Tales of Music and the Brain - by Oliver Sacks
November 10th 2007 07:14
Signature Tune
Why music, that is, why does music exist at all? Why are absurdly abundant musical capacities hard-wired into our brains - notwithstanding the odd tone-deaf exception and puritan enforcers such as the Taliban who would ban all music
"There she was just a-walking down the street" - 200 people jumped to their feet and sang, waving their hands and stomping their feet: "Singing dowadiddydiddydumdiddydo."
Most of us hadn't heard Manfred Mann for years but we still remembered the entire song, syllable perfect. One thing song is very good at is enabling us to remember words.
Poetry has the same mnemonic capacities - rhythm and rhyme also make words stick in our brains - but there is nothing quite like a melody for stickability.
Oliver Sacks is very interested in the stickability of musical phrases in some of the opening case studies of his new book; exaggerated examples of those irritating melodies - known as "brain-worms" - that we cannot get out of our heads for a day or two.
Brain and Music
Sacks documents a few unfortunates in whom a melody can last weeks and seriously jam normal brain functioning. These stories are perhaps the least astonishing in this compilation of neurological "believe it or nots", case-studies that themselves stick in the reader's mind, as if they were also set to music.
Of course, music plays many other parts in our lives besides that of a memory aid - as social adhesive, as religious liturgy, as consolation, as revelation, as a fun way of passing the time - but a key common quality of most poetry and music seems to be its unforgettableness and in preliterate societies remembering poems or songs could be a matter of life and death. Important geographical knowledge, medical knowledge, sacred knowledge and moral instruction had to be remembered, passed on from mouth to ear.
Bards in India today can still recite the tens of thousands of verses of the great Sanskrit epics through song, or chanting; this has always been the preliterate human way, from Homer to the Rain Dreaming. In her book Aboriginal Music, Catherine Ellis tells of asking an Aboriginal woman which number to ring for a taxi; she immediately sang a commercial jingle that included a phone number from a taxi company. Remembering numbers is not natural to our brains; I sometimes think we might remember our phone numbers more easily if we sang them to melodies.
This interesting information comes from a review of Sacks book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Peter Goldsworthy, reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald.
It's interesting isn't it?
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