Music and the Mind. Anthony Storr

Breathing, walking, the heartbeat, and sexual intercourse are all rhythmical aspects of our physical being. In some pre-literate cultures rhythm is so highly developed that Western musicians cannot reproduce its complexities. Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, who were both professors of Music at the University of Chicago, begin their book The Rhythmic Structure of Music by writing:

      To study rhythm is to study all of music. Rhythm both organizes, and is itself organized by, all the elements which create and shape musical processes.¹⁵

      We take for granted the fact that rhythm imposed from outside has an effect upon our own capacity for organizing our own movements. For instance, a military band playing a march orders our strides and also reduces fatigue.

      David, a six-year-old autistic boy, suffered from chronic anxiety and poor visual-motor co-ordination. For nine months, efforts had been made to teach him to tie his shoe-laces without avail. However, it was discovered that his audio-motor co-ordination was excellent. He could beat quite complex rhythms on a drum, and was clearly musically gifted. When a student therapist put the process of tying his shoe-laces into a song, David succeeded at the second attempt.

      A song is a form in time. David had a special relationship to this element and could comprehend the shoe-tying process when it was organized in time through a song.¹⁶

      The effects of music upon patients with neurological diseases causing movement disorders are sometimes astonishing. Some patients can make voluntary movements to the sound of music which they cannot accomplish without it. The disease known as paralysis agitans, or Parkinsonism, causes an inability to co-ordinate and control voluntary movement. In his famous book on sufferers from post-encephalitic Parkinsonism, Awakenings, the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a patient who suffered from recurrent ‘crises’ characterized by intense excitement, uncontrollable movements, forced repetition of words and phrases, and other symptoms. Dr Sacks writes:

      By far the best treatment of her crises was music, the effects of which were almost uncanny. One minute would see Miss D. compressed, clenched and blocked, or jerking, ticcing and jabbering – like a sort of human bomb; the next, with the sound of music from a wireless or a gramophone, the complete disappearance of all these obstructive-explosive phenomena and their replacement by a blissful ease and flow of movement as Miss D., suddenly freed of her automatisms, smilingly ‘conducted’ the music, or rose and danced to it.¹⁷

      Dr Sacks later writes of these terrible cases: ‘The therapeutic power of music is very remarkable, and may allow an ease of movement otherwise impossible.’¹⁸ One of Dr Sacks’s patients who had taught music described herself as ‘unmusicked’. When frozen into immobility by the disease, she would remain helplessly unable to move until she was able to recall tunes she had known in her youth. These would suddenly release her ability to move again.

      Fortunately, the epidemic disease of encephalitis lethargica which caused this type of Parkinsonism has disappeared; and only sporadic cases are now recorded. But Parkinsonism is common in the elderly, and is said to occur in 1 in 200 people over the age of fifty. It is due to loss of cells in the substantia nigra; the part of the brain which produces dopamine. This is a chemical neurotransmitter which is involved in the passage of impulses from the brain to the voluntary muscles.

      Happily, most of us who listen to music do not do so because we need it as treatment for neurological disease; but the physical effects of music are undoubted, and, as we have seen, can be measured in people who are perfectly normal.

      Occasionally, music’s effect upon the brain can be the opposite of therapeutic. In rare cases, music can provoke an epileptic fit. The neurologist Macdonald Critchley described one patient whose epileptic attacks were exclusively brought on by music. Playing a record of Tchaikovsky’s Valse des Fleurs caused emotional distress followed by a typical grand mal; that is, a major epileptic seizure with convulsive movements, frothing at the lips, and cyanosis.¹⁹ Such attacks are without doubt ‘organic’; that is, the result of music as a physical stimulus acting directly on the brain, not secondary to the emotional effects of music. This can be shown by provoking a fit whilst the electro-encephalogram records the electrical activity of the patient’s brain.

      In most cases of musicogenic epilepsy, the seizures are induced by music played by an orchestra. Less commonly, a single instrument, piano, organ, or the ringing of bells may cause an attack. In very rare instances, even the recall of music can be sufficient provocation. Musicogenic epilepsy raises many unsolved neurological problems which it would be inappropriate to discuss in this context. But this rare phenomenon convincingly demonstrates that music has a direct effect upon the brain.

      Music and speech are separately represented in the two hemispheres of the brain. Although there is considerable overlap, as happens with many cerebral functions, language is predominantly processed in the left hemisphere, whilst music is chiefly scanned and appreciated in the right hemisphere. The division of function is not so much between words and music as between logic and emotion. When words are directly linked with emotions, as they are in poetry and song, the right hemisphere is operative. But it is the left hemisphere which deals with the language of conceptual thought. This difference between the hemispheres can be demonstrated in a variety of ways.

      It is possible to sedate one hemisphere of the brain whilst leaving the other in a normal state of alertness. If a barbiturate is injected into the left carotid artery, so that the left hemisphere of the brain is sedated, the subject is unable to speak, but can still sing. If the injection is made into the right carotid artery, the person cannot sing, but can speak normally. Stammerers can sometimes sing sentences which they cannot speak; presumably because the stammering pattern is encoded in the left hemisphere, whilst singing is predominantly a right hemispheric activity.

      The electrical activity of different parts of the brain can be recorded by means of the electro-encephalogram. It can be demonstrated that, if recordings of speech are played to six-month-old babies, the left hemisphere of the brain will show more electrical activity than the right. But if recordings of music are played, the right hemisphere shows the greater electrical response.

      If different melodies are played simultaneously through right and left earphones (so-called ‘dichotic listening’), the melody heard through the left earphone will be better recalled than that heard through the right. This is because the left ear has greater representation in the right hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere processes the perception of melody more efficiently than the left. If words are similarly presented, the reverse is true since the left hemisphere specializes in processing language.

      Patients who have suffered brain damage or disease may lose the ability to understand or make use of language without losing musical competence. The great Soviet neuro-psychologist A. R. Luria studied a composer named Vissarion Shebalin who, following a stroke, suffered from severe sensory aphasia; that is, he was unable to understand the meaning of words. Yet he continued to teach music and composed his fifth symphony which Shostakovich said was brilliant.²⁰ Luria’s famous patient, Zasetsky, whom he studied for many years, received a terrible bullet wound during the Second World War which extensively damaged the left side of his brain. His capacity to use and understand language was at first badly impaired. Amongst many other losses of cerebral function, his spatial perception was grossly distorted and his memory fragmented. Yet he liked music just as much as he had done before he was wounded, and could easily remember the melodies of songs, though not their words.²¹

      Howard Gardner reports the case of an American composer who suffered from a form of aphasia which left him with a persistent reading difficulty. But, although he could not understand the meaning of printed words, he had little difficulty with musical notation, and was able to compose music just as well as he could before his aphasia.²²

      The musician portrayed in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat suffered from a brain lesion which, although he could see, made it impossible for him to recognize the essential nature of objects, as the title of the book indicates. Yet his musical abilities were unimpaired: indeed, he could only dress himself, eat a meal, or have a bath, if he did so whilst singing. Music became the only way by which he could structure