Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (32 page)

This loss of emotional reaction to music was very specific. Dr. Freedman noted that he felt no diminution of his passion for visual art after his concussion. He added that since writing about his experience, he had spoken to two other people, both musicians, who had had the same experience after a head injury.

Those who experience this peculiar indifference to music are not in a state of depression or fatigue. They do not have a generalized anhedonia. They respond normally to everything
except
music, and their musical sensibility usually returns in days or weeks. It is difficult to know exactly what is being affected in such postconcussion syndromes, for there may be widespread, if temporary, changes in brain function, affecting many different parts of the brain.

There have been a number of anecdotal reports of people who, following strokes, have lost interest in music, finding it emotionally flat, while apparently retaining all of their musical perceptions and skills. (It has been suggested that such losses or distortions of musical emotion are more common with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain.) Occasionally there is not so much a complete loss of musical emotion as a change in its valence or direction, so that music which previously delighted one may now arouse an unpleasant feeling, sometimes so intense as to produce anger, disgust, or simply aversion. One correspondent, Maria Ralescu, described this to me in a letter:

There have been very few detailed studies of such patients, but Timothy Griffiths, Jason Warren, et al. have described how one man, a fifty-two-year-old radio announcer who suffered a dominant-hemisphere stroke (with a transient aphasia and hemiplegia), was left with “a persistent alteration in auditory experience.”

Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues have been especially concerned with amusia— the loss (or congenital lack) of ability to make structural judgments about music. They were astounded to find, in the early 1990s, that some of their subjects rendered virtually amusic by brain injuries were nonetheless still able to enjoy music and to make emotional judgments about it. One such patient, listening to Albinoni’s Adagio (from her own record collection), first said that she had never heard the piece before, then commented that “it makes me feel sad and the feeling makes me think of Albinoni’s Adagio.” Another patient of Peretz’s was I.R., a forty-year-old woman who had “mirror” aneurysms of both middle cerebral arteries; when these were clipped the surgery caused extensive infarctions in both temporal lobes. After this, she lost the ability to recognize previously familiar melodies, and even to discriminate musical sequences. “Despite these gross deficits,” Peretz and Gagnon wrote in 1999, “I.R. claimed that she could still enjoy music.” Detailed testing supported her claim.

These and other cases led Peretz to think that there must be “a particular functional architecture underlying the emotional interpretation of music,” an architecture which could be spared even if amusia was present. The details of this functional architecture are being slowly worked out, partly through the study of patients who have had strokes, brain injuries, or surgical removal of parts of the temporal lobes, and partly through functional brain imaging of subjects as they experience intense emotional arousal while listening to music— this has been a focus of work by Robert Zatorre and his lab (see, for example, Blood and Zatorre’s 2001 paper). Both lines of research have implicated a very extensive network involving both cortical and subcortical regions as the basis for emotional responses to music. And the fact that one may have not only a selective loss of musical emotion but an equally selective sudden musicophilia (as described in chapters 1 and 27) implies that the emotional response to music may have a very specific physiological basis of its own, one which is distinct from that of emotional responsiveness in general.

I
NDIFFERENCE TO
music’s emotional power may occur in people with Asperger’s syndrome. Temple Grandin, the brilliant autistic scientist I described in
An Anthropologist on Mars,
is fascinated by musical form and is particularly attracted to music by Bach. She told me once that she had been to a concert of Bach’s
Two-and Three-Part Inventions.
I asked if she had enjoyed them. “They were very ingenious,” she replied, adding that she wondered whether Bach would have been up to four-or five-part inventions. “But did you
enjoy
them?” I asked again, and she gave me the same answer, saying that she got intellectual pleasure from Bach, but nothing more. Music, she said, did not “move” her, move her to the depths, as it apparently could (she had observed) with other people. There is some evidence, indeed, that those medial parts of the brain involved with experiencing deep emotions— the amygdala, in particular— may be poorly developed in people with Asperger’s. (It was not only music that failed to move Temple deeply; she seemed to experience a certain flattening of emotion generally. Once when we were driving together in the mountains and I remarked on them with awe and wonder, Temple said she did not know what I meant. “The mountains are pretty,” she said, “but they don’t give me a special feeling.”)

