Oliver Sacks Searched The Brain For The Origins Of Music

On Science Friday’s 33rd anniversary, excerpts from a classic interview with neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks about music and the brain.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:12Speaker 03

  Music is an integral part of the human experience.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  The executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like 20 or 30 different parts of the brain which are recruited.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  It's Thursday, November 14th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Sci-Fry producer Kathleen Davis. Music was among the many topics that the late neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote extensively and thoughtfully about. Earlier this month, his longtime collaborator Kate Edgar, who also leads the Oliver Sacks Foundation, released a book of Dr. Sacks's letters. And the New York Public Library recently acquired Sacks's entire archive. Here's a conversation between Ira Flatow and Oliver Sacks from 2007 about his book, Musicophilia.

• 2:05Ira Flatow?

  Let me start with the first, one of the major points that you make in your book is that, that our brains are wired for music the same way we're wired for language.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Well, and even more extensively, um, there, there's no particular music center, but there are many different parts of the brain, many networks, many systems, in the auditory parts of the brain, the visual parts, uh, the executive parts, the motor parts, and they're like twenty or thirty different parts of the brain, uh, which are recruited for musical experience and performance.

• 2:41Ira Flatow?

  Uh huh.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  And this is much wider, uh, than for speech, which is a reason why if people lose language in aphasia, they still have music available.

• 2:50Ira Flatow?

  Uh huh. And, and you, you quote, uh, Steven Pinker in the foreword of your book in a preface saying, you know, there's really no biological reason for we as an animal to be so, have music such an integral part of ourselves. Do you agree with that?

• 3:04Speaker 04

  No, I think I'd, um, I disagree rather strongly, although, although really one can only speculate. But music occurs and the central in every culture we know of, we have known of, there are musical instruments which go back fifty thousand years, bone flutes which have much the same tonal intervals as we have now, uh, with things like, uh, something which is exclusively human and doesn't have an analog in speech.

• 3:28Ira Flatow?

  Uh huh.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Is our movement synchronized with beat, with rhythm. And one sees every child spontaneously starts to dance or to keep time. You don't see this in a chimpanzee. This seems to be an exclusively human thing. And, and it wouldn't have been preserved, I mean, to invert the argument, uh, if it hadn't been useful.

• 3:50Ira Flatow?

  Uh huh.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  I mean, Darwin thinks of music in terms of, uh, courtship. He felt was a, had a strong evolutionary sexual selection. I, I also wonder about a cultural selection, because music is so powerful for bonding people together.

• 4:05Ira Flatow?

  Right. Uh, you say it's not, it's not only what, that we, that we appreciate music on an emotional level, but that we have a, quote, largely unconscious structural appreciation of music. What, what do you mean by that?

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Um, well, uh,

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Uh, with experience, uh, uh, as with language, I think, as it were, the grammar of music or of particular music, the rules, the laws, the way it is going, um, come to one. And so, um, much of listening to music is anticipation.

• 4:37Ira Flatow?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  And, uh, and one can whistle along sometimes with a piece one has never heard. You are almost composing it with the composer. He's hinting all the while as to where it's going.

• 4:48Ira Flatow?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  And, uh, if, uh, there won't get a sudden sense of shock or dissonance if there's, if there's a surprise.

• 4:54Ira Flatow?

  Hmm. You say, uh, you talk about having a musician's brain. Are the brains of musicians really different than the brains of non-musicians?

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Well, everyone's brains are different, but the brains of musicians are grossly different. A man called Schlaug, Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard, has shown that various structures in the brain, the corpus callosum, big band between the hemispheres, auditory cortex, motor cortex, visual cortex, are all visibly enlarged, or so visibly enlarged in musicians, that you could look at a brain and say, I think that's a musician's brain, whereas you couldn't say it's a mathematician's brain or an artist's brain.

• 5:28Ira Flatow?

  So which came first? Did the brain shape make you a musician, or did being a musician change the shape of your brain?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Well, it's probably not, not an either or, but, but, but we do know that a lot of training, uh, like the Suzuki method, can make a lot of difference in a year. On the other hand, it's, it's obvious that a, you know, the Mozart's of this world are, are born as well as made.

