The Listener

As Oliver Sacks observes the mind through music, his belief in a science of empathy takes on new dimension.

By Jonah Lehrer in Seed Magazine. Click Here for article.

In 1974 Oliver Sacks was climbing a mountain in Norway by himself. It was early afternoon, and he had just begun his descent when a slight misstep sent him careening over a rocky cliff. His left leg was "twisted grotesquely" beneath his body, his limp knee wracked with pain. "My knee could not support any weight at all, but just buckled beneath me," he wrote in A Leg to Stand On. Sacks began to "row" himself down the mountain, sliding on his back and pushing with his hands, so that his leg, which he'd splinted with his umbrella, was "hanging nervelessly" in front of him. After a few hours, Sacks was exhausted, but he knew that if he stopped he would not survive the cold night.

What kept Sacks going was music. As he painstakingly descended the mountain, he began to make a melody out of his movements. "I fell into a rhythm," Sacks writes, "guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes the Volga Boatman's Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my own. I found myself perfectly coordinated by this rhythm—or perhaps subordinated would be a better term: The musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded obediently...I was musicked along." Sacks reached the village at the bottom of the mountain just before nightfall.

A long convalescence followed, as he tried to regain the use of his injured leg, but the nerves in his limb had been severely damaged. When Sacks tried to walk, he was forced to consciously calculate his movements, to think before each step.

Once again, Sacks was saved by the sudden appearance of song. As he was struggling with physical therapy—and growing increasingly frustrated—his mind was inexplicably filled with the resonant strings of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. "In the moment that this inner music started," Sacks recounts, "the leg came back. With no warning, no transition whatever, the leg felt alive, and real, and mine." Sacks would later describe his vivid hallucinations of the Concerto as a kind of miracle, in which the music "descended like grace," reminding him of his own "kinetic melody." The song had restored him to himself.

I'm sitting in Oliver Sacks's office in New York City's Greenwich Village. Bookshelves are cluttered with neurological texts and periodic-table paraphernalia, so that a rod of tungsten (his favorite element) sits next to the collected works of William James. The air conditioner is perpetually set on high, its wheeze so loud that it drowns out the noises of city and street. This is where Sacks writes, at a desk facing the window by the air conditioner, on long yellow sheets fed into a manual typewriter. "I like the clacking of the keys," he says. "I can't write without that sound."

Sacks's latest book is Musicophilia, an exploration of the musical mind. As in his previous works, such as An Anthropologist on Mars, or The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks describes a series of ordinary people transformed by their extraordinary neurological conditions. He writes, for instance, of Tony Cicoria, who, after being struck by lightning, suddenly developed an insatiable obsession with Chopin's piano music. Before the accident, Tony had been a respected surgeon, with little interest in classical music. But now he insisted on spending all of his spare time practicing the piano. He even began composing his own pieces, "giving form to the music continually running in his head." Sacks also describes the case of Martin, who developed uncanny musical talents after contracting meningitis as a child. While the affliction impaired many aspects of Martin's mind, it left him with a limitless auditory memory. And then there's Mrs. C., who was besieged by musical hallucinations after becoming deaf. She couldn't stop hearing Christmas carols.

But Musicophilia is not just a collection of neurological case studies. There is an unexpected thread running through the book. That thread is Sacks's life. Even as he explores the neurology of music, Sacks returns, again and again, to stories from his own past, almost as if he's rediscovering them. There are the famous patients from Awakenings, who were unfrozen by the sound of music. There are the musical hallucinations of his mother, who, at the age of 70, was temporarily seized by patriotic songs from her childhood. And there's the tale of Sacks's own musical healing so that at times it feels like a memoir told through the prism of music. In Musicophilia, Sacks is both a sensitive observer and a subject. As usual, his own story is inseparable from the stories of his patients.

"I had no intention of writing a book devoted to music," Sacks says. "I'm not a musician or an expert on music...but this book found me. I began to revisit all of these older stories and present them in an explicitly musical light. That's the way writing is sometimes. One doesn't know what story one is telling until the story is told."

At first glance, music seems like an unlikely theme for Sacks. He's hard of hearing, and has to turn down his beloved air conditioner during our conversation. There's also something distinctly unmusical about Sacks's movements. He is charmingly clumsy, and his fingers are constantly fumbling with things, be it a mug of tea or that rod of tungsten. Sacks bears the scars of numerous falls, and says that he's so accident-prone his friends were convinced he wouldn't make it past the age of 30. It's hard to imagine his hands playing a piano (which, very occasionally, they do).

And yet, Sacks has always been enthralled by music. One of his earliest childhood memories is the sound of his mother singing Schubert Lieder in the drawing room. As a teenager, he spent endless hours "trembling" to Mozart symphonies, transfixed by feelings he couldn't comprehend.

Music has also played a crucial role in Sacks's work as a neurologist. In his writings, he uses music as a metaphor for his unusual approach to medicine. He cites a Novalis aphorism—"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution"—in several books, usually when discussing the therapeutic powers of music. But it's clear that Sacks also believes in a deeper, less literal connection between medicine and music, which is why Musicophilia reads like a retrospective. Music encapsulates two of the most essential aspects of his work: listening and feeling. The art form is the model for his method. As a doctor, Sacks is exquisitely attentive, not just to the symptoms, but also to the person. He treats each patient like a piece of music, a complex creation that must be felt to be understood. Sacks listens intensely so that he can feel what it's like, so that he can develop an "intuitive sympathy" with the individual. It is this basic connection, a connection that defies explanation, that allows Sacks to heal his patients, letting them recover what has been lost: their sense of self.

Of course Sacks is still a neurologist, intimate with the folds of the brain and the advances in neuroscience toward understanding our relationship with music. He knows that how we experience music is just an emanation of the temporal lobe, a side effect of neural electricity. But Sacks remains most interested in what anatomy lessons alone can't explain. "There is also a certain danger here," he observes. "A danger that the art of observation may be lost, and the richness of the human context ignored."

