Music and the Mind

In 2005, Mary Ellen Geist left a high-powered job as a radio news anchor in New York to return home to Michigan to help care for her father, Woody Geist. Her touching book, Measure of the Heart, tells a double story: of her father’s battle with cruel dementia and her own search to find new ways to connect with a parent who cannot recall her name.

Playing a starring role in this story is music, and choral music in particular. Though Alzheimer’s disease has robbed nearly all of Woody’s cognitive ability, he can still sing and does so lustily. Every morning he awakens whistling a favorite tune, and he knows the baritone part to almost every song he ever sang.

What keeps the musicmaking part of the brain intact when everything else seems to have fallen away is something of a mystery. Early exposure may be part of it. When Woody was just six, a choir director at the Grosse Point Memorial Church, took him under his wing. Woody sang solos at church, and even had one recorded. As a young man he joined a barbershop quartet and sang with local theater companies, but he found his musical home with a 12-member a cappella group called The Grunyons.

For some 40 years, The Grunyons have been to Woody more than just a singing group. As Dick Bourez, one of Woody’s fellow baritones, explained it, “We really are all one big family. If somebody had a problem, all The Grunyons were behind you.”

“At his 80th birthday,” Bourez recalls, “Woody asked me what number we were going to do. He’d forget before we’d get to the first note, but as soon as he heard the first note or two, he was right with it. He didn’t realize it was his birthday, but the music, for some reason or other, is still there. It just comes out like a natural thing. I can’t figure it out.”

Oliver Sacks, the well-known brain scientist, has wondered, too, about the unique way in which music enlivens even diseased brains and devotes an entire chapter in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain to Woody and his musical abilities.

“Finding, remembering anew that he can sing is profoundly reassuring to Woody,” Sacks writes.

“It can stimulate his feelings, his imagination, his sense of humor and creativity, his sense of identity, as nothing else can. It can enliven him, calm him, focus and engage him. It can give him back himself.”

What’s the Brain Got To Do with It?

For millennia, scientists and philosophers have sought to discover why music has such a profound and broad-reaching impact on our psyches. A spate of recent books has followed the trail of mystery into the inner reaches of the brain.

Musician and neurologist Daniel J. Levitin argues that the development of our brains over the millennia is the singular thing that made music, art, science, and society possible. In his book, The World In Six Songs, he suggests that the six fundamental ways in which music communicates ideas and emotions—through songs of friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love—have provided the underpinnings of human nature.

Rather than merely a distraction or a pastime, music is a core element of our identity as a species and has paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative relationships, and the passing down of information from generation to generation.

How exactly did language and music happen? Levitin believes that it’s unlikely that either one was the result of a single innovator or event, but rather that they were shaped by a large number of refinements, contributed by legions of developers over many centuries and in many locations, building upon structures and abilities that we inherited from our animal and “proto” human ancestors. In particular, he believes, the evolution of a particular brain mechanism, probably in the prefrontal cortex, created a common mode of thought that underlies the development of both language and art.

This new mechanism provided three cognitive abilities that define the human brain. The first is perspective-taking, the ability to think about our own thoughts and to realize that other people have thoughts and ideas that may or may not agree with our own; the second is representation, the ability to bring to mind things that are not physically visible (or audible) to us this very moment; and the third is rearrangement, the ability to re-order elements in the world into a new or different hierarchy.

The age of about 10 is a turning point for musical preferences. Around that age, most children take real interest in music for the first time, and by the age of 14, musical memories and preferences are becoming firmly established.

The combination of the three provides the ability to create depictions of the world (paintings, sculpture, etc.) that preserved the essential, defining features of things though not necessarily the details. And this is the basis for the creation of art.

Interestingly, he argues that this is the one unique thing that separates humans from all other species on this planet—not that we have language (other animals have that), not that we’ve learned to use tools (chimpanzees do that) or have societies (ants have those) or know how to deceive (crows can do that). What distinguishes us from the others most is that we can do one thing other animals can’t—create art. And it’s not just the existence of art—it’s the prominence of art in our make-up.

The auditory arts of music and poetry hold an esteemed position in this history, which is being better understood and more highly revered in our own time through neurological case studies. People suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, such as Woody Geist, victims of strokes, tumors, and other organic brain trauma may lose the ability to recognize faces or even simple objects such as shoes or eating utensils. But many of these same patients can still recite poetry by heart, or sing songs that they learned as children.