• 5:48Ira Flatow?

  Hmm. Let's, let's talk about some of the patients and some of your own experiences with music. And I think, let's start with the thing that all of us have experienced. It's that, that tune you get into your head, and when you hear it, you, you could have it, you were talking about people have it for days, weeks, months.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:04Ira Flatow?

  The brain, brain worm, is that what you call it?

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Well, uh, the music industry originally called it an earworm. I, I somehow like the term of a brain worm, because I imagine it boring into the brain. And certainly, it goes round and round in the brain. I mean, I think all of us have, have a sort of involuntary tunes which go through the head and which are often pleasant and sometimes and usually associated with thoughts or moods. With a brain worm, this has gone wrong, and you will have a fragment of tune which gets into a loop and goes round and round and round, and loses all sense and all connection, and is very difficult to stop sometimes.

• 6:40Ira Flatow?

  Hmm. And just has to go away on its own, or?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean.

• 6:43Ira Flatow?

  Can you talk yourself out of it at all?

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Some people can, or they will sing it through to the end, or they will sort of slap cold water on their face or jump up and down. But sometimes you just have to wait for it to go away.

• 6:55Ira Flatow?

  Is there one that's, you know, should we start one now?

• 7:00Ira Flatow?

  If you got a tune that get everybody in our audience for the rest of the day tuning in there.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Well, actually, as you said that, I started da da da da.

• 7:07Ira Flatow?

  Oh, Beethoven's.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  I started to have a Beethoven one.

• 7:11Ira Flatow?

  All right, we'll have the whole country on Beethoven. Let's talk about, you write about musical hallucinations. One of your patients, talk about musical hallucinations.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Well, a hallucination is quite different from imagery or brain worms. With a hallucination, you suddenly hear it as if it were real. It's just like perception, indistinguishable. People are very startled. They look around, they say, hey, you heard that? They look for a radio or something. And only if they can't find an external source, they then realize that something unprecedented is happening in their brain or their mind. And they're often very scared because it is unprecedented, it's uncontrollable. And people say, you know, hearing things, am I crazy? In fact, this is not at all like hearing voices. It's not at all like a psychotic hallucination. It tends mostly to occur, not exclusively, mostly in people who are pretty deaf.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  And it's as if when the hearing parts of the brain aren't getting their usual input, their usual nourishment, then they dig down into memory and they activate themselves. So usually, these hallucinations are usually of popular songs, hymns, whatever, one has heard in early life.

• 8:21Ira Flatow?

  Let's talk about something that's really fascinating. The orthopedic surgeon who was struck by lightning and had suddenly an onset of musical interest that never had before, never had it before in his life.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  He was in his early 40s and really had very little interest in music. Apparently not much talent, didn't have a piano in the house. But about three weeks after he'd been struck, which gave him a cardiac arrest, basically it killed him for a minute.

• 8:46Ira Flatow?

  Had to add a body experience, the whole thing.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And then he thought, you know, it's all over. But about three weeks later, over the course of a weekend, basically, he got transformed and he developed what he called an insatiable passion for hearing piano music, then for playing piano music, and then for composing piano music. And he acted on this straight away. He got a piano, he got a piano teacher. He continued to work as a surgeon, but he started getting up very early and all his time was spent with music. He said his wife wasn't best pleased. And this has continued for 15 years.

• 9:25Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  There's really been a transformation and a slight mystical or exalted feeling which goes with it. He feels he may have been saved for the specific purpose of delivering this. He talks, he says, he feels he tunes into heaven for his music.

• 9:39Ira Flatow?

  Now, how do you, as a scientist, explain this?

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Well, I asked him and he said, as a doctor, I can't explain. I think it's spiritual. And I said, well, fine, but might not anything spiritual have to operate via the nervous system. So he says, OK. I would suspect there's been some activation or reorganization of structures around the temporal lobes of the brain, the right temporal lobes, which are especially concerned with musical patterns and sometimes with mystical or religious feelings.