Sacks relays in Musicophilia, for example, the case of Dr. P, the infamous patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Dr. P's surreal condition left him unable to perceive objects and people, so that he was "lost in a world of lifeless abstractions." One of the most telling lines in the case history comes at the end, when Sacks is presenting his formal clinical diagnosis: "a massive tumor or degenerative processes in the visual parts of the brain." That single sentence, an ambiguous afterthought, is Sacks's sole nod to "classical, schematic neurology." Instead of looking for the physical source of the illness, Sacks immerses himself in the life of the patient. He describes Dr. P's experiences as a music teacher and the ways in which the sound of music eases his sensory confusion. (In order to get dressed, Dr. P had to sing to himself.) When Dr. P asks Sacks what's wrong with his brain, Sacks replies, "I can't tell you what I find wrong, but I'll say what I find right. You are a wonderful musician, and music is your life. What I would prescribe is a life which consists entirely of music." It's an astonishing prescription, wholly focused on preserving Dr. P's tenuous identity. This is what Sacks tries to treat: not the disease, not even the brain afflicted by it, but the person. Any science of the mind that "neglects the personal," Sacks says, "misses out on our most essential aspect." Although he meticulously follows the latest advances in neuroscience and applies that knowledge to his patients, Sacks is ultimately guided by his sympathetic instincts, his uncanny ear for the consonances and dissonances of being. "We underestimate the power of listening," Sacks says. "It is by listening to our patients that we can discover their humanity. It is the only way to grasp what they are going through."

Sacks was not always such a sympathetic character. Empathy was an epiphany for him, a late revelation. Long before Sacks was a famous neurologist, he was a struggling writer. After he received his medical degree from Oxford, Sacks decided to wander the world. He began, in 1960, with America. His parents thought his trip was just a brief vacation, but once he arrived, Sacks sent them a one-word telegram: "Staying." He traveled across the continent by motorcycle, racking up more than 10,000 miles on an "erratic, zigzag" journey. He fought wildfires in British Columbia and hitchhiked across Alabama with a trucker named Mac. He called himself "Wolf."

At the time, Sacks despaired of ever becoming a doctor. In a journal entry written in the summer of 1960, Sacks confessed that medicine wasn't his chosen profession. "Others chose it for me," he wrote. "Now I only want to wander and write. I think I shall be a logger for a year." While Sacks rarely talks about these years of his life—"They remain a bit of a mystery, even to me," he says—excerpts from his immense travel journals, which he reads aloud to me in a vintage British accent, provide a window into his development, both as a writer and as a person. Many of the entries resemble early Kerouac, filled with odes to the open road and vaguely mystical encounters with nature. His prose is loose yet lucid. And yet, this isn't the writing of the Oliver Sacks the world knows. Something is different.

Sacks had begun sending his journals to his friend Thom Gunn, a British poet living in San Francisco. While Gunn enjoyed Sacks's acutely observed travelogues, he found parts of the journals to be a "little nasty," full of "sarcasms and grotesqueries." Gunn would later write Sacks a letter in which he confided that, after reading Sacks's early prose, he had "despaired of your [Sacks] ever becoming a good writer...I found you so talented, but so deficient in one quality—call it humanity, or sympathy, or something like that."

In 1961, after a year on the road, Sacks finally "settled down" and began an internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. After completing a residency at UCLA, he moved to the Bronx and got a job in New York working in a neuropathology lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "I was awful at bench science," Sacks says. "Truly awful. I think the final straw was when I dropped some food into the ultracentrifuge. They said to me, 'Sacks, get out, you're a menace. Go see patients: You won't be able to do much harm to them.' That's when they sent me to Beth Abraham."

Beth Abraham was a chronic hospital, an asylum for patients for whom there was no cure. In this hopeless place, Sacks ended up working with the most hopeless patients. He was drawn to the "sleeping sickness" ward, filled with people who had been locked in a Parkinsonian trance for decades. An aftereffect of the 1920s encephalitis epidemic, the disease left the patients in an "ontological death," numb to everything around them.

Sacks was deeply moved by these frozen patients. "It was the experience of Beth Abraham that changed me," he says. "It was where I really came alive, almost for the first time in twenty years. I didn't just care for these patients. I lived with these patients." There was no medical treatment for sleeping sickness, and Sacks had nothing to offer the patients but unconditional kindness. "All I wanted was to give them a sense of being people again," he says, "to let them forge human relationships again, even if it was only with me."

In 1969 Sacks began a 90-day clinical study of L-DOPA, a new drug that was heralded as a miracle cure for Parkinson's patients. One group of his patients received the drug, while the other group received a placebo. The effects were immediate and profound. There was an "astonishing, festive 'awakening,'" as the L-DOPA patients suddenly emerged from their timeless limbo.

But the drug wasn't a cure. After a few months of treatment, Sacks's patients began to develop serious side effects, as their diseased brains adjusted to the increased levels of dopamine. And then, one by one, the patients began to sink back into their restless sleep. The "miracle" was temporary.

The following summer, Sacks sent a letter to The Journal of the American Medical Association, documenting the tragic results of his clinical study. His short letter provoked a storm of criticism. Some neurologists declared that the side effects never occurred, and that L-DOPA really was a cure. Others assailed Sacks for being "against L-DOPA" and for not properly controlling his study.

In his defense, Sacks wrote a detailed report describing the personal experiences of his patients, but every major medical and neurological journal rejected it. That's when Sacks realized the problem wasn't L-DOPA; it was the way medicine treated the mind. Modern neurology had become a hard science, a subject of mechanical circuits and anatomical anomalies. Treating patients meant fixing their matter. But Sacks had become acutely aware of what such brute materialism left out. It treated symptoms, not people, and had lost a sense of basic human empathy. The same quality that Thom Gunn had found lacking in Sacks's journals, Sacks now found lacking in modern medicine.

The inability to publish a medical article led Sacks to explore a new kind of medical writing. He was initially inspired by the work of A.R. Luria, a Soviet neurologist who had published two extended case histories that boldly merged clinical descriptions with, as Sacks puts it, "an empathic entering into patients' experiences and worlds." (When Sacks first read Luria's work, he assumed it was fiction.) "When I began writing," Sacks says, "I realized that I was going against the trend. Few doctors wrote case histories anymore. But I had been moved by these patients—I suppose I had fallen in love with them, you might say—and so I needed to tell their stories."

