Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available good afternoon everyone and welcome my name is Kim Ricketts and I manage the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series welcome today I'm thrilled to welcome dr. Oliver Sacks back to Microsoft Research he's here today to discuss his latest work on the many ways that the human mind reacts to music as outlined in his series of case studies and wonderfully told stories in his new book musica philia dr. sacks is the best-selling author of nine earlier books on brain anomalies and was for 42 years the clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York this fall however Columbia University has appointed dr. sacks to the newly created position of Columbia artists which will allow dr. sacks to range freely across disciplines and departments giving lectures conducting seminars seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members in true interdisciplinary fashion dr. sacks Weber professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the University Medical Center while he is also teaching in the creative writing Department please join me in welcoming Oliver Sacks to Microsoft um thanks very much Kim am I am i audible okay it's a it's nice and unexpected to be here again or other unexpected books the last time it was in relation to my book uncle tungsten which was about being a boy chemist and mad for chemistry and this time is about music the actually I come from a fairly musical family as well as a fairly chemical family although I think I was probably one of the the least musical there but but I always adored music and and I always I think felt that it must be very important and so I was very surprised when as a student I read William James principles of psychology and found that in the fifteen hundred pages of this there's only a single sentence about music and that rather dismissive so James talks about the susceptibility to music which some individuals possess he says it has no zoological utility it corresponds to no object to the natural environment it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ just so with the susceptibility to seasickness and incidentally neither in William James's works nor Henry James's do you find any reference to music nor their biographies but I think they were really both quite unusual in this respect and that music does play a part in the lives of many of us most of us now I'm mostly going to as a physician talk about people I've seen patients correspondence and others but I think I'm probably needs to throw out a thought or two is to why we have any musical susceptibility if it has no zoological utility and has no reference to the external world it's some it's an an odd business music it does give on information in the usual sense about the natural world it's not representational like language but it does evoke deep feelings Darwin imagined that music preceded language and he imagined who postulated that musical tones and rhythms were used by our half human ancestors during the season of courtship when animals of all kinds of excited not only by love but by strong passions of jealousy rivalry and triumph other people like his contempt for her but Spencer thought that language came first and that music was a sort of offshoot I think Steven Pinker in our own day feel similarly he's called music auditory cheesecake and in terms a little reminiscent of William James he says what benefit could that be - diverting time and energy to making plinking noises as far as biological cause and effect are concerned music is useless it could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged now I I don't think I agree with him and and certainly one has to wonder why music exists and has a central function in every culture known to us why musical instruments bone flutes and so forth go back 50,000 years or so making music would seem to be perhaps the central part of being human and perhaps if it doesn't have zoological utility whatever that means it has cultural utility now there is no music in the world as there is no color or pain music is something we construct it is something which human nervous systems construct which human nervous systems are particularly equipped to construct as they are to construct language the complexity of construction the complexity of the systems involved is something which may not be immediately obvious anymore than it is with vision we somehow imagine that the visual world has given to us full of color and movement and depth and texture and meaning and you have to see people who have specific in abilities perhaps to perceive color or movement or depth or meaning to realize that there must be many many subsystems in the case of vision probably at least 40 or 50 subsystems which analyze different parts of the visual input and then all come together to create a visual world and it's similar with music many many parts of the brain are involved in fact far more of the brain is involved than with language and even possibly with vision and different parts of the brain are needed to perceive pitch rhythm Tambe mellow melodic contour many other parts to anticipate the shape of music what's going to happen and interestingly it's it's been shown that the brains of musicians and musically trained people are surprisingly different from those of non musicians or non-trained people there's a man called Gottfried Schlag at Harvard who has over the years made fascinating using MRI studies has made fascinating comparisons between the brains of musicians and of non musicians the corpus callosum between the two cerebral hemispheres is enlarged in musicians many there's a great