• 10:14Ira Flatow?

  Hmm.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  I think something happened there.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  After the break, what's going on in your brain when you're humming a song? How music can help people with Parkinson's and more with neuroscientist Oliver Sacks.

• 10:34Speaker 00

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• 12:07Speaker 05

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• 12:36Ira Flatow?

  You mentioned the tools, the tools we have today, the ability to actually image the brain as it's working and helping these things. Tell us how useful that is to you, someone studying music and your own.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Well, I think it would be useful here. Originally, he wasn't inclined to allow any sort of investigation, but he will allow it now. And I think we could actually watch his brain while music is coming to him. He'll say it comes from heaven. You know, I might say in my reductive way, heaven is in the temple lobes, hell as well.

• 13:07Ira Flatow?

  Well, is there a music center in the brain, or is it distributed?

• 13:12Speaker 04

  It's widely distributed, but the um, but elaborate the the final synthesis uh a lot and their emotional components probably especially have to do with temporal lobe and its connections.

• 13:25Ira Flatow?

  If if I'm listening to a song, I'm humming or make i- is it actually playing in my brain?

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Oh, it's absolutely playing in your brain, and even if you don't make any movement to keep time, the rhythm is playing in your brain. So there's a it really is a little internal performance.

• 13:41Ira Flatow?

  Let's go to Janet in Tucson, Arizona. Hi Janet, welcome to Science Friday.

• 13:45Speaker 06

  Okay, well, I come from a real musical family. I'm actually related to Felix Mendelsohn. And and music is so much part of my life. I'm a vocalist and my step grandson is cannot stand music in any any form. It just freaks him out completely. And I was wondering if you've ever heard anything like this. I mean, the kid's seven years old and he cannot stand any kind of music.

• 14:10Ira Flatow?

  Hmm. He writes, you write about that in your book?

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Um, well, not enough, you know. Quite a lot of people have been telling me about musicophobia and a hatred of music or and I think I probably should have written more. I wonder what goes on in a seven year old. Is is he averse to all music?

• 14:27Speaker 06

  Yes, all music. He can't stand it. I'm wondering if it's a function of some form of autism.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  Does he recognize the music he dislikes?

• 14:34Speaker 06

  Um, he just doesn't like any kind of music at all. If there's any kind of music at all, he he can't stand it.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Okay, because there are some people with a rare disorder called amusia, and these people don't have pitch discrimination. They can't hear tones and semitones. They don't really hear music as such. They may just hear it as noise. One of my patients with this said it's like pots and pans being thrown around in the kitchen, and this would certainly make one hate music. But I I mean, one needs to sort out what's going on with your boy.

• 15:04Ira Flatow?

  Could he grow out of it?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Um, well, I hope he can grow out of it. He'll be helped out of it because there's a huge source of joy and you know, one wants a innocent joy in music.

• 15:15Ira Flatow?

  Wait, can a mother like Janet do anything? Take her son?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I I think she needs to sort of find out what's happening and and whether the audiologist will do this or or the psychiatrist or the neurologist.

• 15:27Ira Flatow?

  Good luck, Janet.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 15:29Ira Flatow?

  Let's talk about some of the other kinds of patients. You've had a patients with extraordinary talent for music, but severe deficits in other cognitive activities.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  One sometimes see this in people with Williams syndrome. This is a rare congenital syndrome where people are often precocious and gifted in language and music, and they're very sociable, but with low IQs, they can't usually function independently. But people with Williams syndrome, all of them, a hundred percent of them, are enraptured by music. They're almost helplessly delighted or anguished or overwhelmed by it. A lot of them are musically talented, but all of them are enraptured. But the other thing is one can have a musical savant. These are usually people who have autism. And interestingly, at least half of the musical savants are also blind.

• 16:21Speaker 04

  And blindness disposes to musicality as well.

• 16:25Ira Flatow?

