by Oliver Sacks
Expectation and suggestion can greatly enhance musical imagery, even producing a quasi-perceptual experience. Jerome Bruner, a very musical friend, described to me how once, having put a favorite Mozart record on his turntable, he listened to it with great pleasure, and then went to turn it over to play the other side— only to find that he had never played it in the first place. Perhaps this is an extreme example of something we all experience occasionally with familiar music: thinking we hear music faintly when the radio has been turned off or a piece has come to an end, we wonder whether the music is still playing softly or we are simply imagining it.
Some inconclusive experiments were performed in the 1960s on what the researchers called “the ‘White Christmas’ effect.” When the then universally known Bing Crosby version of the song was played, some subjects “heard” it when the volume was turned down to near zero, or even when the experimenters announced they would play the song but never turned it on. Physiological confirmation of such “filling in” by involuntary musical imagery has recently been obtained by William Kelley and his colleagues at Dartmouth, who used functional MRI to scan the auditory cortex while their subjects listened to familiar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replaced by gaps of silence. The silent gaps embedded in familiar songs were not consciously noticed by their subjects, but the researchers observed that these gaps “induced greater activation in the auditory association areas than did silent gaps embedded in unknown songs; this was true for gaps in songs with lyrics and without lyrics.”1
Deliberate, conscious, voluntary mental imagery involves not only auditory and motor cortex, but regions of the frontal cortex involved in choosing and planning. Such deliberate mental imagery is clearly crucial to professional musicians— it saved the creative life and sanity of Beethoven after he had gone deaf and could no longer hear any music other than that in his mind.2 (It is possible, indeed, that his musical imagery was even intensified by deafness, for with the removal of normal auditory input, the auditory cortex may become hypersensitive, with heightened powers of musical imagery.) The rest of us frequently call upon our musical imagery, too. Nevertheless, it seems to me that most of our musical imagery is not voluntarily commanded or summoned but comes to us apparently spontaneously. Sometimes it just pops into the mind; at other times it may play there quietly for a while without our even noticing it. And though voluntary musical imagery may not be easily available to the relatively unmusical, virtually everyone has involuntary musical imagery.
One sort of involuntary musical imagery is related to intense and repeated exposure to a particular piece or sort of music. I tend to fall in love with a certain composer or artist and to play their music over and over, almost exclusively, for weeks or months, until it is replaced with something else. In the past six months, I have had three such fixations, one after another. The first was on Janácek’s opera Jenufa, after I had gone to hear a beautiful performance of this directed by Jonathan Miller; themes from Jenufa kept going through my mind, even entering my dreams, for two months, reinforced by my getting CDs of the opera and playing them constantly. Then I switched to a profoundly different experience after meeting Woody Geist, a patient who sang for me some of the music he performed with his a cappella jazz group, the Grunyons. This intrigued me, though I had never before been interested in this type of music; once again, I played his CD constantly, and Jenufa vanished from my mental concert hall, replaced by the Grunyons singing “Shooby Doin’.” Most recently, I have turned to constant playing of recordings by Leon Fleisher, and his renditions of Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms have swept the Grunyons out of my head. If I ask what Jenufa, “Shooby Doin’,” and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue have in common, I would have to say nothing musically and probably nothing emotionally (beyond the pleasure they have all given me at different times). What they do share is the fact that I have bombarded my ears and brain with them, and the musical “circuits” or networks in my brain have been supersaturated, overcharged, with them. In such a supersaturated state, the brain seems ready to replay the music with no apparent external stimulus. Such replayings, curiously, seem to be almost as satisfying as listening to the actual music, and these involuntary concerts are rarely intrusive or uncontrollable (although they have the potential to be so).
In a sense, this type of musical imagery, triggered by overexposure, is the least personal, the least significant form of “music on the mind.” We are on much richer, much more mysterious terrain when we consider tunes or musical fragments we have perhaps not heard or thought of in decades, that suddenly play in the mind for no apparent reason. No recent exposure, no repetition can explain such tunes, and it is almost impossible to avoid asking oneself, “Why this tune at this particular moment? What put it into my mind?” Sometimes the reason or association is obvious, or seems so.
As I write, in New York in mid-December, the city is full of Christmas trees and menorahs. I would be inclined to say, as an old Jewish atheist, that these things mean nothing to me, but Hanukkah songs are evoked in my mind whenever an image of a menorah impinges on my retina, even when I am not consciously aware of it. There must be more emotion, more meaning here than I allow, even if it is of a mostly sentimental and nostalgic kind.
But this December is also marked by a darker melody, or train of melodies, which forms an almost constant background to my thoughts. Even when I am hardly conscious of this, it produces a feeling of pain and grief. My brother is gravely ill, and this music, plucked out from ten thousand tunes by my unconscious, is Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of a Most Beloved Brother.
