Pod Insights Science Friday A Neurologist Investigates His Own Musical Hallucinations About this episode In a story from August, neurologist Bruce Dobkin discusses how he started hearing a phantom choir singing on a loop after he received a cochlear implant. He’s not the only one.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ira Flatow? Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.
0:19 Flora Lichtman? Hey, it's Flora Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday. We're revisiting some of our favorite conversations from 2025, and you're going to love this one. It's a conversation Ira had about musical hallucinations. Here we go.
0:34 Ira Flatow? Imagine you're sitting at home, and then, all of a sudden, you hear a men's choir building out the Star Spangled Banner. You check your phone, your computer, radio. Nothing's playing. You look outside. No one's there. This scenario is not a hypothetical. It's what happened to my next guest after he received a cochlear implant. But he's not just a patient. He's also a neurologist. So of course, he had to learn everything he could about his condition called musical hallucinosis. And he recently published an article in a medical journal about his experience to raise awareness about this surprisingly common condition.
1:17 Ira Flatow? Dr. Bruce Dobkin is a neurologist at UCLA Health, based in Los Angeles, California. Welcome to Science Friday.
1:25 Speaker 02 Thank you. Nice to be here.
1:27 Ira Flatow? Nice to have you. You know, Dr. Dobkin, what a story. It almost sounds like a tale out of an Oliver Sacks book.
1:34 Speaker 02 Actually, Oliver Sacks wrote about musical hallucinosis. He suffered with it, as his hearing got worse over time.
1:42 Ira Flatow? So were you surprised what had happened to you then if you had heard about it in Oliver Sacks's book?
1:49 Speaker 02 Well, I'm listening to the Star Spangled Banner, being sung by tenors and baritones every 62 seconds on a loop, nonstop, for three and a half weeks. And like you said, I was looking all over the place for where it might be. And then it suddenly struck me, do I have musical hallucinosis? And then, interestingly, within hours of the last sung stanza...
2:17 Speaker 02 New tunes, childhood songs came into play. Yankee Doodle, Old MacDonald, Mary had a little lamb, Go Down Moses, and dozens of others. Always sung with gusto and lyrical clarity. Every waking hour. And whenever I woke up overnight, there was another medley. And then it changed about eight months later. So I no longer heard either the Star Spangled Banner or nursery rhymes. I began to hear nonsense lyrics with the same four to six notes. And one went like this.
2:56 Speaker 02 A rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth, a rainbow teeth. And just all kinds of lyrics pop in there. I can't interrupt them. I can't alter them. I can't unplug this choir's jukebox.
3:13 Ira Flatow? And why do you think these unusual phrases were chosen? Do you have any idea?
3:20 Speaker 02 Well, the brain is always trying to make sense of nonsense. It's always trying to take what's within your expectations or your experience and come to a kind of neural agreement that what you're hearing is this or that. And so in the face of noise coming up through the brainstem, it turns out that music has certain rules that allow for regularity of sounds and familiar words to sort of come together. The drive from below, from this neural noise,
4:00 Speaker 02 forces some of these regions to begin to take this ambiguous input and place it, in a sense, within the powerful properties of music and reinforces it. And that becomes the sounds that we're hearing, the musical hallucinosis.
4:20 Ira Flatow? Now, this all started way back when you started progressively losing your hearing when you were 45 and then got a cochlear implant. What happened after that? Take us what happened following the implant. Your hearing didn't come back right away, did it?
4:40 Speaker 02 No. Well, what you hear initially with a cochlear implant is, at least in my case, was truly bizarre. The people whose voices I knew, I couldn't recognize their voices. All voices sounded like they were frying in bacon grease. You know, syllables just kind of sizzled in those first days and weeks of the cochlear implant. And I'm doing rehabilitation, trying to convert these odd sounds due to direct stimulation of the nerve as opposed to going through the cochlear and the hair cells. Suddenly, I'm dependent on electrical
5:19 Speaker 02 inputs, and they're very inexact. And so that probably contributed to perhaps the musical hallucinosis, this odd sense of sounds that weren't anything like normal hearing. And yet, our brains are so clever that we can eventually learn and appreciate what's coming in. Voices now sound to me like the voices I remember. I couldn't hear my grandkids speaking, and now I can, if they're right in front of me.
