House explores music-brain connection
March 22nd 2007 01:01
Signature Tune
PalmBeachPost.com reports on Dave Mathews - musician.
On a recent episode of House, the singer-songwriter Dave Matthews offered an impressive performance as a piano-playing musical savant who had gotten that way because of a brain injury suffered as a child of 10.
In one scene, Dr. House brings in a piano to play a short thing he's written as a teenager, and a piece he'd never finished. Not only does the savant (who was in the hospital after suffering a dystonia episode while playing Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata) learn the piece immediately, he also adds a poignant coda that impresses and frustrates House. He says something to the effect of "that nitwit" was able to finish the piece in no time, and he's barely functional (here's a recap on a House fan blog).
At the end of the episode (spoiler alert!) the savant, named Patrick, has a hemispherectomy, which allows him to function normally, but takes away his musical ability. It was an interesting hour of television, and I enjoyed it.
But the episode raises important questions about what the real source of music is. As I've noted before, there's something sad about musical creativity being reduced to a byproduct of cerebral irritation; it should instead emanate from some secret place in the soul.
It does, and yet it doesn't. We bring the soul to bear on the neuronal suggestion, and that combination leads to art. I guess it reminds me that so much of who we are as human beings is locked in our brains. It's the latticework of memory in our cerebral cortex that stitches our lives together, and as we see in Alzheimer's patients, for instance, when that memory has disappeared, so in the most fundamental way has the person.
From there, it's a transfer of that person's identity to the memories of the people he or she knew, and in that way the person lives again. And the same goes for music: The person who created those notes or that performance has long passed from the scene, but what they created lives on in the memory of those who are still here.
It reminds me that art is really evanescent, held as it is by Chance, whose arms are so slender. It makes those miraculous musical moments all the more powerful because they could so easily have not existed.
It also makes me think of the sad case of Maurice Ravel, who came down with Pick's disease or Alzheimer's (I've read different opinions) in the 1930s and was unable at the end of his life to write down the music in his head. He could hear it, he wanted desperately to get it out, but he had lost the ability to transfer the sounds in his head to paper. I can't imagine a worse fate for a great composer.
Whenever I think about the House episode, I'll also be thinking about how fragile this exercise is, and how grateful I am to be able to enjoy it, not least because of the way the neurons in my head work.
Next month, the University of Miami will present master classes given by Michael Thaut, a Colorado State University professor who will give three talks about music and neuroscience. (Details here; click on Stamps Family Distinguished Visitors Series.) One of the classes will be called "Rhythm, Music and the Brain: From Aesthetics and Performance to Medicine.” That sounds like it will touch on some of the questions raised in a TV melodrama, and it might be well worth checking out.
Posted by Greg Stepanich at March 20, 2007 11:43 PM
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Comment by D. Armenta
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Comment by Kleonaptra
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I think that melodrama is incredibly good at presenting thought provoking wisdom. There is a lot of work done in the medium of TV/DVD that is ignored by creative types, but as we paint, draw and write, others have only directing and film in which to create.
And it is the heart of creation you have touched on here, yes, a fragile thing indeed, something we continually forget to be grateful for.
Comment by katyzzz
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You have both expressed yourselves spontaneously and eloquently, congratulations.
Sometimes I think we need a suitable medium to allow us to free ourselves of inhibition and realise our true potential for expression.
Your comments were also thought provoking.
katyzzz