enlargement of gray matter in the auditory cortex there are special systems of the frontal lobes which were involved with the anticipation of melody and the shape of music there are also all sorts of interesting motor systems and one currently one of the specifically human things as one can't listen to music without an impulse to keep time you see the spontaneously in all children you don't see it in a chimpanzee you don't see it in any non-human primate and possibly this business of synchronizing to a beat and music typically has a regular beat in a way which language doesn't this seems to be quite specific to human beings and even if you don't externally move to a beat your brain does and in fact one finds that many motor systems not only in the cortex but subcortical e in the basal ganglia and the cerebellum are involved in listening to music and also in imagining music their music was a very neglected subject if you look up neurology books before nineteen seventy you don't find any reference to music but just really over the last 10-15 years with functional brain imaging where you can see what's going on in the brain and real time when people listen to music or imagine music or play with music or compose music or hallucinate music now we're getting a very clear idea of how much of the brain is involved you can't look at a brain and say this is the brain of a mathematician or a visual artist or a verbal artist you can look at the brain and say this is probably the brain of a musician and the changes and then this is a testament both of the power of music and also to the plasticity of the brain and a year of intense of musical training say with the Suzuki method makes a grossly visible difference to the brain however the the system may fail to develop one way or another there as James says the oil of great variations and musical susceptibility where's there no such variations or no similar variations probably in in visual perception or perhaps and verbal ability we are all verbally competent more or less and I mean and in a Chomsky dawei this this seems to be a given if every human being with an IQ above 30 who was exposed to language whether it's sign language or speech becomes linguistically competent now with music probably about 5% of the population are said to be somewhat tone-deaf or to have a tin ear this they may they won't have any difficulty recognizing music and they may love music and they may ball it out when they're having a shower in a way which delights them and and upsets other people I was actually a myself or other driven from religion from religious practice by the fact that in our temple I used to go to in the Bronx there was a tone-deaf Cantor and I was told he was a and cantillation sometimes there are certain ambitious forms of cantillation which involve very very elaborate tonal excursions and and deviations and then and then you have to come back to the same spot you have to you have to have a tonal Center he would when he returned if he returned he'd be he'd be half an octave away and you know and like like part of moonship screaming faces iiiii would exit from the synagogue and acoustic agony and I never went back and and if I'm an old Jewish atheist that's why however much rarer and neurologically in a way a more interesting are those with an absolute a museu of one sort or another a complete inability to perceive pitch or with them or Tambor or some other aspect of music I first heard of this in a way when I was talking to a colleague of our the eminent French neurologists called left meat and let me said to me that when he heard music he could either say that it was the Mercier's or that it wasn't I unfortunately I forgot to ask him how he could tell if it was the Marsyas and I suspect was books people sort of saluted or or stood up or whatever and now I think I'm going to take the liberty of reading you a little bit about a a patient a woman I saw fairly recently who who has such a difficulty she says she traces it right back to her earliest year she said that when she was in kindergarten children were asked to sing their names she didn't know what was meant by this she couldn't do it and she didn't know what the other children were doing and then she said when she was 6 or 7 was a music recognition class there were five pieces one of them was the will and the William Tell Overture er she she couldn't hear the difference between any of them she said that her father got an old Victrola and records and played them and thought you know at least she can learn but she couldn't learn a family friend tested her and found she had the greatest difficulty with pitch discrimination no tones would have to be half an octave apart for her to distinguish them so she didn't perceive semitones she lacked the building blocks for making a scale for making music she came from a musical family and her and her mother in particular and thought she had something against music and it's um it's very unfortunate when when a sort of amour animus is put in and so poor Dolores did her best to enjoy music and she she went as a teenager she started to go to concerts boyfriends took her to concerts she would watch other people's reactions and try and imitate them but basically for the for her she said the experience was somewhere between unintelligible and excruciating and I asked her what music was actually like for her and she said if you go into the kitchen and throw all the pots and pans on the floor that's what it's like which sort of gave me the shivers she said that when her mother had become ill and had a stroke had gone into a nursing home music was very precious and very valuable for her but she