Studying the musical brain

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Studying the musical brain

ets imagine being at a concert in a stadium, along with thousands of other people. Our brain, in addition to having to recognize the sounds that make up the music we are listening to, is busy analyzing the visual stimuli that make us aware of the lights and various colors on the stage. As well as discerning the tactile stimuli that make our body vibrate when the music gets louder. For their part, the musicians have to produce sounds, and to do so they need to move their fingers, their arms and their feet. Some of them may be blowing into wind instruments. Hence their brains are extremely active while they are playing, not only at the level of the primary auditory cortex, but also in the areas that control movement and tactile awareness. Probably, before the concert, they practiced their parts, normally written as a series of symbols on a sheet of paper; in other words, guitarists, drummers and singers needed to use the cerebral processes involved in abstraction. Then, in front of the audience, they play from memory: along with auditory stimuli, tactile stimuli and motor information, their brains are using the parts able to store information. For sure, our brain is doing so too, especially if we are singing along at the top of our lungs. Not to mention the difficult task of associative areas, which coordinate and cause the various parts of the brain to interact. The primary auditory cortex, then, is not the only part of the brain working hard to ensure we have a good time. Food for neuroscience Obviously, not all the 10,000 fans in the stadium will have the same level of cerebral activity in precisely the same anatomical regions. And not even the quantity of brain dedicated to music is the same for everyone: for example, a group of researchers in Heidelberg discovered that, compared to the rest of the population, musicians generally have a larger quantity of grey matter in a part of the auditory cortex called Heschls gyrus.1 Most of these cells have been there since birth, and their quantity is genetically determined; rather than their quantity increasing by playing scales and arpeggios, it could be that their number determines the desire to study music.

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Why We Like Music

This does not mean that making music does not modify the brainquite the contrary: the brain is plastic and adapts itself to our needs. Thus, the brains of musicians who use their fingers to play, such as violinists and pianists, have an area in the motor cortex dedicated to hand movement that is much larger than that found in someone who is not even able to hunt and peck on a typewriter. As expected, violinists in particular show a larger than average cortical representation of the left-hand fingers, with the exception of the thumb.2 And this correlation between activity and brain area is greater the earlier music-making begins. And so our musical abilities are extremely variable, just like the portions of the brain involved. Not to mince words, some people do not understand and sometimes do not even like music. But in others those abilities are much higher than average. For example, the story goes that a fourteen-year-old boy managed to transcribe the entire Miserere by Gregorio Allegri after having heard it only once. The Misererea rather lugubrious piece for nine voice-parts lasting fifteen minuteshad been written for the Vatican Easter celebrations. The score was meant to be kept secret, and anyone discovered trying to make a copy was to be excommunicated by the Pope. But the boys name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and he didnt need to copy it from a piece of paper. At this point we might honestly say that music is starting to yield results for those scientists who spend their time on it: precisely by virtue of its complexity, is becoming more and more a tool for understanding how the brain works. As the Canadian neuroscientist Robert Zatorre put it:
Music provides a tool to study numerous aspects of neuroscience, from motor-skill learning to emotion. Indeed, from a psychologists point of view, listening to and producing music involves a tantalizing mix of practically every human cognitive function. Even a seemingly simple activity, such as humming a familiar tune, necessitates complex auditory pattern-processing mechanisms, attention, memory storage and retrieval, motor programming, sensorymotor integration, and so forth.3

Thus the researchers work advances and concentrates on the key points in our understanding of the brain.
... such findings of brain plasticity have very general implications for our understanding of the interplay between the environment and the brain, particularly in the context of development, as the age at which training takes place is so critical.4

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Musicians, in particular, seem to be marvelous research subjects, since they are an excellent model for studying the plasticity of the human brain, that is, its ability to adapt to external stimuli.5 And this is why Zatorre defines music as food for neuroscience.6 Music you can touch People who are blind from birth or who became blind as very young children are another story. In these cases, the brain compensates for the lack of visual stimuli by improving the acuity of its response to auditory stimuli, thanks to its plasticity. Indeed, we know that the blind are better able than those who can see to orient themselves using noises, and that they have a superior ability to quickly recognize changes in sounds and their direction of origin.7 Thus, if we could observe the brain of a blind person listening to a concert with us, we would probably see that it behaves in a different way from ours. It might be surprising to learn what takes place in a deaf persons brain when they are in a sound-rich environment. The deaf are not able to perceive sounds with the cochlea, or to transport sound information from the cochlea to the brain. For them, the easiest thing to be aware of when listening to a piece of music is vibration. In fact, as sometimes seen on the news, some clubs in London hold rave parties for the deaf, where the DJs have an unusual job: amplifying the bass and percussion parts so that those attending can feel the vibrations with their bodies, and dance. This is more or less what Ludwig van Beethoven did when he became deaf in 1818, so that he could keep composing. It is reported that, in order to hear what he was writing, he had the legs sawn off his piano, so that he could play sitting on the ground and feel the sound vibrations through the floor. Not much has changed. In fact, as some American researchers found in 2001, the rhythmic vibrations typical of music activate the primary auditory area in the deaf. And this is an indication of the brains extraordinary ability to put underutilized areas to new uses and to adapt itself to the outside world in the most effective way.8 The same vibrations transmitted to the hands of people with normal hearing activate only the tactile areas of the brain. Finally, for both blind and deaf, for musicians or just listeners, there is the fundamental question of the emotional value of the music, which is the main reason why we spend so much money on CDs and concert tickets. The reason for all this is found in a part of the brain called limbic system, which also comes into play when we enjoy a good meal or have sex. From an evolutionary point of view, the limbic system is a very old part of the human brain: it was there before the cerebral cortex, for example, and so is an element we share with most of the animal kingdom. Its function is to reward the indi-