As I was dressing this morning after a swim, I was reminded, now I was on land again, of my painful, arthritic old knees— and I thought too about my friend Nick, who would be visiting that day. With this there suddenly popped into my head an old nursery rhyme that was popular in my childhood but that I had probably not heard (or thought about) for two-thirds of a century: “This Old Man,” and, in particular, its refrain: “Knick-knack, paddy whack, give a dog a bone; / This old man came rolling home.” Now I myself was an old man with painful knees who wanted to be rolled home— and Nick (punned as knick-knack) had entered into it too.
Many of our musical associations are verbal, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Eating some smoked whitefish (which I adore) earlier in this Christmas season, I heard in my mind “O Come Let Us Adore Him.” Now the hymn has become associated with whitefish for me.
Often such verbal associations are subconscious and only become explicit after the fact. One correspondent wrote to me about her husband, who, though well able to remember tunes, was unable to recall the words which went with them— nevertheless, like many people, he might make unconscious verbal associations to the lyrics. “For example,” she related, “we could have been saying something like, ‘Gee, it’s getting dark really early these days,’ and, a half-minute later, he would start whistling ‘The Old Lamplighter’— a fairly obscure song which he has heard just a few times in his life…. Obviously, the lyrics are stored in his brain and linked to the music, but are somehow only retrievable through the music without the words!”
I recently spent several hours with a composer, grilling him about his musical imagery. He finally excused himself and went to the loo. On emerging, he told me that he had heard a song in his head— a song that had been popular forty years earlier but that, at first, he could not identify. He then recalled that the first line of the song was “Only five minutes more…” I accepted this as a hint from his unconscious, and made sure to keep him only five minutes more.
Sometimes there are deeper associations which I cannot fathom by myself— the deepest of these I seem to keep, as if by a sort of agreement with my unconscious, for sessions with my analyst, who is encyclopedically musical, and often able to identify the fragmentary and off-key sounds that are sometimes as much as I can reproduce.
And, of course, the greatest literary analysis of a musical association is th
at given by Proust, in his deciphering of “the little phrase” of Vinteuil’s that runs through the entire structure of Remembrance of Things Past.
But why this incessant search for meaning or interpretation? It is not clear that any art cries out for this and, of all the arts, music surely the least— for while it is the most closely tied to the emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representation whatever. We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love— but music, instrumental music, can tell us nothing about these. Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty (Bach, of course, was a master at combining these). But it does not have to have any “meaning” whatever. One may recall music, give it the life of imagination (or even hallucination) simply because one likes it— this is reason enough. Or perhaps there may be no reason at all, as Rodolfo Llinás points out.
Llinás, a neuroscientist at New York University, is especially interested in the interactions of the cortex and the thalamus— which he postulates to underlie consciousness or “self”— and their interaction with the motor nuclei beneath the cortex, especially the basal ganglia, which he sees as crucial to the production of “action-patterns” (for walking, shaving, playing the violin, and so on). He calls the neural embodiments of these action-patterns “motor tapes.” Llinás conceives of all mental activities— perceiving, remembering, and imagining no less than doing— as “motor.” In his book I of the Vortex, he writes repeatedly of music, mostly of musical performance, but sometimes of that odd form of musical imagery when a song or tune suddenly pops into the mind:
The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning.
Let us think again of our motor tapes in the basal ganglia. I should like to suggest to you that these nuclei do not always wait for a tape to be called up for use by the thalamocortical system, the self…. In fact, the activity in the basalganglia is running all the time, playing motor patterns and snippets of motor patterns amongst and between themselves— and because of the odd, re-entrant inhibitory connectivity amongst and between these nuclei, they seem to act as a continuous, random, motor pattern noise generator. Here and there, a pattern or portion of a pattern escapes, without its apparent emotional counterpart, into the context of the thalamocortical system.
“And suddenly,” Llinás concludes, “you hear a song in your head or out of seemingly nowhere find yourself anxious to play tennis. Things sometimes just come to us.”
Anthony Storr, a psychiatrist, writes eloquently in Music and the Mind of his own musical imagery and wonders “what purpose is served by music running in the head unsummoned and perhaps unwanted?” He feels that such music generally has a positive effect: “It alleviates boredom, makes…movements more rhythmical, and reduces fatigue.” It buoys the spirits, is intrinsically rewarding. Music drawn from memory, he writes, “has many of the same effects as real music coming from the external world.” It has the additional bonus of drawing attention to otherwise overlooked or repressed thoughts, and in this way may serve a function similar to that of dreams. All in all, Storr concludes, spontaneous musical imagery is basically “beneficent” and “biologically adaptive.”3
Our susceptibility to musical imagery indeed requires exceedingly sensitive and refined systems for perceiving and remembering music, systems far beyond anything in any nonhuman primate. These systems, it seems, are as sensitive to stimulation from internal sources— memories, emotions, associations— as to external music. A tendency to spontaneous activity and repetition seems to be built into them in a way that has no analogue in other perceptual systems. I see my room, my furniture every day, but they do not re-present themselves as “pictures in the mind.” Nor do I hear imaginary dog barks or traffic noises in the background of my mind, or smell aromas of imaginary meals cooking, even though I am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind, but with nothing like the richness and range of my spontaneous musical imagery. Perhaps it is not just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about it— its beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and its peculiarly direct connection to the emotions.
