Oliver Sacks Searched The Brain For The Origins Of Music

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. When I think of all the people I’ve interviewed on the show over the past 33 years, Doctor Oliver Sacks is one of my favorites, sharing his insights into neuroscience, art, and what it means to be human.

And his legacy continues. His long time collaborator, Kate Edgar, who also leads the Oliver Sacks foundation, has edited a book of Doctor Sacks’s letters. And earlier this month, the New York Public Library announced its acquisition of Sacks’s entire archive. So what better time, then, to revisit a conversation with Oliver Sacks in 2007 about his book, Musicophilia? Have a listen. 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.

OLIVER SACKS: 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 the reason why if people lose language in aphasia, they still have music available.

IRA FLATOW: And you quote Steven Pinker in the foreword of your book in a preface saying, 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?

OLIVER SACKS: No, I think I’d I disagree rather strongly, although, really, one can only speculate. But music occurs, and is central in every culture we know of, we have known of. There are 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 in 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, because music is so powerful for bonding people together.

IRA FLATOW: You say it’s not– it’s not only 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?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, with experience, as with language, I think, as it were, the grammar of music, or 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.

IRA FLATOW: You say– you talk about having a musician’s brain. Are the brains of musicians really different than the brains of non-musicians?

OLIVER SACKS: 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 in 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.

IRA FLATOW: So which came first? Did the brain shape make you a musician? Or did being a musician change the shape of your brain?

OLIVER SACKS: 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 is obvious that the Mozartz of this world are born as well as made.

IRA FLATOW: 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.

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: The brain, brain worm, is that what you call it?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, the music industry originally called it an ear worm. I somehow like the term of a brain worm because I imagine it boring into the brain. And certainly, it goes round and round in 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 brain worm, 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 loses all sense and all connection, and is very difficult to stop sometimes.

IRA FLATOW: It just has to go away on its own?

OLIVER SACKS: Yes.

IRA FLATOW: Can you talk yourself out of it at all?

OLIVER SACKS: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Is there one that– should we start one now? [LAUGHING] Have you got a tune that get everybody in our audience for the rest of the day tuning in their head?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, actually, as you said that, I started da-da-da-da.

IRA FLATOW: Beethoven’s Fifth.

OLIVER SACKS: I started to have a Beethoven one.

IRA FLATOW: All right, we’ll have the whole country on Beethoven. Well, let’s talk about you write about musical hallucinations, one of your patient. Talk about musical hallucinations.

OLIVER SACKS: Well, a hallucination is quite different from imagery or brain worms. 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, hearing things, am I crazy?

And in fact, this is not at all like hearing voices. It’s not at all like a psychotic hallucination. And it tends mostly to occur, not exclusively, mostly in people who are pretty deaf. And it’s as if when they’re 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.

IRA FLATOW: 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 he never had before, never had it before in his life.

OLIVER SACKS: 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–

IRA FLATOW: Had the out-of-body experience, the whole thing.

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah, absolutely. And then he thought, 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

OLIVER SACKS: 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 says he feels he tunes into heaven for his music.

IRA FLATOW: Now, how do as a scientist explain this?

OLIVER SACKS: 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 operate via the nervous system? So he says, OK. And 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.

IRA FLATOW: You mentioned 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 neurology.

OLIVER SACKS: 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, a heaven is in the temporal lobes, and hell as well.

IRA FLATOW: Well, is there a music center in the brain? Or is it distributed?

OLIVER SACKS: No, it’s widely distributed, but elaborate– the final syntheses are a lot. And their emotional components probably especially have to do with temporal lobe and its connections.

IRA FLATOW: If I’m listening to a song, I’m humming, is it actually playing in my brain?

OLIVER SACKS: 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– it really is a little internal performance.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go to Janet in Tucson, Arizona. Hi, Janet. Welcome to Science Friday.

JANET: OK, well, I come from a real musical family. I’m actually related to Felix Mendelssohn. And our music is so much part of my life. I’m a vocalist. And my step grandson cannot stand music in any form. It just freaks him out 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.