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Why We Like Music

vidual when he does something useful for himself or the specieslike eating and reproducingby means of a hormonal messenger called dopamine. And so, in a way, we find in the limbic system a first, rather superficial, answer to the question: why do we like music? The next question will then be: why does music activate a reward response similar to the one for other activities that clearly promote our wellbeing and that of our species? Where is the evolutionary advantage in wanting a new stereo system or a $500 iPod? This question will be tackled more seriously in the next chapters. Research strategies, past and present Summing up, we can saytogether with Canadian neuroscientist Isabelle Peretzthat music is not a monolithic ability that you either have or dont have.9 And we can add that, in the same way, the areas of the musical brain cannot be indicated with the same ease felt when marking states and regions on a map. So much so that among neuroscientists we find at least two contrasting views on the neuronal connections between music and language. But this is not just the case for music, of course. Almost all our abilities can be linked to various areas in the brain, often connected to each other in ways that science has not yet fully grasped. To study these connections we now have complex and refined techniques, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allow us to recognize the function of an area as well as its anatomy. Many researchers use these to study the brains of healthy subjects, such as students, friends, fiancs and siblings, who are shoved into the machines for a half-hour in exchange for a cup of coffee. However, only until a few decades ago, the only way to single out the parts of the brain involved in a specific ability was by studying people who had had an accident or a stroke, and who had particular symptoms, such as a paralysis or an inability to speak. Their behaviors were carefully observed and then, after death, an autopsy was carried out and the brain examined to locate the damaged area. Today, though, imaging technology, such as CAT and magnetic resonance, allows the same thing to be done with a living subject. The principle is the same: finding a relationship between the lost ability and the part of the brain that has suffered anatomical damage, and arguing that the loss of function is due to the anatomical damage. For example, following a stroke affecting the left portion of the brain, a patient may lose the ability to speak, that is, become aphasic; in some cases, the ability to articulate the sounds that make up a word is lost, whereas in other situations this is still present, but the patient is incapable of producing intel-

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ligible sentences and of understanding what is said. Now we know that these two forms of aphasia are different, because they are caused by injuries to different parts of the brain. The former involves Brocas area, identified in 1861 by the French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca in a patient who had become unable to say anything but Tan Tan (which is why he will be forever known as Mr. Tan). After his death, Broca removed the brain and observed that the damaged area was at a precise point in the left hemisphere. This is how doctors began to understand that some functions of the brain are lateralized: they are found only in one of the two hemispheres. The next language area to be identified, connected with the second type of aphasia, is called Wernickes areaafter its discoverer, German neurologist Carl Wernickeand is also found in the left hemisphere. Even though scientific observation made it possible to discover the main areas controlling language, doing the same for music is not quite as straightforward. Firstly, while we all know how to talk and walk, our level of music ability varies greatly and is often difficult to determine. The best thing would be to study professional musicians, whose level of ability must be among the highest in the population. But there are few professional musicians; in particular, the number of professional musicians who have suffered a stroke followed by a permanent limitation of their musical abilitiesbut not their other abilitiesis very small. And those who have lost other abilities while retaining their desire to play and compose are especially rare. To this day, the number of such clinical cases can be counted on your fingers. Among the most famous cases is that of Maurice Ravel, author of Bolero. The French composer had an extremely serious ischemic stroke in the left hemisphere of the brain that left him aphasic and also unable to write music, but he still managed to recognize and appreciate the music that others played for him. Another famous clinical case is that of Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin, who became aphasic and suffered hemiplegia of the right part of the body (a sign of damage to the left motor cortex, since the nerve paths for movement cross). Shebalin continued to listen to and, notably, to compose music for a number of years. According to his colleague Dimitri Shostakovich, he did so in the same way and in the same style as before. His story was told in 1965 by the famous Soviet psychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria,10 who also described in detail Shebalins autopsy, which confirmed extensive damage to the left hemisphere of the brain.