And yet though Temple seemed indifferent to music, this is not true of all people with autism. Indeed, I formed an opposite impression during the 1970s, when I worked with a group of young people with severe autism. It was only through music that I could establish any contact with the most inaccessible among them, and I felt this so strongly that I brought my own piano (an old, secondhand upright at the time) into the hospital ward where I worked. It seemed to act as a sort of magnet for some of these nonverbal youngsters.
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W
E MOVE ONTO
more uncertain ground with regard to certain historical figures who have been, by their own and others’ description, indifferent (or sometimes averse) to music. It is possible that they were profoundly amusic— we have no evidence to either support or refute this possibility. It is difficult, for example, to know what to make of the peculiar omission of any reference to music in the work of the James brothers. There is only a single sentence devoted to music in the fourteen hundred pages of William James’s
Principles of Psychology,
which treats virtually every other aspect of human perception and thought; and looking through biographies of him, I can find no reference to music. Ned Rorem, in his diary
Facing the Night,
observes the same striking absence in Henry James— that in none of his novels, and in none of the biographies, is there any mention of music. Perhaps the brothers grew up in a music-less household. Could lack of exposure to music in one’s earliest years cause a sort of emotional amusia, as lack of language in the critical period may undermine linguistic competence for the rest of one’s life?

A different and rather sad phenomenon, a loss of feeling for music and much else, is expressed by Darwin in his autobiography:

And we are on much more complex ground when it comes to Freud, who (as far as one can judge from accounts) never listened to music voluntarily or for pleasure and never wrote about music, though he lived in intensely musical Vienna. He would rarely and reluctantly let himself be dragged to an opera (and then only a Mozart one), and when he did, would use such occasions to think about his patients or his theories. Freud’s nephew Harry (in a not-entirely-reliable memoir,
My Uncle Sigmund
) wrote that Freud “despised” music and that the whole Freud family was “very unmusical”— but neither of these assertions seems to be true. A much more delicate and nuanced comment was made by Freud himself, on the only occasion on which he wrote about the subject, in the introduction of “The Moses of Michelangelo”:

I find this comment at once puzzling and rather poignant. One wishes that Freud might have been able, on occasion, to abandon himself to something as mysterious, as delightful, and (one would think) as unthreatening as music. Did he enjoy and respond to music as a boy, when he was not committed to explaining and theorizing? We know only that he was denied the pleasure of music as an adult.

Perhaps “indifference” is not quite the word here and the Freudian term “resistance” would be nearer the mark— resistance to the seductive and enigmatic power of music. And it may be that a similar resistance underlay Nabokov’s disdainful comment that music affected him “merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.”

For many of us, the emotions induced by music may be overwhelming. A number of my friends who are intensely sensitive to music cannot have it on as background when they work; they must attend to music completely or turn it off, for it is too powerful to allow them to focus on other mental activities. States of ecstasy and rapture may lie in wait for us if we give ourselves totally to music; a common scene during the 1950s was to see entire audiences swooning in response to Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley— seized by an emotional and perhaps erotic excitement so intense as to induce fainting. Wagner, too, was a master of the musical manipulation of emotions, and this, perhaps, is a reason why his music is so intoxicating to some and so hateful to others.

Tolstoy was deeply ambivalent about music, because it had, he felt, a power to induce in him “fictitious” states of mind— emotions and images that were not his own and not under his control. He adored Tchaikovsky’s music but often refused to listen to it, and in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” he described the seduction of the narrator’s wife by a violinist and his music— the two of them play Beethoven’s
Kreutzer
Sonata together, and this music is so powerful, the narrator comes to think, that it can change a woman’s heart and cause her to be unfaithful. The story ends with the outraged husband murdering his wife— though the real enemy, he feels, the enemy he cannot kill, is the music.
3

R
obert Burton, in
The Anatomy of Melancholy,
wrote at length of music’s power, and John Stuart Mill found that when he fell into a state of melancholia or anhedonia as a young man, music and nothing else had the power to pierce through this, to give him, at least for a while, a feeling of pleasure and being alive. Mill’s depression, it is thought, stemmed from the ruthless regime imposed by his father, who demanded incessant intellectual work and achievement from the time John Stuart was three, while doing little to nurture or even recognize his son’s emotional needs. Not surprisingly, the young prodigy had a crisis when he reached adulthood and entered a state in which nothing could give him any pleasure except music. Mill was not choosy about the music; he wanted cheerful, lively melodies, and Mozart, Haydn, and Rossini were equally to his taste. His only fear was that he might exhaust the musical repertoire and have nothing left to turn to.

The continuing and general need for music which Mill described is distinct from the crucial effect that particular pieces of music may have at particular times. William Styron, in his memoir
Darkness Visible,
described such an experience, when he was very close to suicide:

I have had a few similar experiences myself, in which music has “pierced my heart,” in Styron’s words, when nothing else could— especially, perhaps, in bereavement.