said that if she got ill and went into a newsroom a nursing home music would would finish her off now I am I asked her if now it should be said this some this woman had no difficulty perceiving voices and the subtlest inflections of voices and she loved going to theater she loved poetry readings she read and recited poetry very nicely herself she had no difficulty with auditory with with ambient sounds dogs barking sort of sings gurgling or whatever it was only the construction of music and in particular the tonality of music which which she couldn't accomplish she had a rather good sense of rhythm and then in the late 90s she read that a group and Canada was investigating such a condition she got very excited she said her husband that's what I have and she wrote the Canadian people and they investigated her and they told her yes that she was a genuine example of congenital amusia and they said this had a neurological basis it went with a certain anatomical anomaly a certain failure of white matter in the inferior frontal gyrus on the right side to develop it was not her fault she was not neurotic she said does anyone else in the world have this you know one of the if one is different from other people one fear is that once a thought the other fears that one is unique so they said you're not afford as real they said you're not unique we can introduce you to your a few brothers and sisters in in in a museum and she was happy too to meet others because in a way you know if if other people if music and other people had been unintelligible to her she was unintelligible to them which is a reason why she was an object of suspicion and finally they said to her you don't have to go to concerts anymore they said to know tell your husband you go I'll go to a movie and she said she wished she had been given that advice when she was seven rather than 70 um well a museu but once the system is set up to perceive music at any level it tends to be very robust and to survive extraordinarily well in face of brain damage this is especially striking if you see people with Alzheimer's disease with widespread cortical problems and you may find that they recognize and respond to music not after they they've lost the ability to respond to anything else and if they've been musical before that is preserved almost completely I saw this very strikingly again recently and I should you know basically as I'm a physician I'm a naturalist I'm a storyteller people come to me and they tell me about their experiences I may not be very good about interpreting them you're going to do this for me so I am I got a letter quite a lot of my encounters start with letters I really get thousands of letters and some of them intrigued me greatly but this one did it was for me I'm a woman writing to me about her father woody Geist she said that he started to show signs of Alzheimer's 13 years before and then now she said the plaque has apparently invaded a large amount of his brain and he can't remember much of anything about his life however he remembers the baritone part to almost every song he has ever sung he was performed with a twelfth man i cappella singing group for almost 40 years oops so I'm having difficulties music is one of the only things that keeps him grounded in the world he has no idea what he did for a living where he is living now or what he did ten minutes ago almost every memory has gone except for the music and she went on to say that a few months earlier he'd performed with the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes the evening he performed he had no idea how to tie a tie he got lost on his way to the stage but the performance perfect he performed beautifully and then I I had occasion to meet him and his wife and daughter he seemed fairly normal at first I mean he was carrying a folded New York Times which was a criterion of normality and in the New York but in fact he had no idea that it was the New York Times or indeed what a newspaper was and yet the the procedure of carrying a folded newspaper was um was still there he'd been a rather good tennis player but now he the word tennis racquet didn't mean anything to him the sight of a tennis racket didn't mean anything but if he was on a court and a tennis racket was put in his hands and a ball came towards him then he would show that he could still play tennis beautifully so if someone like this events have gone facts have gone information has gone everything explicit has gone but procedure is still there ways of doing things how to do things and it's a procedural memory which is especially crucial in performing music or some other things I recently saw an actor of a very eminent actor with amnesia again who and who could recollect very little of his life but who's acting skills and whose enormous acting repertoire or Shakespeare's a start were all were all there I said earlier that some lower parts of the brain that basal ganglia and cerebellum seem to be very important and they're especially important in performance which has a reason why you can be wiped out the cerebral cortex and yet still able to know to perform and I think all of us should should have some sort of performance that locked away in the sub cortex I mean you're young but you know at my age you know one wonders what will come next but it's some things like music and acting and and and all sorts of social repertoires there they're still there this instant he was a man who preserved his civility and his his charm and his humor I asked him at one point how he was and he said I think I'm in good health and this reminded me very much of something which was recorded of Emerson who became quite severely