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Why We Like Music

Similar cases are those of the English composer Benjamin Britten, of George Gershwin, author of the famous Rhapsody in Blue, and of French organist and composer Jean Langlais. Finally, among us mere mortals, we find the case of Susan S., who became completely aphasic following major damage to the left hemisphere: she did not understand what was said to her, could not speak, nor read, nor say anything besides I love you. But she could still sing. A flair for music Ravel, Shebalin and Susan S. are all clinical cases of damage to the left hemisphere who, despite losing the ability to speak, retained to varying degrees their musical skills. Such a case was recorded for the first time in Sweden in 1745, in a man who could say nothing but Yes, though he still managed to sing.11 Throughout the nineteenth century, scientists searched for a center for music similar to the one Broca had found for language; in 1865 the case of a musician who suffered from aphasia, but not amusia,12 was described, and in 1871, the medical journal The Lancet reported the case of two aphasic children: one could sing only with the lyrics, and the other only without them.13 Since then many cases have been reported of people having speech defects, yet able to play, conduct an orchestra, or just singat least a half-dozen of them over the course of the twentieth century alone. However, there are occurrences where the opposite is true: where people lose their musical abilities but continue to speak normally. This happened to I. R., the manager of a restaurant who at twenty-eight suffered serious bilateral damage to the auditory cortex following surgery needed to repair two aneurysmsone on the right and one on the left. The truly astonishing thing about this case was the complete recovery of all her abilities, including intelligence, but the loss of her musical skills. I. R. came from a family of professional musicians so, even though she had chosen a different path, she played, loved and was familiar with music, which made it easier to assess her level of disability. I. R.s story is quite instructive. Firstly, according to some scientists, it contradicts the belief that spoken language is a more complex and hence more fragile ability than music,14 as previously thought. In other words, I. R. shows that the cases of aphasia without loss of musicality depend on a separation of the two functions within the brain. It indicates that music has its own system of cerebral circuits, quite distinct from others.15 But where are they? Given that the areas of the brain that are active while listening to a concert are numerousfrom the primary auditory area that allows us to recognize sounds, to the limbic system that makes us feel good when we singis there a part of the brain (or rather, a system) specifically dedicated to hearing music? This question is fundamental to understanding how music evolved and, in

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particular its connections to language. Darwins theory, according to which our great-great-great-grandparents began with a musical protolanguage (to attract partners) and only then progressed to speaking, is still supported by many scientists. On the other hand, their opponents maintain that music simply exploited, like a parasite, circuits that had evolved for language and other functions. There is, obviously, no clear answer. Nor should we expect one to be provided soonnot even by using the new equipment now available to neuroscientists. Music and language However we can begin to say that in cases of left-hemisphere damage, the deficit is more frequently in the areas of music or language, or of language alone; for example, a difficulty in recognizing spoken or sung words. In contrast, in the few cases where musical abilities are lost but language is unaffected, the damage to the brain is usually on the right; and patients with damage to the right hemisphere do not seem to recognize melodies if they are sung without words. This could mean that while language areas are on the left, those for music are on the right. Or predominantly on the right. The separation between the two functions was studied by Diana Deutsch, psychologist at the University of California,16 who by 1969 had already managed to demonstrate that musical memory and verbal memory are two independent functions. Those studies were carried on a few years later by the Canadian psychologist Doreen Kimura, who pinpointed the two functions by having a group of volunteers (all of them right-handed) listen to music with one ear, while with the other they listened to a voice reciting numbers. The result showed for the first time a predominant role for the right cerebral hemisphere in musical memory.17 This theory came under attack in the mid-1970s, when, in 1974, an article published in Science by the American psychologists Thomas Bever and Robert Chiarello showed that the predominance of the right hemisphere was only true for non-musicians.18 Instead, musicians recognized more easily the passages played in their right earthose processed by the left hemisphere. This could mean that analytical functionsprevalent in professional musicians while listeningtake place on the left, whereas the right side is responsible for synthesizing and globalizing functions. But today we know that assigning one hemisphere completely to music and the other to language makes little sense, as confirmed by other studies based on neuroimaging.19 These showed that musicians, when dealing with exercises in harmonic or melodic recognition, use the left half of their brain more, while non-musicians use the right. That is, the cognitive strategies called into action