In the summer of 1972, Sacks returned to London, renting a small flat on the edge of Hampstead Heath. He had grown close to W.H. Auden, the British poet who occasionally visited Sacks at Beth Abraham. Auden encouraged Sacks to "transcend medical writing, to find some radically new and very personal form." And so, with Luria as his model and Auden as his mentor, Sacks wrote Awakenings, the story of his patients' experiences on L-DOPA. The prose poured out of him, and he wrote most of the book in just a few weeks. It was a strange composition, equal parts neurology and biography, filled with erudite digressions into dopamine, Leibniz, and the perception of time. The science of the disease was delicately interwoven with descriptions of his "intense sense of fellow-feeling" for the patients. Sacks had found his form.

The book was greeted with high literary acclaim and scientific disdain. (Auden declared it a "masterpiece.") "There was one particular review which stung me greatly," Sacks says now. "It said 'Dr. Sacks is clearly imaginative, and he's invented a set of impossible patients.'" Other doctors were dismissive of Sacks's admission of empathy. What kind of neurologist fell in love with his patients?

The work, however, has outlived the criticism: Sacks's writerly form is now its own literary genre. It's easy to take his originality for granted, to forget how unlikely it is that a book about neurological disorders would become a bestseller, or that a bearded neurologist would become a cultural icon. Sacks has used the broken brain as a point of entry into the mind, so that readers learn about the perception of colors from a color-blind painter, or about the structure of memory from a man who has none. But the real lesson of Sacks's work goes far beyond the confines of scientific knowledge. His case histories are essays in empathy, sincere attempts to enter into the experience of someone else, to know the individual and not just the disease. Sacks wants the kind of knowledge that can be known only through love, through listening.

Eighteen months ago, Sacks noticed a looming shadow in his field of vision. The darkness was ocular melanoma, a rare type of eye cancer. The cancer slowly spread, and Sacks felt his sight recede. As a neurologist, he is morbidly fascinated by his own condition and keeps detailed notes on all of his visual problems. "My scotoma [blind spot] is Australia-shaped," Sacks says, "about thirty degrees across. It's almost like a window, and there are constantly hallucinations inside it. Just this morning I was staring at my clock radio and saw a crowd of tiny people inside it."

Sacks shows me his "melanoma journals"—"Melanoma is such a lovely word," he remarks—which are full of rough sketches of his visual sensations. There is one drawing that shows a torso with a scratched-out face, just a slew of horizontal lines. "That's my first horrified sketch of when I couldn't see my own head," Sacks says. "I looked in the mirror one morning, and there was just a shadow there." Sacks is also fascinated by how his mind compensates for the blind spot, automatically "filling in" the new void in his senses. "If I wait for a few moments," he says, "The form just creeps in from the periphery, like ice crystallizing. And then I look away, and the scotoma returns."

There is something deeply poignant about watching Sacks deal with his decaying sight. It's as if he's become a character from one of his books, bewildered by his own brain. He can't help but continually interrupt himself in conversation, remarking on the strangeness of what he's just experienced. His desk is littered with typewritten pages about his blind spot, which he struggles to type since he can't see the keys. "I've always had a great fear of losing central vision. Especially in the past few weeks, it seems to get worse each day," Sacks says. "But now I've come to a deal with the melanoma. If it takes my vision and leaves me my life, that's okay with me."

In his books, Sacks often describes his patients in heroic terms, as they struggle to maintain their identity in the face of disease. Sacks is no exception. The illness hasn't diminished his charming eccentricities. He remains obsessed with the periodic table, ferns, and cephalopods. He swims every day. When Sacks is talking about something that excites him, his voice slips into a slight stammer, as his mouth struggles to keep up with his thoughts. Although he calls his shyness a "disease," he is as exuberant as ever, eager to celebrate the world and its wonders.

Music brings out this romantic side of Sacks, providing him with a deep sense of comfort as cancer erodes his sight. He tends to get passionate about particular pieces of music and will listen, almost exclusively, to the same song or symphony for weeks at a time. Sacks revels in the mysteriousness of music and likes to quote Schopenhauer on its "inexpressible depth...so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable."

One of the final stories in Musicophilia is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who was struck by a severe brain infection that decimated his memory. As a result, Clive lives inside brief parentheses of time, just a few seconds long. "Desperate to hold on to something," Sacks writes, "Clive started to keep a journal. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements 'I am awake' or 'I am conscious,' entered again and again every few minutes."

The only thing that comforts Clive is music. When he is playing the piano, Clive is suddenly "himself again." A Bach prelude can't recover his past, but it does allow him to be fully immersed in the present tense. He can share, if only for a moment, the emotions of the melody. The music is a "bridge across the abyss," a temporary relief from the terrifying loneliness of his amnesia.

Sacks relays numerous similar stories of musical healing—in many instances, an awareness of music is a person's last awareness. "I have seen deeply demented patients weep or shiver as they listen to music," Sacks writes. "Once one has seen such responses, one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling." He likes to quote a shard of a T.S. Eliot poem: "We are the music while the music lasts." For Sacks, the line is literally true. He knows that music is often the final means of human connection, our closing form of comfort. It is what we have when we have nothing else.

Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To

Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To
By Michelle Delio

TORONTO -- A happy brain hums.

A stressed-out brain makes static sounds. A mildly concerned brain produces a noise that sounds like breakfast cereal melting in milk. An interested brain sounds like a jumpy cat emitting a steady, low-level purr interspersed with a few high-pitched squeals.
Hook a whole bunch of brains up to a computer, capture and play the sounds they make, and you get, well, not quite music, but certainly some interesting noise.

That's exactly what happened at the Cyborg Echoes Deconcert in Toronto over the weekend.
The concert was billed as a participatory event, and it certainly was: Audience members' brains were scanned, the scans were transformed into sounds, mixed with a solid little backbeat from some heart scans, combined and played back to create Music in the Key of EEG.
Deconcert, held at Toronto's Deconism Gallery, was based on James Fung's research on biofeedback techniques.

