Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (27 page)

Every culture has songs and rhymes to help children learn the alphabet, numbers, and other lists. Even as adults, we are limited in our ability to memorize series or to hold them in mind unless we use mnemonic devices or patterns— and the most powerful of these devices are rhyme, meter, and song. We may have to sing the “ABC” song internally to remember the alphabet, or imagine Tom Lehrer’s song to remember all the chemical elements. For someone who is gifted musically, a huge amount of information can be retained in this way, consciously or unconsciously. The composer Ernst Toch (his grandson Lawrence Weschler tells me) could readily hold in his mind a very long string of numbers after a single hearing, and he did this by converting the string of numbers into a tune (a melody he shaped “corresponding” to the numbers).

A neurobiology professor recounted to me the story of an extraordinary student, J., whose answers on one exam sounded suspiciously familiar. The professor wrote:

While this student is, like Toch, extraordinarily gifted, all of us use the power of music in this way, and setting words to music, especially in preliterate cultures, has played a huge role in relation to the oral traditions of poetry, storytelling, liturgy, and prayer. Entire books can be held in memory—
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey,
famously, could be recited at length because, like ballads, they had rhythm and rhyme. How much such recitation depends on musical rhythm and how much purely on linguistic rhyming is difficult to tell, but these are surely related— both “rhyme” and “rhythm” derive from the Greek, carrying the conjoined meanings of measure, motion, and stream. An articulate stream, a melody or prosody, is necessary to carry one along, and this is something that unites language and music, and may underlie their perhaps common origins.

The powers of reproduction and recitation may be achieved with very little idea of meaning. One has to wonder how much Martin, my retarded savant patient, understood of the two thousand cantatas and operas he knew by heart or how much Gloria Lenhoff, a woman with Williams syndrome and an IQ under 60, actually comprehends the thousands of arias in thirty-five languages which she can sing from memory.

The embedding of words, skills, or sequences in melody and meter is uniquely human. The usefulness of such an ability to recall large amounts of information, especially in a preliterate culture, is surely one reason why musical abilities have flourished in our species.

T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
motor and auditory systems has been investigated by asking people to tap to a beat or, where commands cannot be given verbally (as with infants or animals), by observing whether there is any spontaneous synchronization of movement with an external musical beat. Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute has recently pointed out that “in every culture there is some form of music with a regular beat, a periodic pulse that affords temporal coordination between performers, and elicits synchronized motor response from listeners.” This linking of auditory and motor systems seems universal in humans, and shows itself spontaneously, early in life. But, as Patel wrote in his 2006 paper, “there is not a single report of an animal being trained to tap, peck, or move in synchrony with an auditory beat.”
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The rather mechanical term “entrainment” is sometimes used in regard to the human tendency to keep time, to make motor responses to rhythm. But research has now shown that so-called responses to rhythm actually
precede
the external beat. We anticipate the beat, we get rhythmic patterns as soon as we hear them, and we establish internal models or templates of them. These internal templates are astonishingly precise and stable; as Daniel Levitin and Perry Cook have shown, humans have very accurate memories for tempo and rhythm.
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Chen, Zatorre, and Penhune in Montreal have studied the ability of human beings to keep time, to follow a beat, and they have used functional brain imaging to visualize how this is reflected in the brain. Not surprisingly, they found activation of the motor cortex and of subcortical systems in the basal ganglia and cerebellum when subjects tapped or made other movements in response to music.

What is more remarkable is their finding that listening to music or imagining it, even without any overt movement or keeping time, activates motor cortex and subcortical motor systems, too. Thus the imagination of music, of rhythm, may be as potent, neurally, as actually listening to it.

Keeping time, physically and mentally, depends, as Chen and her colleagues have found, on interactions between the auditory and the dorsal premotor cortex— and it is only in the human brain that a functional connection between these two cortical areas exists. Crucially, these sensory and motor activations are precisely integrated with each other.

Rhythm in this sense, the integration of sound and movement, can play a great role in coordinating and invigorating basic locomotor movement. I found this when I was “rowing” myself down the mountain to “The Volga Boatmen’s Song,” and when the Mendelssohn enabled me to walk again. Musical rhythm can be valuable, similarly, to athletes, as the physician Malonnie Kinnison, a competitive cyclist and triathlete, observed to me:

Now all of Kinnison’s competitive cycling is accompanied by bracing musical imagery (usually from operatic overtures). Many athletes have had similar experiences.

I have found it similar with swimming. In swimming freestyle, one usually kicks in groups of three, with a strong kick to every armstroke followed by two softer kicks. Sometimes I count these to myself as I swim—
one,
two, three,
one,
two, three— but then this conscious counting gives way to music with a similar beat. On long, leisurely swims, Strauss waltzes tend to play in my mind, synchronizing all my movements, providing an automatism and accuracy beyond anything I can achieve with conscious counting. Leibniz said of music that it is counting, but counting unconsciously, and this is precisely what swimming to Strauss is all about.

