The Sound of Blue
Finlay Macdonald - Sunday Star Times
Feb 04, 2008
MUSICOPHILIA By Oliver Sacks McMillan, $38
Music and neuroscience have opened up in recent years as the brain itself has been opened up through brain charting and, in this highly readable collection of research and clinical studies, neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks details the enormous significance music has on the brain. The place of music in the neural order of things is, in fact, so significant that the brain of a musician can be clearly recognised from a neurological scan. An anatomist would struggle, says Sacks, to similarly recognise the brain of a writer, an artist or a mathematician.
Sacks, a lover of both music and neurology, has spent many years studying the effect of music on a raft of neurological disorders. Musicophilia takes us through a teeming raft of them. We meet blind savants who can reproduce musical pieces after one hearing; elderly dementia patients with a memory span of 10 seconds who can still play piano sonatas; the composer Shostakovitch, who refused to have a piece of shrapnel removed from his head so he could continue hearing hallucinogenic melodies by leaning in a certain direction; aphasics who had their speech restored by music when speech therapy failed; and a one-armed pianist with phantom fingers.
Music can be the strongest of therapies. It can triumph over the tics and convulsions of Tourette's Syndrome, most readably here in the case of musician Nick Van Bloss, who was known to suffer 40,000 tics in a day, plus sundry other mannerisms, but who could play Bach flawlessly without a single interruption. A number of jazz drummers with Tourette's lose the condition altogether when the music begins.
Sacks doesn't just report, he offers lucid explanation. The baffling case of the savant, who struggles with the simplest of survival behaviour and yet displays astonishing ability in music, memory and numbers, is far less baffling when Sacks has finished with it. A severe head injury to the dominant left hemisphere of the brain (abstract and verbal powers) can cause neural relocation to the right (perceptual skills) and result in that unique imbalance in a savant's intelligence. Sacks says we all have the potential to be savants. This is interesting. Banging the right spot on the brain with a mallet would probably do it, but do we want prodigious musical talent at the expense of the ability to clean teeth and tie shoes?
The brain moving its many functions around also explains why so many who suffer from musical hallucinations - Shostakovitch's problem, which he thoroughly enjoyed - have hearing loss: the brain, deprived of the usual input, starts producing its own.
The music in Musicophilia is almost exclusively classical, and yet when Sacks turns his attention to Brainworms, those maddeningly catchy little things that can stick in a certain part of the brain forcing it to fire repetitively, he is cogently explaining the absurdity of Bananarama and the Spice Girls. On what I understood to be a closely related note, he also has an intriguing chapter on musicogenic epilepsy, where certain music can produce seizures and convulsions.
Some people see colours for musical keys, and no, D minor isn't always blue. No two people see the same colour when they hear the same key. Others can change key often when singing and not realise they are doing so. My wife is unashamedly in this category, and beams with pride when I boast she could have been the next Anita O'Day had she chosen vocal avant jazz over teaching. Rhythm deafness occurs in many people, not just those who cannot dance. Che Guevara was so afflicted. Sacks tries to find a place for each phenomenon in the unique workings of the brain, and the alarming picture emerges that your brain may not actually be so dissimilar from your PC hard drive, where every activity is consigned to a specific place. System crash and inexplicable chaos can only result if you over-tax one area, or ask the wrong area to do the wrong job.
Also alarming is the way neurologists have often used powerful drugs in a why-don't-we-try-THIS-one way when treating neural disorders.
Benzodiazepines, anti-psychotic medicine and drugs such as levodopa may have had some success, but they have also produced some chilling side- effects.
The feeling is that we now know more about the brain than we do about the drugs we are feeding into it.
Significantly, Sacks' own work with sufferers from encephalitic lethargica, which eventually became the book and the movie Awakenings, involved music as a strong stimulus for that disease's tragically frozen victims.
But the music worked only for the time it lasted, which has also proved the case with Parkinson's and dementia patients. Anyone who has sat in a rest-home lounge and seen normally mute and motionless residents startlingly brought to life by visiting pianists and singers will know this is memorably true.
Freud loathed music and Nabokov saw it only as an irritating procession of noises. Musicophilia reaffirms music as a tremendously powerful influence in our cerebral behaviour, and also reveals how much it can help us explore and understand the brain's fascinating pathways.
We can only imagine what Freud and Nabokov might have produced had they given it a try.
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