Several hundred people crowded into the small gallery space where ominous-looking hooks, cables, suction cups and clamps dangled from the glass ceilings and white walls. Knowing the machinery was going to record your brain activity certainly added an interesting twist to the gallery visit.

The concert began with a deep breathing meditation. (Evidently, the human brain makes better music when it's in a deeply relaxed alpha state.)

When the brain is busy it generates beta waves, which look like scratchy little marks on an EEG printout and are too shallow to make good music. Alpha waves are strong and steady.
Three sets of music played at the Deconcert. First, the technology was explained during a trial run, and some volunteers were hooked up to the scanning system. Audience members were then connected to the concert system by way of electrodes clamped on each ear. Another electrode was attached to headbands and positioned over the backs of their skulls to grab signals from their occipital lobes, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information.
FlexComp EEG concentrators captured the brainwaves. FlexComp can grab signals sent from human muscles and brain waves, as well as capture data on heartbeat, respiration and perspiration. That information is fed into a PC and can be presented using a spreadsheet, text file or other application.

Fung used his own software to combine the brain waves and transform them into sound. One of the concert's sponsors, Thought Technologies, a Montreal-based company that makes computerized biofeedback devices primarily for medical uses, made the EEG tools.
For the second set, people were divided into groups of eight. When each group's brain waves had been captured, the individual sounds were played to the audience, "sort of like an orchestra tuning up," Fung said.

During the final set, the sounds created from each group's brain waves were averaged out and then combined into a sort of mind-meld musical overture.

So what does brain-wave music sound like? The final cut revealed a cute little tune with all the drawbacks of digitally produced music. In other words, it's brainy, but it's got no soul.

The concert was part of a weekend-long series of events centered on the idea that the body in its present form has pretty much become obsolete. We've all become cyborgs, part human and part machine.

"Humans are now a combination of cyborg and zombie. The body has been augmented, changed, invaded, occupied -- and that's fine," said Australian performance artist Stelarc. "The body can now be used as a host for technology that allows us to share, interface, upload and access ideas."
But, you might argue, bodies can still do one thing better than computers. Stelarc begged to differ, happily describing the joys of virtual sex, performed while hooked up to machines that stimulate the appropriate body parts however and exactly as the brain desires.

"Sounds pretty great, and I'd love to try it, but over time I think I'd miss the element of surprise," said Ian McCormick, a student who attended the concert.

Celebrated Canadian cyborg Steve Mann, who co-founded the MIT Media Lab's Wearable Computing Project and now teaches engineering at the University of Toronto, was also in attendance but spent an awful lot of time seemingly talking to himself.

It turned out he was simultaneously delivering a speech at the Ad Astra Sci-Fi convention and attending the Deconcert. Ad Astra's event was going on about an hour's drive away.
Mann beamed his talk to the convention using his "eyetap," a mini-camera and tiny computer mounted on a pair of glasses that lets him record and broadcast live video feeds straight from his eyes to the Internet.

Mann, who has spent most of his life designing and constructing devices that allow him to stay connected 24 hours a day and broadcast his life to the world in real time, said without "humanistic intelligence" technology is neither fun nor useful.

He cautioned the Deconcert audience to think about what technology they allow into their lives and how they interface with it.

"Use it, don't let it use you," Mann said.

Article May Be Found @: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,58193-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2

How Your Brain Listens to Music

By William J. Cromie

Your inner ear contains a spiral sheet that the sounds of music pluck like a guitar string. This plucking triggers the firing of brain cells that make up the hearing parts of your brain. At the highest station, the auditory cortex, just above your ears, these firing cells generate the conscious experience of music. Different patterns of firing excite other ensembles of cells, and these associate the sound of music with feelings, thoughts, and past experiences.

That's a sketch of how the brain listens to music -- just a short ditty to outline the complex symphony of activity that governs our perception of everything from Bach to U2. It's also a lot more than was known until recently.

"We know much more about how we see than how we hear," says Mark Tramo, assistant professor of neurology at the Medical School, Ph.D. student, and published songwriter. "What happens in hearing is harder to understand intuitively."

Sound transmitted to the inner ear is broken down according to the spectrum of frequencies that make up sounds. This orderly arrangement of low to higher frequencies is mapped onto the brain much like the way low to high notes are mapped on a piano keyboard. However, not much is known about how the pieces are put back together when we recognize melodies, words, or the scolding sound of someone's voice.

Beyond the working of specific bunches of brain cells, humans may come into the world with a predisposition to enjoy singing and music, just as language capacities seem to be prewired into our heads. Culture and experience also play a major role in how we perceive music. Finally, there's evidence that young children who study music become better problem-solvers than those without such training.

Music on the Brain
After receiving his M.D. degree, Tramo started to study how different kinds of brain damage interfere with normal perception of music and speech. One patient, for example, lost most of his auditory cortex to strokes. He could hear but complained that music and speech were hard to understand. He could not recognize harmonic patterns.

However, part of an area called the auditory association cortex, and some of the brain connected to it, survived injury. Experiments indicated he could still call on implicit knowledge to recognize favorite songs.

"The harmonic context in which he heard chords changed his sensory experience, just as it does in people without auditory cortex damage," says Tramo. "Such cases give us valuable information about how the auditory cortex and connected brain systems integrate what we hear with what we know about meaningful sounds like music."

The activity of our brain during music perception also is being studied using various imaging techniques. For instance, increased flow of blood and oxygen to different brain areas can be seen as people play and listen to music. In addition, studies of animals reveal details of anatomy and the workings of brain cells that underlie music perception.

Tramo, who has copyrighted and recorded 21 songs and one musical, now concentrates on listening to individual nerve cells as they transmit messages about sound from the ear to the brain. Metal or glass electrodes with tips smaller than a few millionths of an inch monitor each cell's electrical activity.

Vibrations in the air created by music and words move thousands of tiny hairs spread atop a spiral sheet, or membrane, in the inner ear. Nerve cells, stimulated to fire by the swaying hairs, send electrical signals from the ear to the base of the brain then up to the cortex.