OLIVER SACKS: He writes– You write about that in your book.

IRA FLATOW: Well, not enough. I had quite a lot of people have been telling me about musical phobia and a hatred of music. And I think I probably should have written more. I wonder what goes on in a seven-year-old. Is he averse to all music?

JANET: Yes, all music. He can’t stand it. I’m wondering if it’s a function of some form of autism.

OLIVER SACKS: Does he recognize the music he dislikes?

IRA FLATOW: 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.

OLIVER SACKS: OK, there are some people with a rare disorder called amusia, 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 in the kitchen. And this would certainly make one hate music. But I mean, one needs to out what’s going on with your boy.

IRA FLATOW: Could he grow out of it?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, I hope he can grow out of it, or be helped out of it, because there’s a huge source of joy, and one would say, innocent joy in music.

IRA FLATOW: Can a mother like Janet do anything, take her son to–

OLIVER SACKS: Well, I think she needs to find out what’s happening. And whether the audiologist will do this, or the psychiatrist, or the neurologist.

IRA FLATOW: Good luck, Janet.

OLIVER SACKS: Good luck.

JANET: Thank you very much.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about some of the other kinds of patients. You’ve had patients with extraordinary talent for music, but severe deficits in other cognitive activities.

OLIVER SACKS: I sometimes see this in people with Williams Syndrome. This is a rare congenital syndrome where people are often precocious and gifted in language and music. And they’re very sociable, but with low IQs. They can’t usually function independently.

But people with Williams Syndrome, all of them are, 100% of them are enraptured 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.

IRA FLATOW: Last time you were on our program a couple of years ago, we got into music therapy, and that to coin a 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.

OLIVER SACKS: Yeah, 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 aphasia, may often find they can sing and get a lyric with that. I mean, this can delight them.

Research 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 disembedding 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 syndrome, with Huntington’s chorea, with autism, with all sorts of conditions, can respond very powerfully to music.

IRA FLATOW: When we hear music that is calming, and soothing, and evokes maybe the day you were out on the beach or something. Are there actual runner’s highs like other endorphins that are released? Is this a real feeling? Is there brain chemistry going on to create that soothing?

OLIVER SACKS: 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.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s go to the phones to Dan in Toledo. Hi, Dan.

DAN: Hi.

IRA FLATOW: Hi, there.

DAN: I had heard that Hendrix was one of these people that had optical and audio nerves crossed so that he could–

IRA FLATOW: Oh, can you see– can you see me music? I guess– I think what he was going to talk about. Are there people who see colors and things like that?

OLIVER SACKS: Quite a number of people have some crossing of the senses, as this man puts it, in which they will involuntarily and automatically see things, smell things, taste things as they hear them, or vice versa. One of the commonest 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 to be otherwise.

I mean, I saw this when the composer Michael Torke 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–

IRA FLATOW: Oh, really?

OLIVER SACKS: Blue? And he said, yeah, d-major, blue. And his piano teacher shook his head and said, well, not for me. Michael says that 40 years later, he still remembers the shock of finding that someone didn’t have it. 10 years later, he met her as a teenager, he met someone else who saw colors with keys, but the colors weren’t the same as his.

IRA FLATOW: What is it about the brain that it could survive all these injuries that happen to it, but the music is still there?

OLIVER SACKS: 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.

IRA FLATOW: To me, it’s a recording in there. It’s not that simple. I mean, the recording part gets damaged, if 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.

OLIVER SACKS: I think it’s not like a phonograph, or I think that the pitch, the rhythm, and all sorts are put in separately and absolutely one– you may miss one part, but others will fill in.

IRA FLATOW: Isn’t that amazing that so much of the brain is involved in music that is not?

OLIVER SACKS: Well, one would like to ask Steven 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?

IRA FLATOW: That was my conversation with physician and author, Doctor Oliver Sacks from 2007.

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