Although much remains to be understood, scientists are learning more everyday about the links between music and memory. “Learning, Arts, and the Brain,” a 2008 study by the Dana Foundation exploring the effects of arts education on other types of learning, found that “specific links exist between high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in both working and long-term memory,” and that these links extend beyond the domain of music training.

The Schema’s the Thing

Levitin’s other book, This is Your Brain on Music, examines the art of music creation and appreciation from a scientific perspective. It seeks to answer questions such as why we become emotionally attached for life to the music that we hear as teenagers, why the difference between a virtuoso and an also-ran tends to be thousands of hours of practice rather than innate talent, and why we often react adversely to music with which we are unfamiliar.

A key to unlocking these mysteries is discovering the ways in which the brain is stimulated and the manner in which the brain creates structure from stimulation. Levitin refers to these structures as “schemas,” and believes they function as the vital filters through which all sensory input is processed.

Musical schemas begin forming in our brains while we’re still in the womb, and thereafter become extended, elaborated, and amended every time we listen to or perform music. For example, schemas for Western music include knowledge of the scales used in Western music (i.e., major, minor, blues, whole tone). Because these scale schemas may differ significantly from the schemas that characterize another culture’s music—Greek or Indian, for example – their music sounds strange to the Western ear.

In addition to scales, the schemas we develop during our formative years include a vocabulary of genres, styles, rhythms, chord progressions, phrase structures (i.e., the number of measures in a musical phrase), typical song duration, and the sequence of notes. These schemas become the frameworks that our brains use to assess all music.

Our interest in and attraction to each new musical piece—or lack thereof—is driven by how the piece fits (subliminally) with these schemas. In other words, once these schemas are in place, they play a major role in shaping how we respond when exposed to new music—both favorably and unfavorably. The schemas frame our perception, our cognitive processing, and ultimately our musical experience, good, bad, or indifferent.

Children begin showing an inclination for music of their own culture as early as age two. They generally begin with a preference for simple songs and gradually evolve into more complex songs as their internal schemas become more varied by exposure to more and more music. Researchers believe that the age of about 10 is a turning point for musical preferences. Around that age, most children take a real interest in music for the first time, and by the age of 14, musical memories and preferences are becoming firmly established.

At this stage of life, of course, self-discovery is paramount—and highly emotional. As teenagers, we discover new ideas, cultures, and people, and, at the same time, we experiment with the notion that we can choose different paths, experiences, and life trajectories from our parents. And we tend to remember things—people, events, joys, sorrows—that have a strong emotional content because our neurological system tags those memories as important.

The schemas we develop during our formative years include a vocabulary of genres, styles, rhythms, chord progressions, phrase structures, typical song duration, and the sequence of notes. These schemas play a major role in shaping how we respond to new music—both favorably and unfavorably.

This line of reasoning suggests strongly that early and repeated exposure to music is vital to a lifelong appreciation of the art of making music. It also suggests that the more broadly people are exposed to different types of music during their formative years, the more they will be able to assimilate and appreciate a wide variety of musical styles throughout their lives.

Our musical preferences are also heavily shaped by our social environment. In Western culture especially, we tend to listen to the music our friends like, and vice versa. Musical preferences become a mark of group identity and distinction, further locking in preferences through the reinforcement of the brain’s neurological network.

Although there’s no cut-off point for acquiring new musical tastes, most people have formed lifelong musical preferences by the age of 18 or 20. Part of the reason is that people tend to be less open to new experiences of any type as they age. This is also the stage of life at which the memory of our musical brains is approaching adult levels of completion.

Post-adolescence, the rate at which our brains form new connections slows considerably. This is due to the biological course for growth of the brain’s synapses. These synapses are programmed to grow and make new connections at a robust rate for a number of years, after which they shift from a growth phase to a pruning phase, getting rid of unneeded or unused connections. This means that music we encounter after the adolescent development phase generally becomes assimilated within that pre-existing framework rather than adding to it.

Researchers have also learned that there are critical periods for the acquisition of new skills, such as language. For example, if a child hasn’t learned language by about the age of six, he or she will likely never learn to speak with the effortlessness of a native speaker of that language. Music and mathematics are believed to have an extended window, but it’s not unlimited. If a student hasn’t had instruction in music or mathematics before the age of 20 or so, these subjects will be much more difficult to learn.