The membrane where hairs and nerve fibers meet is wound into a three-turn spiral, thick at its inside and thinning toward the outside whorl. Tramo compares it to guitar strings. In both ears and strings, the thick part is tuned to low frequencies, the thinner part to higher frequencies.
That much has been known for 50 years and applies to speech as well as music. What's new is how this marvelous system handles complex sounds like music and speech. Tramo, working with Harvard colleagues Bertrand Delgutte and Peter Cariani, recently found that the timing of sound-cell activity carries information about harmony and melody.

"In everyday musical experience, melody and harmony emerge from the concerted action of auditory nerve cells in the inner ear and brain," he comments. "In nerves that go from the ear to the brain, it's not only how much they fire, but which ones fire and when."

Tramo is now working toward a Ph.D. in neurobiology, studying where in the auditory cortex various pieces of sound information are put together into a meaningful whole.

Is Music Inborn?
The mechanisms for getting music to the brain, and the experience of being moved by it, are completely different, however. The latter involves both biology and culture.

The auditory cortex has connections to the frontal lobe of the brain, just behind the forehead, where much of our capabilities for abstraction, anticipation, and inference sit. Both these areas also boast extensive passageways to other parts of the brain that generate emotions. How these conduits develop probably are influenced by the culture in which we live.

"Music appreciation is definitely a culture-related phenomenon," says Tramo, "but there are universals that characterize it across the globe. All musics are structured around the octave, all cultures sing, and all have songs they associate with certain meanings and emotions. All children love to be sung to. Perhaps, that's why people refer to music as 'the universal language.' "

Such facts argue in favor of the idea that all humans have an inborn capacity to process music. This idea extends a widely accepted, but unproved, theory that humans come into the world with brains already structured for learning language.

Music and Math
Many parents start giving their children music lessons at an early age, and some evidence indicates that this training bolsters their math and problem-solving skills.
Experimenters at the University of California at Irvine compared 3-year-olds who took piano lessons with peers who learned to sing, use the computer, or did none of these things. A few weeks later, the little piano players did better than the other groups at solving puzzles similar to those presented in IQ tests.

Evidence also exists that high school students with a music background do better than their peers on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) for college entrance.

Tramo thinks this may work because of "generalization," the principle that studying one subject helps a learner with other subjects. "Music performance involves many cognitive, perceptual, and motor skills," he notes. "These skills can be transferred to different kinds of intellectual activities. Music also allows you to put a lot of emotion into what you play or sing."

There could be other explanations, of course. Intelligent, confident children might excel naturally in both music and math. Many parents who can pay for music lessons can also afford a better education for their offspring.

On balance, however, Tramo thinks that "by bringing out and exercising musical ability in children, you nurture the development of their intelligence."

Article May Be Found @:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/11.13/HowYourBrainLis.html

Music and the Brain

Music researchers are finding correlations between music making and some of the deepest workings of the human brain। Research has linked active music making with increased language discrimination and development, math ability, improved school grades, better-adjusted social behavior, and improvements in "spatial-temporal reasoning," - a cornerstone for problem solving.

Links below provide summaries of recent developments in music research field.
Music and the Brain: Major ResearchSome of the world's top research organizations and journals have focused their inquiries on the power of music to help understand and even develop the functions of the brain।

The Royal Institution Presents New Research At First Public Conference on "The Musical Brain"
Keeping Mozart In Mind: Shaw Book Sets the Record Straight on the Mozart Effect

Early ChildhoodIn the first years of life, the brain is undergoing rapid physical development। Studies show participation in music can influence that process, with ramifications that last a lifetime.
New study says playing piano may make kids smarter (Forbes.com article)
Rauscher's Research Points to Link between Intelligence and Music
University of Munster Research: Exposure to Music Is Instrumental to the Brain
Your Child's Lifetime of Music

School-age kidsWhen children begin school, the development of their mental capacities continues, while they begin to experience larger social interactions and the demands of schoolwork. Music can play an important role in this stage of life.
Gordon Shaw's M.I.N.D. Institute Promotes Music-Brain Research
Biological Connection to Musical Activities Uncovered
Piano and Computer Training Boost Student Math Achievement, UC Irvine Study Shows
Enhanced Learning Of Proportional Math Through Music Training And Spatial-Temporal Training
Facts from MENC on the Benefits of Music Making

AdultsThe link between music and brain function persists throughout adult life। Even when the brain is done growing, it's never done learning; and when injury strikes, music can help on the road to recovery.
Study Explains Why Music Can Help Stroke Victims Regain Language Capabilities

Article May Be Found @: http://www.amc-music.com/musicmaking/thebrain.htm

Classical Music Does Not a Genius Make

By Danielle Sweeney

Listening to classical music may soothe your infant and turn her into a classical fan later in life, but it won't make her smarter. Researchers at Appalachian State University believe that they've debunked what has been called the "Mozart Effect," a temporary increase in intelligence experienced after listening to a piano sonata written by the famed composer.

The "Mozart Effect" was first reported in 1993 by scientists at the University of California at Irvine, and replicated by the same group in 1995. The study (which did not look at the effect of Mozart on babies) found that college students who listened to a Mozart sonata for a few minutes before taking a test that measured spatial relationship skills did better than students who took the test after listening to another musician or no music at all. The effect in the students was temporary (it lasted only 15 minutes) and has always been controversial.

Nonetheless, the media and politicians hopped on the "Mozart Effect" bandwagon and claimed that listening to the music offered numerous benefits and could alleviate physical and mental health problems. The notion that babies would be smarter if they listened to classical music was born out of this hype. Last year, the governor of Georgia mandated that a classic music CD — which contained the sonata and other pieces and was donated by Sony — be given to all new babies when they left the hospital.

Despite popular sentiment, the evidence that listening to classical music made anybody smarter was tenuous at best. The lead researcher in the original U.C. Irvine study himself said in a recent Forbes article that the idea that classical music can cure health problems and make babies smarter has no basis in reality, even though he believes that listening to a Mozart sonata can prime the brain to tackle mathematical tasks.

The researchers at Appalachian State University were unable to duplicate the original "Mozart Effect" results and found that the presence or absence of classical music did not significantly affect student performance on tests. Their results can be found in the July issue of Psychological Science.

