Word: musicalities
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Throughout history, the best minds have struggled to define what music is for. To Pythagoras, it was the sound of mathematical, cosmic harmony reverberating in the human soul; to Darwin, a function of sexual selection; to psychologist Steven Pinker, it is a kind of "auditory cheesecake ... crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Like life itself, music is universally experienced yet ultimately eludes explanation...
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks knows all this - and too much else besides, to attempt any glib definitions. On the first page of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, he writes that music "has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world." His book is ostensibly just a survey of research and case histories of patients whose inner lives have been fundamentally changed by music. Yet in revealing the exquisite complexity of the ways in which our minds are attuned...
...Sacks dives into the crevices of the human mind in search of a cure and surfaces with enlightenment for us all. We are irritatedly familiar, for example, with the phenomenon of earworms - catchy tunes that loop in our heads, even when we detest them. This "defenseless engraving of music on the brain," Sacks suggests, is a result of the precision with which most of us can replay music internally; built to seek stimuli, the brain rewards itself for its fidelity with perfect repeats of songs. But for the patients in Sacks' book who suffer musical hallucinations - a related...
Sacks' neurological interest in music dates back to the 1960s, when he noted that the parkinsonian patients he was treating could often inexplicably be roused from their catatonia by music. The leaps in brain science since then, particularly in magnetic resonance imaging scans, mean that neurologists can now actually see what happens when we hear or even compose music. Scans show that, neurally, the experience of imagining music is much the same as listening to it. Also, that the corpus callosum, the mass of nerve fibers that wire the two hemispheres of the brain together, is enlarged in professional musicians...
...fact that absolute pitch - the ability to name any isolated musical tone - shows up on the scanner as an exaggerated asymmetry between the size of certain structures in the right and left sides of the brain falls far short of explaining how it's acquired. What gets closer are the observations that 50% of people born blind or blind from a young age have absolute pitch, and that it's four times more common among first-year music students in Beijing than those in New York - a reflection of the fact that the Chinese are more attuned to pitch, having...