Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (6 page)

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads. If Arthur C. Clarke’s Overlords were puzzled when they landed on Earth and observed how much energy our species puts into making and listening to music, they would have been stupefied when they realized that, even in the absence of external sources, most of us are incessantly playing music in our heads.

S
ometimes normal musical imagery crosses a line and becomes, so to speak, pathological, as when a certain fragment of music repeats itself incessantly, sometimes maddeningly, for days on end. These repetitions— often a short, well-defined phrase or theme of three or four bars— are apt to go on for hours or days, circling in the mind, before fading away. This endless repetition and the fact that the music in question may be irrelevant or trivial, not to one’s taste, or even hateful, suggest a coercive process, that the music has entered and subverted a part of the brain, forcing it to fire repetitively and autonomously (as may happen with a tic or a seizure).

Many people are set off by the theme music of a film or television show or an advertisement. This is not coincidental, for such music is designed, in the terms of the music industry, to “hook” the listener, to be “catchy” or “sticky,” to bore its way, like an earwig, into the ear or mind; hence the term “earworms”— though one might be inclined to call them “brainworms” instead. (One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as “cognitively infectious musical agents.”)

A friend of mine, Nick Younes, described to me how he had been fixated on the song “Love and Marriage,” a tune written by James Van Heusen.
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A single hearing of this song— a Frank Sinatra rendition used as the theme song of the television show
Married…with Children
— was enough to hook Nick. He “got trapped inside the tempo of the song,” and it ran in his mind almost constantly for ten days. With incessant repetition, it soon lost its charm, its lilt, its musicality and its meaning. It interfered with his schoolwork, his thinking, his peace of mind, his sleep. He tried to stop it in a number of ways, all to no avail: “I jumped up and down. I counted to a hundred. I splashed water on my face. I tried talking loudly to myself, plugging my ears.” Finally it faded away— but as he told me this story, it returned and went on to haunt him again for several hours.

Though the term “earworm” was first used in the 1980s (as a literal translation of the German
Ohrwurm
), the concept is far from new. Nicolas Slonimsky, a composer and musicologist, was deliberately inventing musical forms or phrases that could hook the mind and force it to mimicry and repetition, as early as the 1920s. And in 1876, Mark Twain wrote a short story (“A Literary Nightmare,” subsequently retitled “Punch, Brothers, Punch!”) in which the narrator is rendered helpless after encountering some “jingling rhymes”:

Two days later, the narrator meets an old friend, a pastor, and inadvertently “infects” him with the jingle; the pastor, in turn, inadvertently infects his entire congregation.

What is happening, psychologically and neurologically, when a tune or a jingle takes possession of one like this? What are the characteristics that make a tune or a song “dangerous” or “infectious” in this way? Is it some oddity of sound, of timbre or rhythm or melody? Is it repetition? Or is it arousal of special emotional resonances or associations?

My own earliest brainworms can be reactivated by the act of thinking about them, even though they go back more than sixty years. Many of them seemed to have a very distinctive musical shape, a tonal or melodic oddness that may have played a part in imprinting them on my mind. And they had meaning and emotion, too, for they were usually Jewish songs and litanies associated with a sense of heritage and history, a feeling of family warmth and togetherness. One favorite song, sung after the meal on Seder nights, was “Had Gadya” (Aramaic for “one little goat”). This was an accumulating and repetitive song, and one that must have been sung (in its Hebrew version) many times in our Orthodox household. The additions, which became longer and longer with each verse, were sung with a mournful emphasis ending with a plaintive fourth. This little phrase of six notes in a minor key would be sung (I counted!) forty-six times in the course of the song, and this repetition hammered it into my head. It would haunt me and pop into my mind dozens of times a day throughout the eight days of Passover, then slowly diminish until the next year. Did the qualities of repetition and simplicity or that odd, incongruous fourth perhaps act as neural facilitators, setting up a circuit (for it felt like this) that reexcited itself automatically? Or did the grim humor of the song or its solemn, liturgical context play a significant part, too?

Yet it seems to make little difference whether catchy songs have lyrics or not— the wordless themes of
Mission: Impossible
or Beethoven’s Fifth can be just as irresistible as an advertising jingle in which the words are almost inseparable from the music (as in Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” or Kit Kat’s “Gimme a break, gimme a break…”).

For those with certain neurological conditions, brainworms or allied phenomena— the echoic or automatic or compulsive repetition of tones or words— may take on additional force. Rose R., one of the post-encephalitic parkinsonian patients I described in
Awakenings,
told me how during her frozen states she had often been “confined,” as she put it, in “a musical paddock”— seven pairs of notes (the fourteen notes of “Povero Rigoletto”) which would repeat themselves irresistibly in her mind. She also spoke of these forming “a musical quadrangle” whose four sides she would have to perambulate, mentally, endlessly. This might go on for hours on end, and did so at intervals throughout the entire forty-three years of her illness, prior to her being “awakened” by L-dopa.

The phenomenon of brainworms seems similar, too, to the way in which people with autism or Tourette’s syndrome or obsessive-compulsive disorder may become hooked by a sound or a word or a noise and repeat it, or echo it, aloud or to themselves, for weeks at a time. This was very striking with Carl Bennett, the surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome whom I described in
An Anthropologist on Mars.
“One cannot always find sense in these words,” he said. “Often it is just the sound that attracts me. Any odd sound, any odd name, may start repeating itself, get me going. I get hung up with a word for two or three months. Then, one morning, it’s gone, and there’s another one in its place.” But while the involuntary repetition of movements, sounds, or words tends to occur in people with Tourette’s or OCD or damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, the automatic or compulsive internal repetition of musical phrases is almost universal— the clearest sign of the overwhelming, and at times helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music.

