Music As Brain Food

In the last few years, it seems like there's been a surge of interest in music and the human brain. Renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks jump-started the conversation with his remarkable 2007 book, Musicophilia, which was part scientific examination of how our brains process and react to music, and part deeply personal memoir of the author's own lifelong love of classical music.

Sacks also showed up on an episode of WNYC's radio show/podcast Radiolab (which I can't recommend highly enough, by the way) to talk about a British man with "the most severe case of amnesia ever documented." Remarkably, while the man had forgotten nearly every detail of his life, down to the names of his children, and could barely speak coherently, he could remember how to read music, sing, and even conduct a choir!

I've been fascinated by the way the brain processes music since the summer when I was 15 years old. I was attending a summer music camp at which we were encouraged, on Sunday mornings, to walk down the hill into the tiny town the camp was in, and become the summer choir at the village church. I loved to sing, and loved the people who attended the church, so I never missed a Sunday, even though I had little interest in the actual service.

But that summer, the church had just lost its pastor to a larger church in another part of the state, so an interim pastor had been appointed while a permanent replacement was sought. The fill-in was named Jed, as I recall, and he seemed like a wonderful and caring man, but he had a terrible stutter that nearly prevented him from being able to speak complete sentences. His condition was ameliorated by an electronic device, but it still made his sermons a challenge for everyone involved.

But the very first week I attended one of Jed's services, I was dumbstruck to see him open a hymnal and sing along with the choir, in full, unstuttering voice. So long as the words were married to a melody, he never missed a beat. A few weeks later, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it, and he explained that, because music is processed by a different part of the brain than language, people with his condition could frequently leave their stutter behind when singing. Remarkable.

Late last year, a new scientific paper was published that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how we hear various kinds of music, and why, evolutionarily, we even bother with the stuff at all. You can get the full paper here, but unless you're actually a scientist, you may have better luck with this excellent summary by science writer Jonah Lehrer. Here's the money graf:

"There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of 'low-probability notes'. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty - we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns - that's exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance."

All of which could help explain why fans of one kind of music have trouble understanding or liking another, or why someone who listens to a lot of Stravinsky and Bartok might have an easier time deciphering Schoenberg than someone who listens to a lot of Mozart and Haydn. The real bottom line seems to be that our brains are designed to be exercised, and respond best when regularly challenged. And yes, I'm already trying to work out a way to insert this whole concept into next season's ItC concerts...