demented when he was in his sixties and when Emerson was asked how he was he would say quite well I've lost my mental faculties but I'm perfectly well you know you know dementia carries so much shame and stigma and medical errors day so once the musical system is set up it seems to be very robust and this because really the perception and the memory and the imagination and the performance of music recruit so many parts of the brain at so many levels from frontal lobe practically down to to spinal cord now although people vary quite a lot and their ability to to evoke a tune voluntarily I think that most of us have Tunes going through our heads and and once our attention was drawn to this I think we we become even more conscious and the tool can go through one's head and you may suddenly realize that's been going through your head half an hour or whatever it it's an interesting teleological puzzle if you want if music has no zoological utility you know why why the hell sure that should tools go through the head but they do and for sometimes one can find the origin of a tune you could make the Association something you've seen a feeling sometimes it will go with activity I know for example for myself when I swim and freestar which involves a one two three one two three one two three I am attempt Strauss forces start inside I swim to Strauss in something I think a lot a lot of athletes if they don't actually use iPods use internal music to coordinate themselves to synchronize to energize themselves to animate themselves I think inner music is is strangely important for for all of us and this is not really something which psychology or neurology has addressed much but also inner music can sometimes become excessive and then a tune which has originally been relevant and charming starts to repeat itself again and again and again and again and to get into a loop and a loop which one can't stop you know people in the music trade talk about sticky music or tenacious music or ear worms the term ear worms is used i I rather prefer brain worms and these things bore themselves in let me redo if I can find it a little bit of a but I thought it was funny a description from a friend who I don't know the particular songs he's talking about I have to say and I need to say my own musical background is rather now though I is Western European from 1600 to 1900 and that's it but a friend of mine described to me how he had been fixated on the song love and marriage a tune written by James Van Heusen a single hearing of the song a thank Sinatra rendition uses the theme song of the television show married with children was enough to hook him he quote got trapped inside the tempo of the song and 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 countered to a hundred I splashed water on my face I tried talking loudly to myself anyhow finally it would faded away although when he told me about it it got reactivated now I think this is close to a universal I suspect that most of you here have had ear worms or will have them I I suspect they're becoming common are as we become almost helplessly exposed to music all the while not only music mmm if we're not actually plugged in all the while there's there's music and every mall every swimming pool every restaurant and bar and and we can't close our ears also to have a an ear worm you don't have to attend it doesn't need to be any attention to the music the this sort of repetition seems to be pre perceptual a single unwitting unconscious exposure and and and you can be in trouble Mark Twain gave a delightful wrote a delightful story in the 1870s about an earworm and and how the afflicted person finally confessed this to their pastor who then in turn got the ear worm and spoke to his congregation about it and infected all of them and there's something highly contagious about this and now on our wicked exploitative world sort of advertisements undone and theme songs look for ways to to hook the mind whether their particular sort of melodic works particular repetitions particular whatever's our our musical susceptibility can become excessive and pathological and mechanical and if one does functional MRIs you can sort of see the ear worm going round like a little like a little vortex and roll em and some sort of electrical Harlequin and so I don't think that this really has any parallel in other senses the I mean perhaps the nearest to sometimes some words or thoughts which go out obsessively this can especially happen in people with Tourette syndrome very rarely in the visual world people who have hallucinations they sometimes could have something called pal anoxia whence if someone walks past they will then see a vision of them walking past again and again but this is very aware pala laelia and and pattern op Co these these circular things are where accepted music where I think they universal now I think they go to mention one other strange and I think also rather common excess which can go with musical imagery or those different from imagery and this is musical hallucination and hallucination is not like imagery it's like perception and you hear that you know when someone hallucinates they're immediately startled they look around where where's the music coming from to someone turn on a radio you know their band outside and only when one can't find an external source you were then forced to the bewildered and frightening thought that maybe a bit of your brain is has become autonomous and is just generating this by itself um let me read you again a little bit of a letter from someone I love receiving letters with with these conversations with rich descriptions this was a woman who described