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Why We Like Music

when listening to music are different; it is likely that musicians partly use their verbal competencies, too, to memorize and efficiently utilize musical data. If anything, there might be components of musicality dissociable from language, as shown by recent studies where a final wrong note or a final erroneous word were deliberately placed in opera arias, showing that the reaction time for the brain is different in the two cases. Additionally, if an erroneous word is sung to a wrong note, the two reactions are combined. But other music and language components are tightly linked. The small number of cases where professional musicians have suffered cerebrovascular accidents confirm that the higher the level of musical specialization, the tighter the link. With new diagnostic imaging techniques, research has taken a farther step forward. It has been shown, for example, that some brain functions participate in both activitiesabove all, syntax.20 When we talk, we use syntax to arrange the words within the sentence; for example, in Italian (and English) we almost always put the subject before the verb, followed by the object. When dealing with music, syntax seems to have the same function: arrange the sounds within the musical phrases. The idea is that music and language share this capacity, but use it in a different way. Another recent discovery has shown how the auditory cortex of the right hemisphere is better able to make fine distinctions in pitch between sounds. Moreover, some French researchers studying the brains of forty-five people during neurosurgical procedures observed that tonotopic distribution in the right hemisphere is quite evident, whereas in the left hemisphere it is much less so.21 We can hypothesize that the right hemisphere specializes in pitch recognition and the left in recognition of rhythms. According to the researchers, an important factor lies behind this lateralization: the need to choose between speed and precision in processing sound information from the environment.22 In the case of a sound stimulus, it can sometimes be useful to sacrifice detail in favor of greater perceptual speed, such as when you communicate with words. With music, on the other hand, the brain can opt for a way of understanding that is slower but more detailed. Therefore, both music and language might have emerged and evolved as part of a broader system of environmental sound recognition. As shown in the next chapter, this idea is not only championed by the neuroscientists who are photographing the brain, but is especially supported by those who study the history of the human species through past evidence and comparison with other primates.

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The strange cases of Isabelle Peretz But here is the problem. One of the prevailing models for brain function draws on the idea of modularity, put forward in the 1980s by the American psychologist Jerry Fodor. According to this, the brain can be pictured as a set of separate modules, each with its own rules and characteristics that allow us to have certain abilities. In light of our findings so far, do music and language have different and separate modules? Neuroimaging would seem to indicate not,23 whereas neuropsychology leans more decidedly toward the affirmative. Music, some psychologists say, has its own module with a precise anatomical location,24 like books arranged on a shelf in a bookstore, but neuroimaging is simply not able to show it to us yet. Cases such as those of I. R. and others who have lost musical abilities without becoming aphasic demonstrate the separation between music and language. And so do the many, many cases of people who are completely tone-deafnot even able to sing White Christmasbut are perfectly capable of distinguishing a statement from a question made up of the same words (Speak French! versus Speak French?). In particular, there are apparently two modules for listening to music: one for pitch and one for rhythm (the former on the right and the latter on the left).25 And then there is musical memory, which some think would take a third module all of its own.26 Among the neuropsychologists who strongly support this approach is Isabelle Peretz, a pioneer in research on musical disorders, who for more than twenty-five years has been patiently putting the most tone-deaf individuals she can find in front of a musical staff and a microphone. For me, she says, the work is as fascinating as a spy story. Even after so many years I still dont get bored.27 Her scientific papers and conference reports are rich in anecdotesor rather, clinical casesof people with defects in musical perception but no speech deficits, or vice versa. There is the case of C. N., who lost the ability to recognize melodies after bilateral damage to the primary auditory cortex but still retained the sense of rhythm. Or the case of G. D., an old man who became aphasic because of severe dementia; he no longer spoke and was completely disoriented, but could repeat a melody almost perfectly after hearing it once. In contrast, there is the case of Alberto, who was born tone-deaf (as we will see later, he suffers from congenital amusia) and if he hears the melody of the Marseillaise without the lyrics, cannot recognize the tune and has to guess. Finally, there is Jonathan, the final gem from Peretzs neuropsychology lab: a flutist with a conservatory diploma, who had ended up there as an assistant.

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Why We Like Music

One day he confessed to being tone-deafor at least his wife, also a professional musician, thought so. And so he became a valuable subject. According to Peretz, if Jonathan is asked to sing something as easy as Happy Birthday with no preparation, he is terribly out-of-tuneenough to make you want to cover your ears. And yet, he has absolute pitch: the ability to recognize the pitch of any note whatsoever; if another assistant sits at the piano (an essential research tool in Peretzs lab) and plays a note at random, Jonathan can name it immediately. And he has no trouble singing solfege (i.e. reading music from a staff, singing the names of the notes). This is how Jonathan managed to get his conservatory diploma without anyone noticing his anomaly. And besides, he is young, in perfect health, well-educated and smart, with no speech defectsand he only happened to be at the neuropsychology laboratory in his capacity as a flutist. What now interests Peretz and her colleagues is the reason behind this strange phenomenon: Jonathan has absolute pitch, but seems to be completely lacking in relative pitch: the ability that most of us possess to pick an arbitrary tonality, chosen on the spot, to sing. Also, Jonathan is unable to use his absolute pitch in ordinary conditions, like a birthday party, and does not realize he is off-key. Needless to say, Jonathan will not get away very easily from Peretzs lab, as he has become the number one candidate for her future research.