Pinker in the forward of your book in a preface saying, you know, there's really no biological reason for we as an animal to be so, have music such an integral part of ourselves. Do you agree with that? No, I think I'd disagree rather strongly, although really one can only speculate. but music occurs and essential in every culture we know of. We have known of. They're musical instruments which go back 50,000 years, bone flutes which have much the same tonal intervals as we have now, with things like something which is exclusively human

and doesn't have an analog and speech is our movement synchronized with beat, with rhythm. One sees every child spontaneously starts to dance or to keep time. You don't see this in a chimpanzee. This seems to be an exclusively human thing. And it wouldn't have been preserved, I mean, to invert the argument, if it hadn't been useful. I mean, Darwin thinks of music in terms of courtship. He felt had a strong evolutionary sexual selection.

I also wonder about a cultural selection, books music are so powerful for bonding people together. Right. You say it's not only what that we appreciate music on an emotional level, but that we have a, quote, largely unconscious structural appreciation of music. What do you mean by that? Well, with experience, as with language, I think as it were, the grammar of music or of particular music, the rules, the laws, the way it is going, come to one. And so much of listening to music is anticipation. And one can whistle along sometimes with a piece one has never heard. You are almost composing it with the composer.

He's hinting all the while as to where it's going. And if one gets a sudden sense of shock or dissonance, if there's a surprise. You say you talk about having a musician's brain. Are the brains of musicians really different than the brains are non-musicians? Well, everyone's brains are different. but the brains of musicians are grossly different. A man called Schlaug Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard has shown that various structures in the brain,

the corpus callosum, big band between the hemispheres, auditory cortex, motor cortex, visual cortex, are all visibly enlarged or so visibly enlarged to musicians that you could look at a brain and say, I think that's a musician's brain, whereas you couldn't say it's a mathematician's brain or an artist's brain. So which came first? Did the brain shape make you a musician, or did being a musician change the shape?

you bring? Well, it's probably not an either-or, but we do know that a lot of training, like the Suzuki method, can make a lot of difference in a year. On the other hand, it's obvious that the Mozart's of this world are born as well as made. Let's talk about some of the patients and some of your own experiences with music. And I think, let's start with the thing that all of us have experienced. It's that tune, you get into your head. And when you hear it, you could have it, you were talking about people have it for days, weeks, months. Yeah.

Brain worm? Is that what you call it? Well, the music industry originally called it an earworm. I somehow like the term of a brainworm, which I imagine it boring into the brain. And certainly, it goes round and round on the brain. I mean, I think all of us have a sort of involuntary tunes which go through the head and which are often pleasant and sometimes and usually associated with thoughts or moods. With a brainworm, this has gone wrong, and you will have a fragment of tune which

gets into a loop and goes round and round and round and lose all sense and all connection and it's very difficult to stop sometimes. It just has to go away on its own? Can you talk yourself out of it at all? Some people can or they will sing it through to the end or they will sort of slap cold water on their face or jump up and down but sometimes you just have to wait for it to go away.

Is there one that's, you know, should we start one now? If you got a tune that, get everybody in our audience for the rest of the day, doing it in there. Well, actually, you said that I started, da, da, da, da. I started to have a Beethoven one.

All right. We'll have the whole country on Beethoven. Let's talk about, you write about musical hallucinations. One of your patients, talk about musical hallucination. Well, a hallucination is quite different

from imagery or brainworms. With a hallucination, you suddenly hear it as if it were real. It's just like perception, indistinguishable. People are very startled. They look around, they say, hey, you heard that? They look for a radio or something.