her musical hallucinations started last November when I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law after turning off the TV and for paying to retire I started hearing Amazing Grace it was being sung by a choir over and over and over again I checked with my sister to see if they had some church service on TV but they had Monday Night Football or somesuch so I went onto the deck overlooking the water the music followed me I looked down on the quiet coastline and the few houses with lights and realized that the music couldn't possibly be coming from anywhere it had to be in my head so that's how it often starts usually the music proliferate and one of my correspondences talked about what he called his intracranial jukebox its characteristic that one cannot stop the music though one can sometimes switch it to another tune another part of the jukebox of the repertoire with somewhat similar rhythm or melody or theme anyhow this lady enclosed what she called her playlist and beside Amazing Grace it had the Battle Hymn of the Republic Beethoven's Ode to Joy the drinking song from La Traviata a tisket a tasket and what she called a really dreary version of we three kings of Orient are instead this is a woman I should have said now in her 70s with a somewhat religious background one night she wrote I heard a splendidly solemn rendition of Old MacDonald had a farm followed by thunderous applause I decided that as I was obviously completely bonkers I better get the matter looked into well she'd heard that people with Lyme disease can have musical hallucinations she'd heard the people who take too much aspirin can get musical hallucinations anyhow she had everything checked and and she had a cat scan and an MRI and aegs and really nothing turned up I saw her again fairly recently and she is still having these although in a way she can live with them now one when can't sometimes musical hallucinations like ear worms may be very very unpleasant I saw one man a while back who told me that his hallucinations which at first he would only have when he traveled by plane or train when the sound of the plane or train would be elaborated into melody would be added but then one day when he got off the plane the music continued I saw him a few weeks later and I said what are you hearing and he said the music he was hearing was all tonal and corny and I said that's a strange choice of adjectives and he said well his wife was a an eminent composer of atonal music and his own a doubt tastes well for Schoenberg but this wasn't what he had been hearing he'd been born in Germany in the 1920s he said first of all he said he heard some disgustingly sentimental German lullabies and then he heard some Nazi marching songs which were terrifying because as a Jewish boy and growing up in Hamburg in the 1930s you know he had been terrified in the Hitler and so the earworms I'm sorry the hallucinations are nearly always regurgitation of music from early life and they sometimes have a personal stamp they they will always have a sort of cultural stamp so so as it were people who grew up in the 1940s will hallucinate music in the 1940s the top ten of the 1940s become the top ten of the cortex or or whatever 90% of the people with musical hallucinations are the Deaf and some of them extremely death musical hallucinations like tinnitus may come on as one loses hearing as the brain has less and less input and less and less to digest and work on and one way or another and there seem to be very similar things in the visual sphere the brain can't be inactive and if there's some form of sensory deprivation then the brain will start to generate its its own output one has this generally with sensory deprivation you have it with people who are on becalmed sailing ships or on camels and the deserts but also if there are specific forms of sensory deprivation if there's ordered through deprivation you hear music interestingly you don't hear voices or noises for the most part despite the thunderous applause you know people often afraid to mention this they think hearing things seeing things and I must be going crazy and you know as a physician and a naturalist whether one one needs to listen carefully and to reassure people and to say look these are not psychotic hallucinations they're not voices they're not addressed you they don't accuse or seduce or cajole or persecute you know this is um this is sort of in a way purely neurological although nothing is purely neurological at this level of course verses bounty be informed by by the circumstances of of someone's life there's no there's no gin or music there's only particular pieces of music interestingly as people lose their vision they can become prone to visual hallucinations and sometimes if one just loses vision and part of the visual field that part of the visual field may become filled with visual hallucinations now so I don't know how to end up but I really don't have to end up but just a third open to you and there is this this funny thing the brain does and apparently only the human brain I mean for the moment I'm going to exclude birdsong and whale song because I think these are rather stereotyped and they are codes with specific functions whereas I think making music and human beings as as much more important and different and as it's also a crucial sort of bonding thing between people there's this strange thing the brain does it makes no intellectual sense it's a playing with patterns that doesn't represent anything and it doesn't tell you anything and yet I think the deepest feelings in the world and some of the strangest and most elevated states of mind can be induced by music and why