All in Good Time

One of the unique properties of music compared to other art forms is that music manifests itself over time. When we encounter a Rodin sculpture or a Rembrandt painting, we—our brain, that is—take it all in “in the moment.” With music, the shape and flow of the work reveals itself to the listener over the course of time. This characteristic adds the elements of expectation and anticipation to the experience.

Our expectations are the product of our schemas, which are shaped by all of our prior musical experiences. When those expectations are met—say, in the resolution of a dominant 7th chord to the root major chord—we feel reassured. However, if that’s the only way we ever hear a dominant 7th chord resolve, we may become bored. When expectations are not met—when a dominant 7th modulates into another key, for instance—we may feel vaguely unsettled, but also a little more interested in where the piece is going.

Finding the balance between what is expected and what is not expected, between the simple and the complex, between the conventional and the unconventional, is one of the hallmarks of creativity and originality in musical composition—and it isn’t easy to achieve. Choral singers have all experienced being put off by learning an atonal work in the first few rehearsals of the piece. But after subsequent hearings the work becomes more familiar and the initial aversion often resolves into admiration and enjoyment as the melodic and harmonic elements find their place in the singer’s constellation of schemas.

Researchers are also actively involved in studying the nature of rhythm, another distinctive characteristic of music. In his book Musicophilia, Sacks notes that rhythm, in the sense of combining movement and sound, appears spontaneously in human children, but not in any other primate. Although researchers have theorized that music was chronologically preceded by speech (or perhaps the other way around) it seems plausible that musical rhythm evolved independently of speech. He notes that “there is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity (among humans) to impose a rhythm whenever we encounter a series of sounds or noises at a constant interval.”

Early and repeated exposure to music is vital to a lifelong appreciation. The more broadly people are exposed to different types of music during their formative years, the more they will be able to assimilate and appreciate a wide variety of musical styles throughout their lives.

The late British psychiatrist and musician Anthony Storr, author of Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music has been collective and communal—to bring people together and to facilitate the development of cultural and societal bonding. This bonding is accomplished by the music’s rhythm, which makes listening active and synchronizes the minds of all who participate. Sacks drew a parallel between the human neurological system’s core function and the seminal power of rhythm when he wrote: “Just as rapid neuronal oscillation binds together different functional parts within the brain and nervous system, so rhythm binds together the individual nervous systems of a human community.”

Unfortunately, this primal role of music has been diminished in recent generations due to the separation of composers and performers from their audiences, which are largely passive. On the other hand, it really flourishes in a choral setting—a chorus is a model vehicle for fulfilling the joint purposes of bringing people together, collectively and communally, and not always solely for the purpose of making music.

Woody’s Musical Coda

In 2003, Woody Geist’s a cappella group, The Grunyons, won an open audition to perform before the annual Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Christmas Show at the Fox Theatre in downtown Detroit. “He knows all the tunes we plan to sing,” one of his fellow Grunyons told Woody’s wife, Rosemary. “We want him on stage with us.”

Getting ready for the day of the concert was fraught with difficulties. “We left Dad in The Grunyons’ steady hands, took two deep breaths, and went out into the hall to our seats,” writes his daughter Mary Ellen in Measure of the Heart. “Then we got nervous. Very nervous.”

The Grunyons had things well in hand. They had worked out a buddy system to make sure Woody didn’t get lost on the way to the stage and back. Someone always made sure he was standing in the right place. The person who sang with him in the baritone section stood a bit closer to him.

When the lights went down and The Grunyons filed out, “there was Dad, looking the way he always did when he sang with the group: confident, smiling,” Mary Ellen says. “I watched him throughout the performance. Dad seemed to know his part and all the words. They sounded great.”

Afterward, as The Grunyons came by to pat him on the back and shake his hand, Woody asked, “What did I do?” He may not have remembered being on the stage. “But from the look on his face,” Mary Ellen says, “he knew something wonderful had happened. It’s hard to find research that explains the deep imprint music seems to have on my father’s soul and the way his passion for it has endured the ravages of his disease. I believe the power of music propels my father through the plaque in his brain. I believe it helps him leap across neurotransmitters into the lucid world, even if only for a few moments.”
This article is reprinted from The Voice,Winter 2009-10.