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The Musical Hormone

By:Norman M। Weinbergerand the Regents of the University of California। All Rights Reserved.

Music has well established psychological effects, including the induction and modification of cognitive states, moods and emotions. Were it not so, then marches would be played as readily at bedtime as at the half-time of football games, dirges would grace weddings. lullabies would be heard at parades and Gregorian chant would bombard our ears in supermarkets.
Many people think that psychology is one thing but physiology is another thing। There is the mind and there is the body. This common "dualist" assumption scores high on our own psychological "comfort meters". It is always nice when common sense matches scientific reality. When that happens, we feel that we have a good grasp of things and that an issue has been settled. Of course, the dualist position has a problem with the question of just how music affects our private mental lifes. And just where is it that our private mental lifes live anyway? But mind-body dualism has been the dominant belief in the history of the world. Can so many people over so long a time be wrong? Certainly.

Yes, the mind is still mysterious. But it has proven impossible to toss away the brain and still keep the mind. By mind, I refer to our everyday mental experiences, not to the soul or similar formulations. I would not claim that science provides the only type of knowledge or understanding possible. Only that what we consider to be our normal, run-of-the-mill, daily mental experiences necessarily are a product of our brain function. The evidence, quite overwhelming, cannot all be reviewed here. But a few examples. When our level of consciousness changes from waking to sleeping, the electrical activity of our brains changes as well. If one induces a sleeping pattern in the brain by drugs or other means, the behavior goes along. In fact, most drugs that alter our experiences, perceptions, moods, general state of pain, etc. do so by their physiological and chemical actions on the brain, including nicotine and alcohol. (Others, like local anesthetics, can block pain receptors on the body, preventing the brain from receiving messages that it interprets as pain.) Death is medically defined not as cessation of heart beat or respiration but rather by the absence of electrical activity of the brain, literally "brain dead". Finally, but more speculatively, if you exchanged brains with another person (really science fiction!!), where would your mind be ... with your brain or elsewhere?
So there is the mind and there is the body, including the rather important bodily organ of the brain। To begin to understand the power of music on our brains, and therefore on our minds, we need to consider some basic physiology.

The brain sends to and receives messages from the rest of the body ceaselessly, every minute, second and fraction of a second। As for the receiving side of things, the brain gets information from our senses -- vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, etc. We can be constantly aware of these. But there is another major source of input to our brains, and thus ultimately to our mental lives ... our bodily hormones. These are secreted by our endocrine system and include sex hormones, like testosterone and estrogen, and a group usually called "stress" hormones, like ACTH, adrenaline and cortisol.

A capsule summary of the way stress hormones are released into the blood stream is that the brain, sensing stress, ultimately releases ACTH from the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, itself controlled by neural and hormonal messages from its link to the brain, the overlying hypothalamus। When ACTH reaches the adrenal glands, they release adrenaline and cortisol into the blood stream. These have many effects on target organs, including the release of stored glucose for energy, increasing blood flow to the muscles and increasing blood pressure, all as part of a constellation of bodily mobilization for possible action, defense or whatever. One effect of stress hormones is to dampen down the immune system, so that unfortunately continual stress can reduce the ability to fight disease. Although this counterintuitive effect of stress hormones is not fully understood, it should not be ignored.

While oversimplified, this sketch provides a basis for understanding how music affects the body. And of great interest, how the body then affects the brain. As noted above, the brain also receives the effects of the hormones which it has commanded glands (e.g., the adrenals) to release. So there is "feedback". In other words, our brains and our glands are in a continual pas de deux . Now a fascinating fact is that a major result of the release of adrenaline (also called epinephrine) is to affect the brain, particularly an almond-shaped group of brain cells termed the amygdala. The amygdala can be thought of as a major emotional command center. When the amygdala is particularly active, it is believed emotions are experienced. There is another important effect -- when an experience causes adrenaline to be released and ultimately activate the amygdala (actually through the mediation of another hormone called noradrenaline), memories of the initiating experience are strengthened. That is, the body tells the brain how much adrenaline was released Which in turn modifies how strongly the brain stores the memory of the event which started the whole thing. In short, when we experience something very important, even traumatic, a lot of adrenaline is released which "instructs" and the amygdala to help other parts of the brain store stronger memories.(1) So, as we come to the question of music and hormones, we must realize that hormones secreted in the body and affecting bodily processes, such as the cardiovascular, muscular and immune systems, also affect the brain.
There are now several studies, mainly within the last five years or so, that have addressed the issue of whether music itself actually changes the amount of release of our stress hormones। Most of these have concentrated on measuring levels of cortisol before and after various exposures to music.

We can start with attempts to reduce cortisol levels, or more specifically to prevent increased release of this stress hormone, in conjunction with invasive diagnostic and surgical procedures. Gastroscopy is one such diagnostic technique, involving the oral insertion of a probe into the stomach in the awake and aware patient. This is a highly stressful situation, so any approaches that would reduce stress would be helpful. Dr. Escher and co-workers allowed a group of patients undergoing gastroscopy to select and listen to the type of music they preferred, chosen in consultation with a music therapist. A control group heard no music. The control group showed a large increase in levels of cortisol, and also ACTH, in their blood. In contrast, the music group exhibited a significantly lower level of release of these hormones.(2) In a similar approach, in this case to surgery, Miluk-Kolasa et al measured cortisol levels in patients in conjunction with informing them that they would have to undergo surgery the next day.(3) One group received an hour of music immediately following receipt of this unwelcome news, while another group of surgical patients received no treatment; a third non-surgery group of patients served as additional controls. These workers found that the information about impending surgery produced a 50% rise in cortisol within 15 minutes in both surgical groups. Surgical patients who did not receive music exhibited a higher level of cortisol an hour later than the music group, which had returned to a baseline no different from the non-surgical controls. Thus, music greatly reduced the duration of the cortisol response to stress. Both studies indicate that stress hormone levels can be reduced by exposure to music in a medical treatment setting.
What of healthy individuals who are not in a medically-compromised state? Möckel and several co-workers at the Free University of Berlin undertook just such a study। They examined the effects of three types of music on several physiological measures. They employed a waltz by Johann Strauss because it had a regular rhythm. To contrast with this, a composition by the more contemporary composer W. H. Henze was used; the authors note that its rhythm was markedly irregular. The third piece was by Ravi Shankar, selected for it meditative nature without strong rhythmic characteristics. Levels of cortisol and also noradrenaline were reduced by one type of music, the Shankar piece.(4) Of course, the types of music differed in many ways in addition to rhythm, so the particular aspect of music that was responsible is unknown. Still hormonal control by music seems clear.