And only if they can't find an external source, they then realize that something unprecedented is happening in their brain or their mind. And they're often very scared because it is unprecedented, it's uncontrollable. And people say, you know, hearing things, am I crazy? In fact, this is not at all like hearing voices. It's not at all like a psychotic hallucination. it tends mostly to occur, not exclusively, mostly in people who are pretty deaf. And it's as if when the hearing parts of the brain aren't getting their usual input, their usual nourishment,

then they dig down into memory and they activate themselves. So usually these hallucinations are usually of popular songs, hymns, whatever, one has heard in early life. Let's talk about something that's really fascinating. The orthopedic surgeon who was struck by lightning and had suddenly an onset of musical, interest that never had before. He never had it before in his life. He was in his early 40s and really had very little interest in music, apparently not much talent, didn't have a piano in the house, but about three weeks after he'd been struck, which gave him a cardiac arrest, basically it killed him for a minute. Had the ad-a-body experience the whole thing. Yeah, absolutely. And then he

thought, you know, it's all over, but about three weeks later, over the course of a weekend, basically, he got transformed and he developed what he called us an insatiable passion for hearing piano music, then for playing piano music, and then for composing piano music. And he acted on this straight away. He got a piano, he got a piano teacher. He continued to work as a surgeon, but he started getting up very early and all his time was spent with music. He said his wife wasn't best pleased. And this has continued for 15 years. There's really been a transformation and a slight mystical or exalted feeling which goes with it. He feels he may have been saved for the specific purpose of delivering this. He talks, he says he feels he tunes into heaven for his music. Now, how do you as a scientist explain this? Well, I asked him and he said, as a doctor, I can't explain. I think it's spiritual.

And I said, well, fine, but might not anything spiritual have to be. to operate via the nervous system. So he says, okay, I would suspect there's been some activation or reorganization of structures around the temporal lobes of the brain, the right temporal lobes, which are especially concerned with musical patterns and sometimes with mystical or religious feelings. I think something happened there. After the break, what's going on in your brain when you're humming a song, how music can help people with Parkinson's and more with neuroscientists. Oliver Sacks. You mentioned the tools, the tools we have today, the ability to actually image the brain as it's working and helping these things.

Tell us how useful that is to you, someone studying music and... Well, I think it would be useful here. Originally, he wasn't inclined to allow any sort of investigation, but he will allow it now. And I think we could actually watch his brain while music is coming to him. He'll say it comes from heaven. I might say in my reductive way, heaven is in the temporal lobes, hell as well. Well, is there a music center in the brain or is it distributed? No, it's widely distributed.

But the final synthesis and their emotional components probably especially have to do with temporal lobe and its connections. If I'm listening to a song, I'm humming or is it actually playing in my brain? Oh, it's absolutely playing in your brain. And even if you don't make any movement to keep time, the rhythm is playing in your brain. So there's a, it really is a little internal performance. Let's go to Janet in Tucson, Arizona. Hi, Janet. Welcome to Science Friday.

Okay. Well, I come from our real musical family. I'm actually related to Felix Mendelsohn. And music is so much part of my life. I'm a vocalist. And my step-grandson is, cannot stand music. any form. It just freaks about completely. And I was wondering if you've ever heard anything like this. I mean, the kid's seven years old and he cannot stand any kind of music.

He writes, you write about that in your book. Well, not enough. You know, quite a lot of people have been telling me about musical phobia and a hatred of musica, and I think I probably should have written more. I wonder what goes on on a seven-year-old. Is he averse to all music? Yes, all music. He can't stand it. I'm wondering. if it's a function of some form of autism? Does he recognize the music he dislikes? He just doesn't like any kind of music at all. If there's any kind of music at all, he can't stand it.

Okay. Books, there are some people with a rare disorder called a musia, and these people don't have pitch discrimination, they can't hear tones and semitones, they don't really hear music as such. They may just hear it as noise. One of my patients with this said it's like pots and pans being thrown around to the kitchen,

and this would certainly make one hate music. music. But I mean, when he's to sort out what's going on with your boy. Could he grow out of it? Well, I hope he can grow out of it or be helped out of it because there's a huge source of joy and, you know, one wants to say innocent joy in music. Can a mother like Janet do anything? Take her son? Well, I think she needs to sort of find out what's happening and whether the audiologist will do this or the psychiatrist or the neurologist. Good luck, Janet.