  Last time you were on our program, a couple of years ago, we got into music therapy. And that, to coin a phrase, really struck a chord in a lot of our listeners. And I'm struck by the wide range of patients, people with an array of neurological conditions, who can, as you talk about in your book, be reached by music.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Well, as I say, I first saw this with the Parkinsonian people who really have this motor problem. And for them, it's the rhythm which is important. The music doesn't have to be familiar or affect them in other ways. For people with Alzheimer's, it needs to be a familiar song, which has, especially, which has associations and resonance and stirs memory and mood.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  For people who've lost language, people who have aphasia, may often find they can sing and get a lyric with that. I mean, this can delight them, because it shows that language is there, although it may be embedded in the song. And there are ways now, or there's a lot of work, of disembedding the language, so they can reacquire it, sometimes with a different part of the brain, with the right side of the brain. And one sees that people with Tourette's Syndrome, with Huntington's, Korea, with autism, with with all sorts of conditions can respond very powerfully to music.

• 17:41Ira Flatow?

  When we hear music that is calming and soothing and revokes, evokes, you know, maybe the day you were out on the beach or something, are there actual runners highs? Like, are there endorphins that are released? Is this a real feeling? Does it, you know, there's a brain chemistry going on that create that soothing?

• 17:58Speaker 04

  There's, there's quite a lot of work on this and, you know, and both the physiology of, of thrills and chills, but also of calming music. You can investigate it electrically by doing EEGs or by brain imaging or by looking at some of the chemicals. And the changes are very real.

• 18:17Ira Flatow?

  Let's go to the phones, to Dan in Toledo. Hi, Dan.

• 18:21Speaker 07

  Hi.

• 18:22Ira Flatow?

  Hi there.

• 18:23Speaker 07

  See, I had heard that Hendrix was one of these people that had optical and audio nerves crossed so that you could.

• 18:32Ira Flatow?

  Well, can he, can you see, can you see the music? I guess, I think what he was going to talk about there. Are there people who see colors and things like that?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Quite a number of people have some crossing of the senses, as this man puts it, in which they will involuntarily and automatically have, see things, smell things, taste things as, as they hear them, or vice versa. One of the commonest is to see colors with music. And this is not just a metaphor, it's not just a poetic association. This is totally real, so real that people who have this can't imagine how it would be to be otherwise. I mean, I saw this, I, when the composer Michael Torquay came to visit me, he told me that when he was five, he said to his piano teacher, I love that blue

• 19:19Speaker 04

  piece. His piano teacher said, blue? And he said, yeah, D major, blue. And his piano teacher shook his head and said, well, not for me. You know, Michael says that 40 years later, he still remembers the shock of finding that someone didn't have it. 10 years later, he met a, as a teenager, he met someone else who saw colors with keys, but they, the colors weren't the same as his.

• 19:42Ira Flatow?

  Right. What is it about the brain that it can survive all these injuries that happen to it, but the music is still there?

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Well, it's because so many different parts of the brain are recruited for, for listening to music and remembering music. And some of them may get damaged, but others are still there. But also, the brain is very plastic. And if one part gets damaged, other parts can take over. You see this with, with many things.

• 20:09Ira Flatow?

  To me, it's a recording in there. It's not that simple. I mean, if the recording part gets damaged, I put a hole in my, you know, my LP, it's going to be a skip in that spot. You're saying that it's not so simple, that other parts may be able to fill that in?

• 20:22Speaker 04

  I think it's not, it's not like a phonograph or, you know, I think that the pitch, the rhythm and all sorts, all sorts are put in separately. And absolutely one, you may miss one part, but others will fill in.

• 20:35Ira Flatow?

  Isn't it amazing that we, that so much of the brain is involved in music that is not, you know?

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Well, you know, one would like to ask Steven Pinker, who feels that music is useless and, you know, why, why this should be so. I mean, I think the question has to be put. Why are we so musical if music is of no utility?

• 20:54Ira Flatow?

  That was my conversation with physician and author Dr. Oliver Sacks from 2007.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  That's all the time that we have for today. Lots of folks helped make the show happen, including Santiago Flores. Emma Gomez. Diana Plasker. Robin Casmer. And many more. Tomorrow, a roundup of the top science stories of the week. I'm Sci-Fry producer Kathleen Davis. Thanks for listening.