Oliver Sacks investigates.
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I write this just after another season awash with familiar carols and hymns—what would Christmas be without music? Yet it is worth stopping to reflect that all the well-known music we use to adore the newborn King only comes round once a year. The rest of the time it sits in our brains, dormant until activated by the next round of midwinter festivities.
We all have music on the brain. And not just in the sense that it is lodged in our memories, but in the sense that we seem to be hard-wired for it. The vast majority of humans have a capacity for music. We can feel it in our bones from our earliest years: we tap to it, dance to it, sway with it, cry with it. On this built-in competence, music's legendary powers depend: music can send armies into battle, get us to buy this or that product, calm us in a traffic jam—and, indeed, direct us to the Almighty.
Quite how music interacts with our brains to achieve these effects is far from clear. Therapists have long recognized that music can, for example, relieve the symptoms of dementia, aphasia, and Parkinson's disease, but the processes involved have remained something of a mystery. However, in recent years, rapid progress has been made in bringing them to light. Most important, sophisticated imaging techniques have enabled neurologists to study brain activity while music is being produced and heard. In his latest book, neurologist Oliver Sacks, perhaps best known for The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, leads us into this rich and complex territory. With almost breathless excitement the dust-jacket declares: "Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why."
Well … not really. Fascinating, readable, and accessible the book may be, but it delivers considerably less than the blurb promises. And, as I shall suggest, this may be no bad thing.
Sacks' method is unusual. For much of the book, he operates via negativa, by showing what happens when the brain misbehaves and misfires, through injury, illness, or congenital disease (he is, after all, Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University). In this way, we can learn of the "wonderful machinery" that gives rise to humans' "musicophilia." It is as if we were shadowing Sacks at one of his clinics, except that all the patients suffer from disorders related to the experience of music.
In the book's first section, we are introduced to those who endure musical hallucinations, those ravaged by "brainworms" (melodies you can't get out of your head), and to a surgeon who after being struck by lightning developed an insatiable passion for music. In the second section Sacks addresses the question of musical ability, and we encounter, among other things, "tone deafness" (actually present in only 5 percent of the population), "disharmonia" (harmony deafness), and "distimbria" (timbre deafness). We learn that the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain is distinctly enlarged in trained musicians: "Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician … they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation."
In the section headed "Memory, Movement, and Music," Sacks includes the poignant case of Clive Wearing, a musician stricken in 1985 with severe amnesia. From one minute to the next he does not know who, where, or what he is. Now 69, only two things keep him together: a deep love for his wife and the ability to sing or play any piece of music put in front of him. For Wearing, says Sacks, music is like a rope let down from heaven: "Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss." Sacks highlights the strong links between music and bodily movement: only humans can synchronize their body movements with heard rhythm, due to a particular connection between the auditory and the dorsal premotor cortex. He writes of taking an amnesiac to a Grateful Dead concert, and watching this previously inert man begin to shout in time with the crowd. A composer with Tourette's syndrome testifies: "I live my life controlled by Tourette's but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy—I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way."
"Emotion, Identity, and Music" forms the focus of the fourth and final part. Sacks observes that "musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared." I recall the wife of a friend being able to sing along with every note of Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony, even though her cruel early Alzheimer's prevented any other communication. Familiar music, it seems, acts as a "Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to moods and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost."
In effect, we are offered 29 short chapters of brilliantly presented case studies intertwined with the results of focused neurological research. Given the strangeness of some of the cases (and the distress they cause), some readers may feel uneasy, a little like medical tourists. Rather unkindly, Tom Shakespeare, a disability-rights activist, once spoke of Sacks as "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career." On the other hand, it is hard to miss the strong tone of compassion throughout the book; those Sacks describes are never treated as mere raw data, and his emotional investment in the more heart-rending tales is palpable.