Good luck. Thank you very much. Let's talk about some of the other kinds of patients. You've had a patience with extraordinary talent for music, but severe deficits in other cognitive activities. One sometimes see this in people with William's syndrome. This is a rare congenital syndrome where people are often precocious and gifted in language and music. And they're very sociable, but low, low IQs. They can't usually function independently.

But people with William's syndrome, all of them, 100% of them, are enraptu. by music. They're almost helplessly delighted or anguished or overwhelmed by it. A lot of them are musically talented, but all of them are enraptured. But the other thing is one can have a musical savant. These are usually people who have autism. And interestingly, at least half of the musical savants are also blind. And blindness disposes to musicality as well. Last time you were on our program a couple of years ago, we got into music therapy, and that's the point of phrase really struck a chord in a lot of our listeners. And I'm struck by the wide range of patients, people with an array of neurological conditions who can, as you talk about in your book, be reached by music. Well, as I say, I first saw this with the Parkinsonian people who really have this motor problem. And for them, it's the rhythm, which is important. The music doesn't have to be familiar or affect them in other ways. For people with Alzheimer's, it needs to be a familiar song,

which has especially, which has associations and resonance and stirs memory and mood. For people who've lost language, people who have a phasia, may often find they can sing and get a lyric with that. I mean, this can delight them as it shows that language is there, although it may be embedded in the song, and there are ways now, or that's a lot of work, of disembeding the language so they can reacquire it, sometimes with a different part of the brain, with the right side of the brain. And one sees that people with Tourette's syndrome, with Huntington's career, with autism, with all sorts of conditions,

can respond very powerfully to music. When we hear music that is calming and soothing and revokes, you know, maybe the day you were out on the beach or something, are there actual, runners' highs, like other endorphins that are released? Is there sort of real feeling? There's a brain chemistry going on and create that soothing? There's quite a lot of work on this, and both the physiology of thrills and chills, but also of calming music.

You can investigate it electrically by doing EEGs or by brain imaging or by looking at some of the chemicals, and the changes are very real. Let's go to the phones. To Dan and Toledo. Hi, Dan. Hi, there. Can you see music? I guess I think of what he was going to talk about.

There are other people who see colors and things like that. Quite a number of people have some crossing of the senses, as this man puts it, in which they will involuntarily and automatically have, see things, smell things, taste things as they hear them or vice versa. One of the commoners is to see colors with music. And this is not just a metaphor. It's not just a poetic association. This is totally real, so real, that people who have this can't imagine how it would be to be otherwise. I mean, I saw this. When the composer Michael Torkey came to visit me, he told me that when he was five, he said to his piano teacher,

I love that blue piece. His piano teacher said, blue? And he said, yeah, D major, blue. And as piano teacher shook his head and said, well, not for me. You know, Michael says that 40 years later, he still remembers the shock of finding that someone didn't have it. Ten years later, he met as a teenager. He met someone else who saw colors with keys, but the colors weren't the same as his. What is it about the brain, that it can survive all these injuries that happened to it, but the music is still there?

Well, it's because so many different parts of the brain are, recruited for listening to music and remembering music. And some of them may get damaged, but others are still there. But also the brain is very plastic. And if one part gets damaged, other parts can take over. You see this with many things. To me, it's a recording in there. It's not that simple.

I mean, if the recording part gets damaged, and I put a hole in my LP, it's going to be a skip in that spot. You're saying that it's not so simple that other parts may be able to fill that in. I think it's not like a phonograph or, you know, I think that the pitch, the rhythm, and all sorts, all sorts are put in separately. And absolutely one, you may miss one part, but others will fill in. Isn't it amazing that so much of the brain is involved in music that is not, you know? Well, you know, one would like to ask Stephen Pinker, who feels that music is useless

and, you know, why this should be so. I mean, I think the question has to be put. why are we so musical if music is of no utility? That was my conversation with physician and author, Dr. Oliver Sacks, from 2007. That's all the time that we have for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Santiago Flores. Emma Gomez.

Diana Plasker. Robin Kassmer. And many more. Tomorrow, a roundup of the top science stories of the week. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.