While these findings all seem to agree that music lower levels of stress hormones, this is not a universal finding. For example, Brownley et al investigated how music affects cortisol in trained and untrained runners under three conditions: "sedative", "fast" and no music.(5) Following high intensity exercise, the authors observed increased levels of cortisol for fast music, compared to sedative and no music in the untrained runners only. So music can actually increase stress hormones. Indeed, in circumstances where the general stress reaction of bodily mobilization may be desirable, music might be a good way to promote this outcome. Such is the case when strenuous activity is required. The trained runners may already have conditioned their bodies to optimal levels of hormonal state, hence the absence of an effect of fast music.
Other studies also show that music can increase as well as decrease stress hormones। And this doesn't have to happen under conditions of high activity or athletic exercise. In one such study, college majors in music and in biology were exposed to two selections from Holst's The Planets -- Venus and Jupiter. The former was rated as peaceful and the latter as very lively. Hormones were altered by the music, but the effect was not so much due to the type of music (relaxing vs. energizing) as to the field of study of the subjects. The biology majors exhibited a decrease in cortisol, similar to that which might be expected from other studies of the effects of music. In contrast, the music students had significant increases in cortisol. When later interviewed, music students indicated that they were actively engaged in mental analysis of the music, some even "playing" their instruments mentally.(6) The same authors obtained similar findings in a follow-up study in which unpleasant, even tragic music was played to the two groups.(7)

Taken together, these findings indicate that there is no simple relationship between music and stress hormones। It is not only a matter of the type of music played, but also the cognitive and other mental activities that the individual brings to the situation. This seems to be a foundational consideration in understanding the interplay between music, hormones and the brain. Moreover, the longer term consequences of the music experience need to be kept in mind. As pointed out above, increased release of stress hormones can strengthen memories for events that occurred at that time or shortly before. Thus, in cases in which one wants to increase memory, music that produces transiently higher hormone levels might be employed, the "flip side" of musical sedation. Moreover, unlike the prescription for an antibiotic or similar therapeutic drug, a "prescription for music" has to be formulated with appropriate attention to and knowledge of the cognitive state, level of knowledge and likely mental response of the individual receiving the music treatment.

Healthy individuals already self-select music but often without an understanding of how or why certain music affects them in a particular way। If a selection produces certain signs of arousal of the autonomic nervous system, like increased respiration and heart rate, the individual could be "self-dosing" with increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones। If done continually, chronic high levels of these hormones might be achieved. Whether this has serious health implications needs to be determined. Although one might not want to consider whether they are "overdosing" on cortisol, it might be prudent to give this some serious thought.

Article May be Found @: http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/V4I2F97.html#hormone">http://www.musica.uci.edu/mrn/V4I2F97.html#hormone

Anxiety and Memory: Their Effects on Cognition and Musical Performance

By Daisy T. Lu, Ph.D.

The way in which the brain works is one of the great mysteries and wonders of science. Information is acquired, stored and retrieved in the brain by a complex process. Analysis of how learning and memory work through musical performance is the thesis of this essay. Musical learning has additional implications for cognitive processes involved in presenting a paper from memory or performing in a play or a dance.

Like the universe with its billions of stars, the human brain is a constellation of billions of neural cells which communicate with one another by forming networks that are the basis of human awareness and memory. Learning a scientific theory is a process of forming connections among these cells. In a like manner, learning a piece of music through memory is similar to the clustering of the planetary systems and stars.

Patterns of neural networks are unique to each individual. Every person's memory is formed from bits and pieces of existing networks resulting from previous musical training, making past learning crucial to more advanced learning. Added to this are the immediate requirements of the memory task at hand. As new materials are encoded in the memory, existing networks expand, forming new memory "constellations." Therefore, the mastery of musical modes forms building blocks for understanding and remembering a specific piece written in one of those modes. The same is true for any cognitive process such as writing. Skills in good writing - content, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, and voice - are mastered through meaningful active learning processes in context rather than in isolation. When the brain sees the connections, it stores information in long term memory.

The plasticity (ability to change) or reconfigurations of neural networks means that effective practice and mastery of past work will always be beneficial to new musical tasks. This holds true with science, math, reading and writing, where new knowledge "scaffolds" or builds on previous knowledge, and where new learning "evolves" to a higher level rather than acting as a mere add-on.

Active learning enables memory networks to be altered by neural activities, building higher levels of meaning in the process. No less potent to memory are the emotional feelings associated with thoughts. Signals from emotional activities "sparkle" through memory networks as one learns and recalls stored information. One's conscious thoughts constantly influence how one learns and remembers, again affecting long term memory.

Fears and doubts also influence what is stored in memory. Negative feelings can interfere with recall by diverting one's attention from previously prepared memory tasks. Anxiety, which alters the focus of attention, can result in the concentration on the "self" rather than the "task." Thus, the attention focus in memory tasks cannot be overemphasized. A memory "slip" on the part of a performer, musician or lecturer, may not be the result of faulty memory storage, but a misdirection of attention. Although a great portion of a performance is automatic, signals from the limbic system where anxiety operates can disrupt the flow of automatic response patterns programmed by hard work and diligent practice.

Anxiety during performance is not all negative. The anxious state is the work of the sympathetic nervous system, whereas the calm state is the work of the parasympathetic nervous system. When a risk is perceived, the body circulates adrenalin to activate the sympathetic nervous system, bringing into effect bodily responses useful for survival in a primitive environment. The heart rate increases blood supply to the larger muscles which are ready for "fight or flight" responses, either to attack or to move away from the threat.