It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads. If Arthur C. Clarke’s Overlords were puzzled when they landed on Earth and observed how much energy our species puts into making and listening to music, they would have been stupefied when they realized that, even in the absence of external sources, most of us are incessantly playing music in our heads.
5
Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes
Music is playing inside my head Over and over and over again…There’s no end…
— CAROLE KING
Sometimes normal musical imagery crosses a line and becomes, so to speak, pathological, as when a certain fragment of music repeats itself incessantly, sometimes maddeningly, for days on end. These repetitions— often a short, well-defined phrase or theme of three or four bars— are apt to go on for hours or days, circling in the mind, before fading away. This endless repetition and the fact that the music in question may be irrelevant or trivial, not to one’s taste, or even hateful, suggest a coercive process, that the music has entered and subverted a part of the brain, forcing it to fire repetitively and autonomously (as may happen with a tic or a seizure).
Many people are set off by the theme music of a film or television show or an advertisement. This is not coincidental, for such music is designed, in the terms of the music industry, to “hook” the listener, to be “catchy” or “sticky,” to bore its way, like an earwig, into the ear or mind; hence the term “earworms”— though one might be inclined to call them “brainworms” instead. (One newsmagazine, in 1987, defined them, half facetiously, as “cognitively infectious musical agents.”)
A friend of mine, Nick Younes, described to me how he had been fixated on the song “Love and Marriage,” a tune written by James Van Heusen.1 A single hearing of this song— a Frank Sinatra rendition used as the theme song of the television show Married…with Children— was enough to hook Nick. He “got trapped inside the tempo of the song,” and it ran in his mind almost constantly for ten days. With incessant repetition, it soon lost its charm, its lilt, its musicality and its meaning. It interfered with his schoolwork, his thinking, his peace of mind, his sleep. He tried to stop it in a number of ways, all to no avail: “I jumped up and down. I counted to a hundred. I splashed water on my face. I tried talking loudly to myself, plugging my ears.” Finally it faded away— but as he told me this story, it returned and went on to haunt him again for several hours.
Though the term “earworm” was first used in the 1980s (as a literal translation of the German Ohrwurm), the concept is far from new. Nicolas Slonimsky, a composer and musicologist, was deliberately inventing musical forms or phrases that could hook the mind and force it to mimicry and repetition, as early as the 1920s. And in 1876, Mark Twain wrote a short story (“A Literary Nightmare,” subsequently retitled “Punch, Brothers, Punch!”) in which the narrator is rendered helpless after encountering some “jingling rhymes”:
They took instant and entire possession of me. All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain…. I fought hard for an hour, but it was useless. My head kept humming…. I drifted downtown, and presently discovered that my feet were keeping time to that relentless jingle…. [I]jingled all through the evening, went to bed, rolled, tossed, and jingled all night long.
Two days later, the narrator meets an old friend, a pastor, and inadvertently “infects” him with the jingle; the pastor, in turn, inadvertently infects his entire congregation.
What is happening, psychologically and neurologically, when a
tune or a jingle takes possession of one like this? What are the characteristics that make a tune or a song “dangerous” or “infectious” in this way? Is it some oddity of sound, of timbre or rhythm or melody? Is it repetition? Or is it arousal of special emotional resonances or associations?
My own earliest brainworms can be reactivated by the act of thinking about them, even though they go back more than sixty years. Many of them seemed to have a very distinctive musical shape, a tonal or melodic oddness that may have played a part in imprinting them on my mind. And they had meaning and emotion, too, for they were usually Jewish songs and litanies associated with a sense of heritage and history, a feeling of family warmth and togetherness. One favorite song, sung after the meal on Seder nights, was “Had Gadya” (Aramaic for “one little goat”). This was an accumulating and repetitive song, and one that must have been sung (in its Hebrew version) many times in our Orthodox household. The additions, which became longer and longer with each verse, were sung with a mournful emphasis ending with a plaintive fourth. This little phrase of six notes in a minor key would be sung (I counted!) forty-six times in the course of the song, and this repetition hammered it into my head. It would haunt me and pop into my mind dozens of times a day throughout the eight days of Passover, then slowly diminish until the next year. Did the qualities of repetition and simplicity or that odd, incongruous fourth perhaps act as neural facilitators, setting up a circuit (for it felt like this) that reexcited itself automatically? Or did the grim humor of the song or its solemn, liturgical context play a significant part, too?