There may be a continuum here between the pathological and the normal, for while brainworms may appear suddenly, full-blown, taking instant and entire possession of one, they may also develop by a sort of contraction, from previously normal musical imagery. I have lately been enjoying mental replays of Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Piano Concertos, as recorded by Leon Fleisher in the 1960s. These “replays” tend to last ten or fifteen minutes and to consist of entire movements. They come, unbidden but always welcome, two or three times a day. But on one very tense and insomniac night, they changed character, so that I heard only a single rapid run on the piano (near the beginning of the Third Piano Concerto), lasting ten or fifteen seconds and repeated hundreds of times. It was as if the music was now trapped in a sort of loop, a tight neural circuit from which it could not escape. Towards morning, mercifully, the looping ceased, and I was able to enjoy entire movements once again.

Brainworms are usually stereotyped and invariant in character. They tend to have a certain life expectancy, going full blast for hours or days and then dying away, apart from occasional after spurts. But even when they have apparently faded, they tend to lie in wait; a heightened sensitivity remains, so that a noise, an association, a reference to them is apt to set them off again, sometimes years later. And they are nearly always fragmentary. These are all qualities that epileptologists might find familiar, for they are strongly reminiscent of the behavior of a small, sudden-onset seizure focus, erupting and convulsing, then subsiding, but always ready to re-ignite.

Some of my correspondents compare brainworms to visual afterimages, and as someone who is prone to both, I feel their similarity, too. (We are using “afterimage” in a special sense here, to denote a much more prolonged effect than the fleeting afterimages we all have for a few seconds following, for instance, exposure to a bright light.) After reading EEGs intently for several hours, I may have to stop because I start to see EEG squiggles all over the walls and ceiling. After driving all day, I may see fields and hedgerows and trees moving past me in a steady stream, keeping me awake at night. After a day on a boat, I feel the rocking for hours after I am back on dry land. And astronauts, returning from a week spent in the near-zero-gravity conditions of space, need several days to regain their “earth legs” once again. All of these are simple sensory effects, persistent activations in low-level sensory systems, due to sensory over-stimulation. Brainworms, by contrast, are perceptual constructions, created at a much higher level in the brain. And yet both reflect the fact that certain stimuli, from EEG lines to music to obsessive thoughts, can set off persistent activities in the brain.

There are attributes of musical imagery and musical memory that have no equivalents in the visual sphere, and this may cast light on the fundamentally different way in which the brain treats music and vision. This peculiarity of music may arise in part because we have to
construct
a visual world for ourselves, and a selective and personal character therefore infuses our visual memories from the start— whereas we are given pieces of music already constructed. A visual or social scene can be constructed or reconstructed in a hundred different ways, but the recall of a musical piece has to be close to the original. We do, of course, listen selectively, with differing interpretations and emotions, but the basic musical characteristics of a piece— its tempo, its rhythm, its melodic contours, even its timbre and pitch— tend to be preserved with remarkable accuracy.

It is this fidelity— this almost defenseless engraving of music on the brain— which plays a crucial part in predisposing us to certain excesses, or pathologies, of musical imagery and memory, excesses that may even occur in relatively unmusical people.

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition. Every piece of classical music has its repeat marks or variations on a theme, and our greatest composers are masters of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability.

Is it possible that earworms are, to some extent, a modern phenomenon, at least a phenomenon not only more clearly recognized, but vastly more common now than ever before? Although earworms have no doubt existed since our forebears first blew tunes on bone flutes or beat tattoos on fallen logs, it is significant that the term has come into common use only in the past few decades. When Mark Twain was writing in the 1870s, there was plenty of music to be had, but it was not ubiquitous. One had to seek out other people to hear (and participate in) singing— at church, family gatherings, parties. To hear instrumental music, unless one had a piano or other instrument at home, one would have to go to church or to a concert. With recording and broadcasting and films, all this changed radically. Suddenly music was everywhere for the asking, and this has increased by orders of magnitude in the last couple of decades, so that we are now enveloped by a ceaseless musical bombardment whether we want it or not.

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong concerts of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to the environment— and for those who are not plugged in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and gyms. This barrage of music puts a certain strain on our exquisitely sensitive auditory systems, which cannot be overloaded without dire consequences. One such consequence is the ever-increasing prevalence of serious hearing loss, even among young people, and particularly among musicians. Another is the omnipresence of annoyingly catchy tunes, the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only in their own time— catchy tunes that may, in fact, be nothing more than advertisements for toothpaste but are, neurologically, completely irresistible.

I
n December of 2002, I was consulted by Sheryl C., an intelligent and friendly woman of seventy. Mrs. C. had had progressive nerve deafness for more than fifteen years, and now had profound hearing loss on both sides. Until a few months earlier, she had managed to get by with lip-reading and the use of sophisticated hearing aids, but then her hearing had suddenly deteriorated further. Her otolaryngologist suggested a trial of prednisone. Mrs. C. took a gradually rising dose of this for a week, and during this time she felt fine. But then, she said, “on the seventh or eighth day— I was up to sixty milligrams by then— I woke up in the night with dreadful noises. Terrible, horrific, like trolley cars, bells clanging. I covered my ears, but it made no difference. It was so loud, I wanted to run out of the house.” Her first thought, indeed, was that a fire engine had stopped outside the house, but when she went to the window and looked out, the street was completely empty. It was only then that she realized that the noise was in her head, that she was hallucinating for the first time in her life.