Increased sympathetic responses in anxious situations can increase mental alertness. However, these responses may also encourage racing images and thoughts not experienced in regular practice. Often, the performer will have doubts never before experienced in practice. The resulting over-consciousness can create havoc in performance. Under similar conditions, the performer may also invent novel ways to imagine danger in the execution of prepared passages. This hyperactive mental state can be a threat to memory because brain networks are activated which otherwise are silent during rehearsed performances.

The sympathetic nervous system can bring about body changes such as increased peripheral vision and light sensitivity, palm perspiration, dry mouth, and similar negative states which affect the recall of musical scores. The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is the normal state without excess adrenalin. Chances of uninterrupted memory are much greater in the parasympathetic state.

A constant state of anxiety affects memory networks themselves. Although some anxiety is part of the learning process, repeated practice in a nervous state can associate unwanted feelings and insecurities with the memory of the passage itself. This learned anxiety can be difficult to remedy and will negatively affect overall performance.

Ironically, practice that concentrates on avoiding mistakes is likely to condition the performer to anxiety responses rather than confident motor output. For most people, positive concentration on musical content is better than intense worry over techniques. This physiological anxiety gets built into the performance when good decisions about fingering, technique, choreography, or a verbal presentation are missing. Inefficient technical practice also induces fatigue, lack of coordination, stiffness, and absence of expressiveness.

An expressive and efficient musician learns to establish "emergency stations" by automatically building some amount of anxiety into his or her performance. A secure musical flow can result from proper phrasing and from confidence in knowing certain "landmarks" without considering them as escape routes. One can be productive by being music-centered rather than self-centered, being self-aware for the sake of improving one's performance rather than developing a habit of self-doubt or being overly concerned about what critical listeners are thinking.
Visual and auditory memory are parts of the musical learning process which require similar interacting networks located in various parts of the brain. They, too, are constantly reshaped by new experiences. Meaningfully challenging input, which can bring in positive anxiety, reshapes thinking to a higher level.

The way in which anxiety and emotion interact is an important issue for further research. Anxiety may modulate memory via the limbic system. In his book, Memory and Brain (1990), Larry Squire describes the contribution of the limbic system in modulating memory formation. As we learn, the very chemistry of our anxiety may influence what we remember, and this certainly extends beyond musical memory.

Memory is crucial to the normal functioning of the mind and to the phenomenon of consciousness. It is a major breakthrough, therefore, that scientists have begun to understand how biological and biochemical changes and mental processes can account for the way in which we record events as memories, and how these memories are associated with one another. Educators likewise can benefit from this research as we teach according to how memory retains intact meaning and, in the process, stimulates and gains deeper meaning.

Does Playing The Piano Make You Smarter?

Did you know that....

...the children of the Baby Boom generation have set off a population explosion in the nation's schools? The dramatic enrollment growth, known as the Baby Boom Echo, began in the nation's elementary schools in 1984, and elementary enrollment has increased annually since then. At the secondary level, annual enrollment increases began in 1991 and are expected to continue through the year 2007.
(Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement)

Classical Music's Traditional Audience Is Graying.
By the year 2030, approximately half of our nation's population will be over 65 years of age. Music educators have the power to make Classical music matter again to young people.
(Source: Chamber Music, February 1998; a publication of Chamber Music America)

Music Students Are Scoring.
Music students are outperforming non-music students on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). College-bound seniors with coursework or experience in music performance scored 52 points higher on the verbal portion and 37 points higher on the math portion of the SAT than students with no coursework or experience in the arts.
(Source: The College Board, September 1997)

Music Is Beating Computers
at Enhancing Early Childhood Development. Music training, specifically piano instruction, is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children's abstract reasoning skills necessary for learning math and science. Learning music at an early age causes long-term enhancement of spatial- temporal reasoning.
(Source: Frances Rauscher, Ph.D., Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1997)

Music Enhances Linguistic Skills.
Music -- specifically song -- is one of the best training grounds for babies learning to recognize the tones that add up to spoken language.
(Source: Sandra Trehub, University of Toronto, 1997)

America Is A Country Full Of Music-Makers.
113 million, or 53%, of Americans over the age of 12 are current or former music makers.
(Source: 1997 "American Attitudes Towards Music" poll conducted by the Gallup Organization)
Americans Say Schools Should Offer Instrumental Music Instruction
as part of the regular curriculum. 88% of respondents indicated this in a 1997 "American Attitudes Towards Music" Gallup poll.
(Source: Music Trades, September 1997)

Scientists, Therapists Agree: Music Heals More Than Just The Spirit.
Music benefits older adults. Active music-making positively affects the biology and behavior of Alzheimer's patients.
(Source: Music Making and Wellness Project, a study conduc ted at the University of Miami)

The Window Of Opportunity For Studying Music
is between the ages of three and ten. This is the time when we are the most receptive to and able to process music.
(Source: Newsweek, February 19, 1996)
Studying Music Strengthens Students' Academic Performance.
Rhode Island studies have indicated that sequential, skill-building instruction in art and music integrated with the rest of the curriculum can greatly improve children's performance in readi ng and math.
(Source: "Learning Improved by Arts Training" by Martin Gardiner, Alan Fox, Faith Knowles, and Donna Jeffrey, Nature, May 23, 1996)

Music and Spatial Task Performance: A Causal Relationship.
Music lessons, and even simply listening to music, can enhance spatial reasoning performance, a critical higher-brain function necessary to perform complex tasks including mathematics.
(Source: Frances Fauscher, Ph.D., Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1994)

The Mozart Effect
surfaced about four years ago when research uncovered that adults who listened to music of complexity for ten minutes or so experienced temporary increases in their spatial IQ scores.
(Source: Frances Rauscher, Ph.D.,Gordon Shaw, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine,1993-1994)

Music Is One of Our Greatest Economic Exports.
"The arts are an economic plus -- second only to aerospace as our most lucrative national export."
(Source: Michael Greene of The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences)

Music Teacher Expertise is a Critical Factor in Student Learning.
Research indicates that teachers of all subjects -- including music -- who are more experienced and educated are more effective in the classroom. Consequently, students learn more from them.
(Source: Paying for Public Education: New Evidence on How and Why Money Matters, by Ronald Ferguson, 1991)

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