In Music, Whole Brain Gets Involved

In Music, Whole Brain Gets Involved
The Boston Globe 11/23/92

By Richard A. Knox
Globe Staff

CHICAGO - Tony DeBlois is blind and autistic. At age 18, he has trouble with abstract notions like "up" and "down." He cannot even button his shirt or tie his shoes. As a young child he could barely relate to the world around him.

But put Tony at a piano - especially in front of an audience - and he'll launch into an extended exploration of a jazz classic like Ellington's "Take the A-Train" that his teacher, Boston jazz pianist Paul Barringer, says is "highly improvisational" and "displays an intuitive understanding of the jazz language." the operative word here is "language." "Music is Tony's language," says his mother, Janice DeBlois of Waltham. "It's the mode we have used to bring out the verbal language. The more music we have pumped into him, the more language we have gotten out of him."

Tony DeBlois appropriately served as the centerpiece of a symposium on "music and the brain" last week at the Chicago Art Institute sponsored by the newly formed Foundation for Human Potential. He embodies an idea taking shape among scientists, physicians, musicians, music therapists and teachers - that music is a quintessentially human language with powers and purposes that researchers are only beginning to plumb.

So preoccupied is Western culture with words that music has been relegated to the, status of a frill, a pleasurable but nonutilitarian human activity. School boards clearly consider it expendable. "Many of us in the arts are alarmed that in the recent federal Education 2000 planning document, the word arts was not even mentioned," says Henry Fogel, executive director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The evidence is beginning to show, however, that music is an alternate mode of thinking deeply rooted in the human character, embodied in its own complex brain structures and with purposes that may have much to do with our cohesion as a social species. By this line of thinking, to minimize music is to overlook whole realms of human potential, dismiss the abilities of children who have difficulty with verbal thinking strategies and miss the chance to foster human empathy and cooperation.

Tedd Judd, a Seattle neuropsychologist and amateur musician, maintains that Western notions of music in the past two centuries or so derive from social stratification and division of labor. Our notion of music, Judd says, has been distorted into an individualistic activity in which a composer is sending a message through performers to passive listeners.

"Why do we make music? I venture to say music did not emerge so a composer could communicate a message to an audience," Judd said. "It is to feel the feelings with gome-one else, to have the experience of empathy."

Music, Judd continues, "was not originally intended to say 'I felt joy once and it was like this,' but 'Let's party!' Not 'I felt grief once,' but 'We are grieving together.' Not 'I prayed once,' but 'Let us pray.'"

Music-making, in this view, evolved as a central participatory experience. Judd likens it to sex, but more social. "As countless adolescents have discovered, the solo sexual experience does not tell you everything you might want to know about the duet," he points out

Anthropologic studies of music support Judd's argument. The "main thing" about traditional African music, reports Simha Arom, director of the National Scientific Research Center of Paris, is its role "in communicating between humans and divinities and among members of the community. There are no listeners. Everybody is a participant."

Music's tribal role has its contemporary counterpart, researchers speculate, in rituals such as weddings, funerals, patriotic occasions and dancing parties. Its emotional punch is exploited by TV commercials, MTV and movie scores.

Seen this way, the neuroanatomy and neuropsychology of music - the way the brain processes musical information - begin to make sense.

Neuroscientists are discovering that the human brain has structures for processing and generating the language of music that are quite separate from those that deal with the language of words. Recent investigations are also turning up surprises that are forcing scientists to alter their conceptions of where music lodges in the brain.

Previous thinking, supported by controversial studies, placed music processing in the brain's right hemisphere. Since language usually resides in the left brain, which specializes in sequential, analytical operations, the idea that music is handled by the right brain, which is intuitive, holistic and good at detecting the ge-stalt of the outside world.

To some degree this idea was supported by previous studies carried out by Dr. John C. Mazziotti and colleagues at the University of California at Los Angeles. Through brain scans that measure blood flow, an index of which parts of the brain are most active during a particular operation, the UCLA researchers found that right-brain structures tend to "light up" when musically naive subjects listen to music.

However, the UCLA studies suggested that musicians' brains work differently. Once people learn to read music and approach it analytically, the left brain becomes more active in processing musical tones, the brain scans showed.

However, new studies by Justine Sergent of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital show that the whole brain is involved in some if not most musical tasks.

Sergent studied the brains of 10 professional pianists as they read and played the right-hand portion of an unfamiliar musical score, a Bach partita. Musical sight-reading, she noted in an interview, "is one of the most complex known. It's much more sophisticated than reading words because notes sort of all look alike, unlike letters. What's important is the relationships between the notes."

The Montreal researcher's brain scans showed "complete dissociations between the verbal and musical areas" of the brain, a novel finding. Second, both brain hemispheres are involved in the task.

"It was a big surprise to us," Sergent said. "From the literature, it was always the right hemisphere. If anything, we found more activity on the left than right, but it's symmetrical on both sides."

Sight-reading a score involved a number of cooperating brain structures joined in a large neural network, Sergent found. The emerging picture begins to explain confusing case reports of musicians, like the French composer Maurice Ravel, who lost some but not all musical abilities following strokes, head trauma or degenerative brain diseases.

Sergent said music's emotional power does not seem to stem from the right brain, either, as often assumed. Rather, music activates the amygdala, a structure tucked underneath the "thinking brain" or cerebral cortex that contains the areas responsible for musical perception, understanding, reading, writing and the technical aspects of performing.

Activation of the amygdala, part of the limbic system, fits nicely with notions of music's social functions. "In any social activity, the limbic system must be involved," Sergent said.

Interestingly, in recent brain studies of musicians playing familiar scores, the Montreal researchers found more activity in the limbic system, presumably because the musicians were investing the performance with more emotional content than when they were doing the merely technical task of sight-reading an unfamiliar score.

The discovery that music activates its own neural network distinct from verbal language has broad implications for the way the mind works and for strategies to enhance mental performance and creativity, according to researchers.

For instance, Jeanne Bam-berger, a professor of music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described how music unmasked the true abilities of a 9-year-old boy experiencing great difficulties learning to read, write and express himself verbally.

The boy, whom she called Brad, had been diagnosed as having a "severe auditory deficit" and "difficulty sequencing," but by letting him manipulate a series of bells and discover different ways of playing a simple tune, Bamberger showed that neither was true. Using musical concepts, Brad spontaneously devised alternative strategies for answering questions that were inaccessible to him through the medium of words.

"Music showed his so-called deficits have to do with a language deficit," Bamberger said. "There must be a language mind behind the ear that is different from the music mind. It's very important to differentiate these and not talk about them as a lump."

But music may help humankind enhance the creativity inherent in all minds, not just those that appear impaired. The evidence lies in the stories of dozens of scientist-musicians, from Rene Laennec, the 18th-century inventor of the stethoscope, to Albert Einstein, who took refuge in Bach when stumped by a problem in theoretical physics, according to Dr. Robert S. Root-Bernstein of Michigan State University, a biochemist, science historian and cellist.

Unlike words, music is able to "explore and convey numerous concurrent themes," Root-Bernstein notes. "It requires practice thinking concurrently about complex patterns and sensing multiple levels of interaction - holistic thinking - rather than linear, reductionist analysis."

Music can teach us "ways to communicate between modes of thinking," he argues. And this may "break the bonds of accepted practice and allow new things to be done."