5:56 Ira Flatow? So all that distracting music and noise, it's worth it?
5:59 Speaker 02 It is.
6:00 Ira Flatow? What's it like being a neurologist, looking at your own brain and figuring this out?
6:07 Speaker 02 There's a mix, a real dissonance here between the repetitiveness of the song and the way it can especially interrupt in quiet places, like when you're laying in bed, and how fascinating it is that this is happening. And so, of course, I went and looked into a lot of the literature, contacted some fellow scientists, looked at brain imaging to try to get a handle on it. For example, in musical hallucinosis, the same parts of the brain are active as when you actually are hearing a song. All the auditory cortex, musical-related cortex, rhythmic-related cortex.
6:51 Ira Flatow? And how do you keep from going crazy, hearing that same song over and over again for how long?
6:57 Speaker 02 I try to mask it. I try to cope with it. So, for example, I'm talking to you. If there's a moment of utter silence, the lyrics will, and the melody will kind of leak through. And my wife said, I suddenly shouted out, "Mary, get your lamb out of my pasture." Mary had a little lamb was driving me crazy. Interestingly, the majority of people who have this, when they're surveyed, say that it doesn't particularly bother them. You know, there's no paranoia associated with it.
7:39 Speaker 02 And it turns out that when, let's say, a survey's done by audiologists who are asking their patients with hearing impairment, whether they've ever experienced musical hallucinosis. Sometimes as many as 4 to 20% will say they have experienced this on occasion, and some have it rather persistently. And almost none of them have ever mentioned it to another person.
8:08 Ira Flatow? That's amazing.
8:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, they, I don't know if they're embarrassed by it, or think it's, make them sound crazy, or it just doesn't annoy them enough, you know? There are plenty of blame mechanisms that allow us to reduce our sense of angst about it and just come to accept it.
8:28 Ira Flatow? Because there are no real treatments for it, you just have to accept it?
8:33 Speaker 02 Yes, and I, of course, like many people, didn't initially accept it. I looked through the literature. I found some various medications that might work. As a researcher myself, my area has been in motor neuroplasticity. How do we improve reaching and grasping or walking after stroke or spinal cord injury or traumatic brain injury? And so I had more than most people a rather good understanding of adaptations that the brain makes under various circumstances. My case is, and musical laryngosus is one of the, you know, relatively rare ones.
9:17 Ira Flatow? Has this experience changed your understanding of how the brain works?
9:23 Speaker 02 Yes, it has complemented my understanding. I mean, we're in a world where there's so much ambient visual input and ambient talking and noises in the environment. All these sensations are just constantly coming into the nervous system. It's constantly trying to recognize what in all this information that's coming in is likely to be important. And all of that probably developed a million more years ago as our hearing apparatus became more and more attuned to danger. What are the sounds around us?
10:07 Speaker 02 We want to be aware of them. So the brain is always taking in all this remarkable information and yet we don't have to process much of it. It's just been a decision, in a sense, made by the brain under a lot of input.
10:22 Ira Flatow? I want to thank you for sharing your experience with us. Fascinating discussion and good luck with you and your cochlear implant.
10:30 Speaker 02 Me and my choir. Thank you.
10:32 Ira Flatow? You're welcome. Dr. Bruce Dobkin, neurologist at UCLA Health, based in Los Angeles, California.
10:45 Flora Lichtman? This episode was produced by Shoshana Buxbaum. Check out some of our other favorites from 2025 at sciencefriday.com/2025. Thank you for listening. I'm Flora Lichtman.
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