why the hell is it going on and at this point I leave it to you okay thanks yeah by the way I am I should say I'm very deaf and you may have to feel questions yes a friendship University found 50% more synesthetes in the music clackety than the other faculties a friend found 50% more synesthetes in the music faculty than the other faculties uh-huh I wonder I mean this was just a university project it didn't go anywhere do you know anything about this about that particular project I do know that the Communist forms of synesthesia our audio-visual ones and in particular colored music if you look up the Oxford Companion to music you will find 18 pages on colored music and the in general the until weather recently in fact until about a year ago synesthesia was regarded as fairly rare maybe like 1 in 2,000 that have just been bumped up by two orders of magnitude it has now thought that synesthesia is about 1 in 20 I mean this in itself is interesting because it shows how underreported it was one of the reasons has underreported is that people with synesthesia don't feel they've got anything I mean is just the way they are I am one of the people I've spoken with as a composer who has absolute pitch as well and he described him how when he was about 5 he said to his music teacher I love that blue piece blue they say yeah d-major blue and his music teacher said not not for me and he he was very shocked because he couldn't see and he still can't see 40 years later how someone can hear D and not see blue and some years later he did meet some other musical synesthetes and thought our will all sort of be together now but in fact no two of them agreed about the colors but it's I mean the synesthesia may extend to to any sense there was a fascinating description in nature recently of a professional musician who could taste various musical intervals I mean a minor third was like garlic or whatever these now these are not just mental associations or metaphorical things these are actual sensory couplings which are involuntary irresistible go back to people's earliest memories and remain more or less immutable throughout life and they're not always easy to describe so although say Michael toki sees and say G minor is yellow he said what's not really yellow perhaps oka gay gamboge no he and what will finally come out is that the synesthetes may see colors which they have never seen with their eyes Ramachandran a neurobiologist and the west coast has written about a colorblind synesthetes who sees what he calls martian colors when when the brain is stimulated sin aesthetically and this is a real physiological thing I mean and people with this you see you know areas of the visual cortex light up when they listen to music or whatever but I'm sorry I'm but I still haven't addressed your you know your product question I I think is interesting this might be so I can't say more and quite a number of people with them synesthetes themselves often feel that they are an unusually gifted an artist dick Bunch but then people with Tourette's and autism also feel the same III mean I mean all in groups filled with our special positive qualities and they're probably right or possibly so I I don't know I'm I am I inserted I first heard of synesthesia as a loss some years ago I wrote my encountered a patient who had lost the ability to perceive color from brain injury or to imagine color he'd originally experienced color with music and then then he lost it one can have a sort of temporary synesthesia but that's not the same thing with various drugs as I suspect most of you know and with some seizures although the only common cause of permanent acquired synesthesia is blindness and if again if you if you lose if you lose sort of visual input you may become hyper visual and have all sorts of unusual connections including synesthesia for tones I'm wondering to talk about a temporal it does exist and Kay Guevarra describes it and the Motorcycle Diaries as to how he and whenever he heard a tango he would dance a mambo or maybe the other way around but he really couldn't couldn't get the rhythm but I would say it's much rarer because rhythm seems to be much more robustly represented now a quite different group of people who don't have rhythm or can't generate it are people with Parkinson's and then they may either be frozen or make little little stuttering movements and music I mean for me the interest in profession neurological interested music started with seeing these scattering or transfixed parkinsonian who could move fluently in gracefully and normally with music and only with music and the basal ganglia and trouble in Parkinson's and basically ordering and sequence and temporal organization and the estimation of time may all become almost impossible and music this way connectors are sort of post esis so called music and I I know about seven syndrome well with all of these seven syndromes there is one ability or perhaps two abilities which may be very very highly developed in people who are generally somewhat and frequently autistic typically the savant talent tends to appear very suddenly and sometimes almost full-blown I mean I saw this with a visuals drawing seventh Stephen will show whom I wrote about who suddenly at the age of six did beautiful drawings of of the Albert Hall and complex buildings in London that didn't seem to be any sort of warming up process and they're similar things with musical savants and I think the musical servants have real musical intelligence they can appreciate the structure of a fugue this is not something mechanical it has real musical intelligence and I think the most isolated of all intelligences can be musical