Music seems to be involved with so many functions of the brain: It can aid memory, assist movement, and trigger emotions. Why is that?
However music started—and it may be that the evolution of rhythmic sense is quite different from that of tonal sense—it has now taken up residence and demands many, many different parts of the brain, certainly more than language. And by the same token, music is very robust neurally. There are people with a huge amount of cerebral disease who are still responsive to music.
Does that suggest that music is somehow essential to human survival, or at least to social survival?
This is a big question. I can only say that there is no culture without music. There are almost no individuals without music. The lady in the Bronx is a one-in-a-million sort of exception. And in every culture, music forms a social cement for dancing, for singing. It’s invariably part of ritual and religion, and then there are things like work songs and martial music. Steven Pinker said, “Music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” I strongly disagree with that and I think no anthropologist in the world would agree with that.
You’ve been fascinated with music for so long—why are you only writing about it now?
Going back 40 years, I was very struck by the therapeutic power of music with many of the patients I saw: Parkinson’s patients, patients with aphasia, patients with dementia. But just in the last 20 years, there has grown up an ability to examine the living brain when people are listening to music or imagining music or composing music and to define—in a way which would have been unimaginable 30 years ago—what goes on in many different parts of the brain when one listens to music, imagines music, composes music, et cetera. Although I was experiencing both the power of music and the varieties of musical experience 20 or 30 years ago, I couldn’t have given it the scientific backing which is possible today.
In Musicophilia, you argue that emotional responses to music may be distinct from other emotional reactions. What do you see as the difference?
I think the emotional responses to music can be unbelievably complex and mysterious and deep. You can be sort of agonized, sort of ecstatic, and you don’t know what’s happening. You can’t even say what the feeling is. The usual feelings just can’t begin to match the musical experience. On the clinical side, in some cases, people—maybe after a head injury or a stroke—suddenly cease to enjoy music, while still enjoying everything else, and while perceiving music perfectly well. And then there’s the opposite of this, which gives the title to my book: people who develop an oddly specific need for music—they must have it.
It seems strange that music can become a hunger, like the need for food or sleep or sex.
I agree. And it can be very, very specific—because often, you don’t just want music; you’ve gotta have Brahms, or you have to have a particular pianist. That exact music will speak to your condition and will fill a particular void—and nothing else can.
There’s a notion that savant abilities may be universal or latent in all of us and could be released.
And other people are musical savants, with musical abilities far beyond the norm. What have you learned about them?
Savants are people with extraordinary capacities of calculation or music or drawing, mixed with generally low intelligence—a very startling anomaly. I first saw savant syndromes in an institutionalized autistic population at Bronx Psychiatric Center. The savant I have seen in most detail is Steven Wiltshire. One really does have the feeling with him of something autonomous. There will be a brief sidelong glance at a landscape, and then he’s drawing it. He may be looking around as he’s drawing it; he’s whistling. There doesn’t seem to be concentrated attention. And it may be done in a very odd way. He doesn’t do a sketch first; he doesn’t do salient features. He will start at one edge of the paper and go over like that [Sacks makes a trilling noise and motions from one side of the page to the other]. He’s also a musical savant. Not only does he have absolute pitch, he is able to get the structure of a fugue. It’s very, very startling to see someone who is dazzling in one way and grossly defective in others. This disparity tends to be increased by practice and possibly obsession—because, of course, this may be the one highly pleasurable and rewarding thing in their lives.
What is happening in the brain of a person like that?
Some neurologists think that what may go on in the savant may be a relative preservation and heightening of primitive perceptual and computational powers in the right hemisphere—powers of a sort that are normally inhibited with the development of abstract intelligence and language. If abstract intelligence and language don’t develop, it could be possible that they may be, in a word, freer. Something which might support this idea may be the late appearance of savant-like powers in people, say, with frontal temporal dementia; it is precisely with the decline of verbal and abstract intelligence that we sometimes see this emergence of artistic powers. There are much-discussed and somewhat disputed experiments in Australia, where a researcher named Allan Snyder is using TMS—transcranial magnetic stimulation—to try and damp down the left dominant temporal lobe. I tried this myself, but it just gave me a headache after 15 minutes. And I was actually slightly afraid of the effects of TMS on my own nervous system.
