Interaction between music and the brain is a fascinating subject, it is always new to me because the subject is so vast, so inaccessible and still so not understood. I was listening to an interview of Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme this morning and he explained he clinically died during surgery but got reanimated and survived. However something weird happened to him after this terrible episode: whereas he could hear music in his head when he was composing a song, nothing was coming after his brush with death, it was complete silence and he took him months to recover from his depression – he was in a very dark and foggy hole for a long time – and be able to compose new music. The first song he wrote was ‘The Vampyre of Time and Memory’, and eventually the entire QOTSA’s last album, ‘… Like Clockwork’, was inspired by his near-death experience. In his case, composing and playing music was clearly linked to his physical and mental condition, but it turns out that music plays an essential role in the functioning of the brain even if you are not composing songs.
There is a new documentary called ‘Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory’ which explores the link between music, memory and mental condition. Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett captured on camera the work of social worker Dan Cohen in nursing homes over the course of three years, showing that ‘songs from a patient’s past can awaken memories and emotions that have been asleep for years, sometimes decades’. These elderly patients in nursing homes, who have Alzheimer or dementia, are suddenly bring back to life when they hear a song of their past. For example patient Marylou became euphoric and started to dance around the living room as soon as she listened to ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys. I haven’t seen this documentary yet, but it is sure something I won’t miss as it will also include conversations with my favorite neurologist Oliver Sacks (who has always been interested by the impact of music on the brain and wrote this awesome book called ‘Musicophilia‘) and musician Bobby McFerrin. How is this possible? How can music, that Oliver Sacks called the ‘quickening art’, suddenly awake someone from the deep dark hole of memory loss that is Alzheimer? I have already noticed how a song can be strongly associated with a specific memory, and transport you in time better than any other time-machine (I know Proust had his madeleine) but we honestly don’t understand why music, and apparently music better than anything else, can do that.
The more we learn about music the more we discover there is a stong link between music and memory. Research by Ludke et al. (2013) established that people learned Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language, much better if they sang the Hungarian phrases rather than just saying them. People who have had traumatic brain injuries and consequently problems with memory, had their memories brought back by listening to songs from their lifetimes (Baird & Sampson, 2013). Another study showed that music we listened to in our teens and twenties is particularly efficient at bringing back memories of this time, but even music that our parents and grandparents listened to during our early childhood has an impact (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013). So music may be the ultimate vampire of memories (to reference Homme’s song) in the sense that it brings the dead ones back to life.
However, I would say that the elderly people in ‘Alive Inside’ were born in the 20s and 30s and music was probably the most important source of entertainment when they were young. Times are really different, there is so much now, music still plays a major role in young people’s lives, but there is so much of everything else and I wonder whether music is gonna keep the same strong bond with memory when this generation gets old. Now, music is such a background distraction to every daily activity and not the central scene anymore. Personally, I keep it as the essential scene in my life and I avoid doing anything else when I listen to music, so may be it will still work for me and I wonder what song of my past will help me awaken from my future dementia.
Watch this moving excerpt showing an old man waking up and lightning up after listening to his favorite music (Cab Calloway), and no it’s not an advertisement for the next Apple device.
