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computing and model-based design. Mathworks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. Business supported. WNYC Studios. 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 Sifri Producer Kathleen Davis.
Music was among the many topics that the late neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sachs wrote extensively and thoughtfully about. Earlier this month, his longtime collaborator, Kate Edgar, who also leads the Oliver Sachs Foundation, released a book of Dr. Sachs' letters. And the New York Public Library recently acquired Sachs' entire archive. Here's a conversation between Ira Flado and Oliver Sachs
from 2007 about his book, Music Affilia. 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 a phase, they still have music available. And you quote Steven Pickard in the forward 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? No, I think I disagree rather strongly, although really one can only speculate, but music occurs and a central and every culture we know of, we have known of, the 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 meant to invert the argument. If it hadn't been useful, I mean Darwin thinks of music in terms of our courtship he felt was a strong, evolutionally sexual selection. I also wonder about a cultural
selection because music is so powerful for bonding people together. Right. You say it's not, 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, is where 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 the 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 musicians really different than the brains of non-musician? Well, everyone's brains are different, but the brains of musicians are
grossly different. A man called Schlag got freed Schlag at Harvard has shown that various structures in the brain, the corpus, chalose, and 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. So which came first? Did the brain shape make you a musician or did
being a musician change the shape of your brain? Well, it's probably not and 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 motes out 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. The brain, brainworm, is that what you call it? Well, the music industry, originally called it an earworm, I somehow like the term of a brainworm, because 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 have a sort of involuntary tunes which go through the head and which often pleasants 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 loses all sense and all connection. And it's very difficult to stop sometimes. And it just has to go away on its own? Yes, I mean, can you talk yourself out of it?
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, you know, should we start one now? If you got tune it, get everybody in our audience for the rest of the day, tuning in there. Well, actually, as you said, that I started, I started to have a Beethoven line. All right, we'll have the whole country on Beethoven.
I want to 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, interstingular. People are very startled. They look round. 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 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 popular songs, hymns, whatever, one is 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. They've never had before. 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 my cardiac arrest, basically it killed him for a minute. Had a body experienced 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 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 all of her sacks.
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immigration system at afsc.org-slash-welcome. WNYC Studios is supported by the John Templeton Foundation, funding interdisciplinary research and catalyzing conversations to inspire all and wonder. Dive deeply into the wonders of the universe at Templeton.org. You mentioned the tools that tools we have today, the ability to actually image the brain as it's working and helping these things. I tell us how useful that is to you, someone studying
music. I think it would be useful here originally. He wasn't inclined to allow any sort of investigation, but he will allow it now. 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 regard to the way, no, heaven is in the term for lobes, hell as well. Is there a music centering 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, is it actually playing in my brain? No, 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. 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 a real musical family. I'm actually related to Felix Mendelsson. A music is so much part of my life. I'm a vocalist and my step-grandson is, cannot stand music in any form. It just freaks about completely. I was wondering if you'd ever heard anything like this. I mean, the kid's seven years old and he cannot stand any kind of music. He writes you right about that in your book? Well, not enough. Quite a lot of people have been
telling me about musicophobia and hatred of music. I think I probably should have written more. I wonder what goes on in a seven-year-old. Is he a verse 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. Is there any kind of music at all? He can't stand it. Okay. Books, there are some people with a
rare disorder called a musea 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 at the kitchen and this would certainly make one hate music. But I mean, when he's a sought out what's going on with your boy? Could he grow out of it? Well, I hope he can grow out if it will be helped out of it
because there's a huge source of joy and one would 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 patient with extraordinary talent for music but severe deficits in other cognitive activities.
One sometimes see this in people with William syndrome. This is a rare congenital syndrome where people 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 syndrome, all of them, 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. 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 to the point of phrase really struck a chord in a lot of our
listeners. I'm struck by the wide range of patients, people with an array of neurologic 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. 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 phasier, may often find they can sing and get
a lewick with that. I mean, this can delight them, so 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 disemboding the language so they can re-acquire 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 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, evokes, maybe the day you were out on the beach or something, are there actual runners high, like in other endorphins that are released, is there a 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. I had heard that a Hendrix was one of these people that had optical audio nerve cross, so you could act. Can you see music? I think 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 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 metaphors, 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, 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. Ten years later, he met a teenager, he met someone else
who saw colors with keys, but the colors were at the same as his. What is it about the brain? That it can survive all these injuries that happen 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, 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 I think that the pitch, the rhythm, and all sorts of sorts are put in separately, and absolutely one,
you may miss one part, but others will fill in. It's amazing that so much of the brain is involved in music that is not, you know. Well, one would like to ask Stephen Pinker, who feels that music is useless and 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. Aliver Sacks from 2007.
That's all the time that we have for today. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Santiago Flores. Emma Gomez. Diana Plasker. Robin Kasmur. And many more. Tomorrow, a roundup of the top science stories of the week. I'm Cypher, producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening. WNYC Studios is supported by Mint Mobile. Say bye-bye to your overpriced wireless plans jaw-dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages. For a limited time, get a deal for Mint Mobile when you
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