intelligence um it can be very highly developed in a you know in you know genius and that can be be highly developed in who is know who can do who was scarcely even verbal there are thoughts that all the servant abilities may go with some abnormal or failure to develop left hemisphere functions in utero sort of the right hemisphere which is a great pattern generator and pattern recognizer is well ahead and development and so at at birth you are equipped or you will soon be equipped to analyze a visual and auditory world and a musical world then that ability tends to diminish with the development of language and abstract powers and left hemispheres in the third year of life or perhaps earlier but it's thought that many savants there is this so called anomalous sort of right hemisphere dominance but I I'm not sure that that's holds water too much am a colleague in Australia Alan Snyder is convinced that we all have a savant talents which are native or rather which are suppressed and that if one can he uses transcranial magnetic stimulation that if one can inhibit some of the activity in the left temporal and frontal areas then this may release or liberate the the suppressed abilities of the right hemisphere and people may have some savantism at the moment his results are a little soft and ambiguous although also fascinating and suggestive and it needs to be looked at more and there is an intriguing condition called frontotemporal dementia it's different from Alzheimer's it's not uncommon but it affects especially the frontal and temporal parts in the brain and if this begins and predominates on the left side and usually just on the left temporal lobe you may have astonished heightening Zoar emergences of artistic either visual or musical talent and if the person's frontal lobes are intact it may be of a high order and and in a way this is like a form of acquired Cervantes and rains of music music people are demonstrably you have you noticed any correlation between that and other abilities we in the computing field notice that the number of the people up and down the halls and it be musicians as well as programmers right yeah and of course sort of Marvin Minsky who is the the sort of found of artificial intelligence is a very good musician himself and it was written very interestingly and yeah well it's people people often talk about sort of um I don't know mathematics and music I I think there's a UH a fascinating book and a memoir by Victor vice cop who was a very good theoretical physicist and also a good amateur musician he has a chapter called Mozart and quantum mechanics in which he compares his reactions to to the two although he decides they'd really rather rather different although I think the so-called Mozart effect which was the in horse supposed enhancement of various abilities after listening to a little Mozart I I think that was hyped and I think there's nothing there I think there's quite a lot to suggest that intensive musical training can be good for one in various extra musical capacities and although I don't know specifically about about mathematics or whatever I know certainly do you know how James in fact that he found music useless yes then you've done a lot of research into this do you have some speculations or evidence on what the actual well I first I like I can only vaguely speculate I sort of you know as a physician I mostly see people who sort of come along and say I have a problem I can't hear music I have hallucinations I you know or whatever the my thought has especially to do with the bonding and synchronizing power of rhythm which seems to be specifically human and so that people will tend to dance together to sing together to play together to hunt together I imagine there's been a sort of powerful powerful bonding quality with rhythm again for because of because of its emotional power music seems to be summoned for every sort of purpose whether it's religious or martial or for consolation or for animation I mean music is the easiest way of turning people on or consoling people or whatever but and I sort of you know and I I imagine that these these powers must must cause it to know to to survive i I've never heard of a culture with no music except of course the Taliban but they said but that's anti culture although although I think Plato was rather against music he didn't like it in the academy he thought it might distract people oh of course there were all sorts of specific uses when Galileo wanted to measure the descent and the acceleration of objects down an inclined plane he timed this by humming a tune he is very difficult to you know music tends to impose its own tempo and the chronometer of the time were not as accurate as his musicality but I you know you can all speculate very curious about her language ability in terms of understanding intonation and pitch so like if somebody was worse in question and had a rising rate was she able to well that's a very good question and I should have addressed it yeah yeah she did she seemed to do very well and well in real life she did very well with that however this exact question has been looked at by a very good man called called anyroad Patel and Neurosciences who actually has a wonderful book called music language and the brain which has coming out next month and but he has removed some of the words from interrogate of sentences and just replaced them by by sounds and and then people like her can't get it so they depend very heavily on the actual verbal content

Channel: Microsoft Research

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Length: 56min 58sec (3418 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2016