T
HE FACT THAT
“rhythm”— in this special sense of combining movement and sound— appears spontaneously in human children, but not in any other primate, forces one to reflect on its phylogenetic origins. It has often been suggested that music did not evolve on its own but emerged as a by-product of other capacities with more obvious adaptive significance— such as speech. Did speech, in fact, precede music (as Steven Pinker suggests); did song precede speech (as Darwin thought); or did both develop simultaneously (as Mithen proposes)? “How can this dispute be resolved?” Patel asks in his 2006 paper. “One approach is to determine whether there are fundamental aspects of music cognition which…cannot be explained as by-products or secondary uses of more clearly adaptive abilities.” Musical rhythm, with its regular pulse, he points out, is very unlike the irregular stressed syllables of speech. The perception and synchronization of beat, Patel feels, “is an aspect of rhythm that appears to be unique to music…and cannot be explained as a by-product of linguistic rhythm.” It seems probable, he concludes, that musical rhythm evolved independently of speech.

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals. John Iversen, a neuroscientist and an avid drummer, has pointed this out. We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as “tick-tock, tick-tock”— even though it is actually “tick, tick, tick, tick.” Anyone who has been subjected to the monotonous volleys of noise from the oscillating magnetic fields that bombard one during an MRI has probably had a similar experience. Sometimes the deafening ticks of the machine seem to organize themselves in a waltzlike rhythm of threes, sometimes in groups of four or five.
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It is as if the brain has to impose a pattern of its own, even if there is no objective pattern present. This can be true not only with patterns in time, but with tonal patterns, too. We tend to add a sort of melody to the sound of a train (there is a wonderful example of this, raised to the level of art, in Arthur Honegger’s
Pacific 231
) or to hear melodies in other mechanical noises. One friend of mine feels that the hum of her refrigerator has a “Haydn-ish” quality. And for some people with musical hallucinations, these may first appear as an elaboration of a mechanical noise (as with Dwight Mamlok and Michael Sundue). Leo Rangell, another man with musical hallucinations, commented on how elementary rhythmic sounds, for him, became songs or jingles; and for Solomon R. (in chapter 17) rhythmic body movements gave rise to a singsong cantillation— their minds giving “meaning” to what would otherwise be a meaningless sound or movement.

A
NTHONY STORR,
in his excellent book
Music and the Mind,
stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. People sing together and dance together in every culture, and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. This primal role of music is to some extent lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, with the rest of us often reduced to passive listening. We have to go to a concert, or a church, or a musical festival to reexperience music as a social activity, to recapture the collective excitement and bonding of music. In such a situation, music is a communal experience, and there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or “marriage” of nervous systems, a “neurogamy” (to use a word the early mesmerists favored).

The binding is accomplished by rhythm— not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds (and, since emotion is always intertwined with music, the “hearts”) of all who participate. It is very difficult to remain detached, to resist being drawn into the rhythm of chanting or dancing.

I observed this when I took my patient Greg F. to a Grateful Dead concert at Madison Square Garden in 1991.
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The music, the rhythm, got everyone within seconds. I saw the whole vast arena in motion with the music, eighteen thousand people dancing, transported, every nervous system there synchronized to the music. Greg had had a massive tumor which had wiped out his memory and much of his spontaneity— he had been amnesic and inert, barely responsive except to music for many years. But he was taken over and animated by the thumping, pounding excitement of the crowd around him, the rhythmic clapping and chanting, and soon he, too, began shouting the name of one of his favorite songs, “ ‘Tobacco Road,’ ‘Tobacco Road’!” I say I “observed” all this, but I found myself unable to remain a detached observer. I realized that I, too, was moving, stamping, clapping with the music, and soon lost all my usual diffidence and inhibition and joined the crowd in communal dancing.

Augustine, in his
Confessions,
described how, on one occasion, he went to a gladiatorial show with an aloof young man who professed disgust and contempt at the scenes before him. But when the crowd grew excited and began a rhythmic roaring and stamping, the young man could resist no longer, and joined in as orgiastically as everyone else. I have had similar experiences in religious contexts, even though I am largely lacking in religious faith or feeling. When I was a boy, I loved Simchas Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law, which was celebrated, even in our normally sober Orthodox congregation, with ecstatic chanting and dancing round and round the synagogue.

While in many cases religious practice now tends to be somewhat decorous and detached, there is evidence that religious practices began with communal chanting and dancing, often of an ecstatic kind and, not infrequently, culminating in states of trance.
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The almost irresistible power of rhythm is evident in many other contexts: in marching, it serves both to entrain and coordinate movement and to whip up a collective and perhaps martial excitement. We see this not only with military music and war drums, but also with the slow, solemn rhythm of a funeral march. We see it with work songs of every sort— rhythmic songs that probably arose with the beginnings of agriculture, when tilling the soil, hoeing, and threshing all required the combined and synchronized efforts of a group of people. Rhythm and its entrainment of movement (and often emotion), its power to “move” people, in both senses of the word, may well have had a crucial cultural and economic function in human evolution, bringing people together, producing a sense of collectivity and community.