Others will miss the lack of an argument. No overarching case is advanced, no thread developed, no summary or conclusion offered to pull the strands together. Never does Sacks stand back and ponder the wider consequences of his findings. He leaves us to do that. And there's the rub. For those inclined to think outside the box, not least those with theological interests, the value of this book will lie not so much in what it tells us about the ways Beethoven or U2 are digested by the nervous system but in the wider issues it raises about our appropriation of music. For example, those who lead churches and wonder why there is so often such a fuss about music will be reminded that for many, music is the medium that offers the deepest access to reality, including the reality that Scripture narrates. Others might reflect on why it is that so many Western Christians feel obliged to remain motionless when they sing in church: neurological research on the music-body link (not to mention the overwhelming witness of many non-Western congregations) makes such compulsory stillness seem distinctly odd.
More widely, we may ask: what vision of the human person does Sacks provoke us to imagine? At the very least, it is one that takes our embodiment seriously. Evolutionary biology and genetics—as well as neuroscience—tell us that most of the abilities commonly attributed to a "soul" can be shown to be functions of the brain. In any case, a biblically grounded anthropology does not readily endorse the notion of a soul (or mind) as a discrete metaphysical entity housing our identity and agency, and of our bodies as utterly distinct, with no inherent value and no future beyond death. The human being is rather conceived as a composite and integral unity, and our body—made from matter created "good," reaffirmed in the incarnation, and destined for a future previewed in the resurrected and transformed body of Jesus—as intrinsic to our identity. Sacks reminds us of the massive difference that minute modifications in brain states can make: only the tiniest neurological quirks separate us from the shuffling depressive in the psychiatric ward, or, indeed, from the celebrated concert violinist. Our finely tuned bodies are part of who we are. Music's engagement with the brain (as physical) and through the brain with bodily movement should not thereby bring it under suspicion. Indeed, the partial liberation of a victim of Parkinson's or Tourette's by music is surely best seen as a preview of the bodily liberation promised to those in Christ in the Age to Come. The challenge is not to deny or denigrate music's bodily appeal but to find ways of ensuring that the appeal is not abused, that it contributes towards the flourishing of our humanity that God intends.
On the other hand, for all that music is embodied, Sacks clearly has no sympathy with reductionism, those who would account for making and hearing music solely and entirely in terms of elementary particles subject to biological and physical laws, as "nothing but" (for example) the firing of individual neurons. This emerges at many points. Speaking of dementia patients Sacks writes: "one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling." Even when pointing out the neurological correlates of musical experience he never suggests that in so doing he has given an exhaustive account of it. He seems quite unwilling to let go of the notions of consciousness, mind, and free human agency. The way is thus left open for some form of "nonreductive physicalism," which acknowledges the physical nature of human beings but holds that higher-level human capacities, although dependent on lower-level neural processes, are nonetheless causal in their own right. That is to say, there appear to be processes emerging from the complex interactive operations of the entire brain that exercise a causal influence on the lower-level processes. [1] "Higher-level" capacities would include not only actions such as thinking and decision-making, but the creation and enjoyment of music.
The point can be pressed further. A much-discussed and highly fruitful way of regarding scientific enquiry is to see it as involving a conception of (a) reality as "stratified," as a "universe of levels," each operating under the influence of the levels above, and (b) explanation as likewise stratified, with each level knowing its own limits and opening up to the levels above it. [2] Reductionism occurs when reality and explanation are flattened on to what is believed to be the lowest level; when it is assumed, for example, that to show that the enjoyment of music involves particular neurological firings means we have provided a complete description and explanation of it. Sacks takes us to the upper limit of his neuroscientific level, and stops. That is greatly to his credit.
Sacks' open-endedness may irritate some scientists. But what will be a frustration to some will be an invitation to others to take the elevator to higher levels and face rather larger questions about music. How can we best account for the way humans seem to be constituted to resonate with the sonic phenomena of the world we inhabit (something Sacks assumes throughout)? How can we best account for the existence of beauty, and our response to it when embodied in music (something Sacks writes about in rhapsodic terms)? How can we best account for that intense sense of wonder music so readily evokes (something Sacks expresses repeatedly)? And why is it that music, like any reality, does resist one-level explanations, and where might the ever-higher levels lead?
Inevitably, we are pushed towards the theological. Sacks describes himself as an "old, Jewish atheist." What might result from a conversation with a young Jewish or Christian believer, equally stricken with musicophilia?
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