it is due in 22 hours from now

Music on the Brain: ImageryandImagination

Heardmelodies are sweet, but those unheardare sweeter.

‐ I O H N KEATS, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

usic forms a significant and, on the whole, pleasant part of life for most of u s ‐ n o t only external music, music we hear with our ears, but internal music,

music that plays in our heads. When Galton wrote on ”mental imagery” in the 1880s, he concerned himself only with Visual imagery and n o t at all with musical imagery. But a tally of one’s friends will suffice to show that musical imagery has arange no less varied than the Visual. There are some people who can scarcely hold a tune in their heads and others who can hear entire symphonies in their minds with a detail and Vividness little short of actualperception. I became aware of this huge variation early in life, for my

parents stood at opposite ends of the spectrum. My mother had

30

Music on the Brain:ImageryandImagination 31

difficulty voluntarily calling any tune to mind, but my father seemed to have an entire orchestra in his head, ready to do his bidding. He always had two or three miniature orchestral scores stuffedin hispockets,andbetweenseeingpatients hemightpull out a score and have alittle internal concert. Hedid not needto put arecordon the gramophone, for he couldplay ascore almost asvividly in his mind,perhaps with different moods or interpre‑ tations, and sometimesimprovisations of his own. His favorite bedtime reading was a dictionary of musical themes,- he would t u r n over afew pages, almost at random, savoringthis andthat ‑ and then, stimulated by the opening line of something, settle down to a favorite symphony 0r concerto, his ownklei'neNacht‑ musik, ashecalledit. My own powers of musical imagery, and of musical percep‑

tion, are muchmore limited. I cannot hear an entire orchestra in my head, at least under normal circumstances. What I do have, to some degree, is a pianist’s imagery. With music I know well, such asChopin’s mazurkas,which I learnedby heart sixty years ago and have continued to love ever since, I have only to glance at a score or think of aparticular mazurka (an opus number will set me off) and the mazurka will start to play in my mind. I not only I’hear” the music, but I “see” my hands on the keyboard before me, and ”feel” them playing the piece‐a virtual perfor‑ mance which, once started, seems to unfold or proceedby itself. Indeed, when I was learning the mazurkas, I found that I could practice them in my mind,andI often “heard” particularphrases or themes from the mazurkasplayingby themselves. Evenif it is involuntary and unconscious, going over passages mentally in this way is acrucial tool for all performers, and the imagination of playingcan bealmost asefficacious asthe physicalactuality. Since the mid‐I990s,studies carried out byRobertZatorre and

his colleagues, using increasingly sophisticated brain-imaging

3 2 M U S I C O P H I L I A

techniques, have shown that imagining music can indeed acti‑ vate the auditory cortex almost as strongly as listening to it. Imagining music also stimulates the motor cortex, and con‑ versely, imagining the action of playing music stimulates the auditory cortex. This, Zatorre andHalpernnotedin a2 0 05paper, ”corresponds to reports from musicians that they can ’hear’ their instrument duringmentalpractice.” As Alvaro Pascual‐Leone has observed, studies of regional

cerebralbloodflow

[suggest that] mental simulation of movements activates some of the same central neural structures required for the performance of the actual movements. In so doing, mentalpractice alone seems to besufficient to promote the modulation of neural circuits involvedin the early stages of motor skill learning. This modulation not only results in marked improvement in performance, but also seems to place the subjects at an advantage for further skill learning with minimalphysicalpractice. The combination of mental and physical practice [he adds] leads to greater perfor‑ mance improvement than does physical practice alone, a phenomenon for which our findings provide aphysiological explanation.

Expectation and suggestion can greatly enhance musical imagery, even producing a quasi‐perceptual experience. Ierome Bruner, avery musicalfriend, 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 t u r n it over to play the other side‐only to find that hehad 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 on the Brain:ImageryandImagination 33

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 imaginingit. Some inconclusive experiments were performedin the 19603

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 i n ” 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 listenedto famil‑ iar and unfamiliar songs in which short segments had been replacedby gaps of silence. The silent gaps embeddedin 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 unknownsongs; this was true for gaps in songs with lyricsand without lyrics.”I 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 professionalmusicians‐ it savedthe creative life and sanity of Beethoven after he had gone deaf and couldno longerhear any music other thanthat in hismind.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

I. See DavidI. M. Kraemer et al., 2005. 2. Indeed,for any professionalmusician,voluntary imagery may dominate muchof con‑ scious and even subconscious life, Basically, any artist is always at work, even when he

3 4 M U S I C O P H I L I A

powers of musical imagery.) The rest of us frequently call upon our musicalimagery, too. Nevertheless,it seems to methat most of our musical imagery is not voluntarily commanded or sum‑ monedbut 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 Ianacek’s opera Icnufa, after I had gone to hear a beautiful performance of this directed by Jonathan Miller; themes from [enufa kept going through my mind, even entering my dreams, for t w o 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 interestedin this type of music; once again, I playedhis CD constantly, and[enufa vanishedfrom my mental concert hall, replaced by the Grunyons singing ”Shooby Doin’.” Mostrecently,I haveturnedto constant playing of recordings by Leon Fleisher, and his renditions of Beethoven, Chopin, Bach,Mozart,andBrahmshave swept the Grunyons out

appears n o t to be. This is well brought out by NedRorem,in Facingthe Night: “I ’m never not working. Even asI sit here chatting of Kafka or cranberries, sodomy or softball, my mind is simultaneously glued to the piece I’m currently creating; the physical act of insertingthe notes on astaff is merely anecessary afterthought.”

Music on the Brain:ImageryandImagination 35

of my head. If I ask what [enufa, ”Shooby Doin’,” and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue have in common, I would have to say nothing musically and probably nothing emotionally (be‑ yond the pleasure they have all given me at different times). What they doshare is the fact that I havebombardedmy ears and brain with them, and the musical “circuits” or networks in my brainhavebeensupersaturated, overcharged, with them. In such asupersaturated state, the brain seems ready to replay the music with no apparent external stimulus. Such replayings, curiously, seem to bealmost assatisfying aslistening to the actual music, andthese involuntary concerts are rarely intrusive oruncontrol‑ lable (althoughthey havethe potential to beso). In asense, this type of musicalimagery, triggeredby overexpo‑

sure, is the leastpersonal, the least significant form of ”music on the mind.” We are on much richer, much more mysterious ter‑ rain when we consider tunes or musical fragments we have per‑ hapsn o t heardor thought of in decades, that suddenlyplayin the mind for no apparent reason. No recent exposure, no repetition can explain such tunes, andit is almost impossible to avoidask‑ ingoneself, ”Why this tune at this particular moment? What put it into my mind?” Sometimes the reason or association is obvi‑ ous, or seems so. As I write, in New York in mid-December, the city is full of

Christmas trees and menorahs. I would beinclined to say, asan old Iewish atheist, that these things mean nothing to me, but Hanukkah songs are evokedin my mindwhenever animage of a menorah impinges on my retina, even when I am n o t con‑ sciously aware of it. There must be more emotion, more mean‑ ing here than I allow, even if it is of a mostly sentimental and nostalgic kind. But this December is also markedby adarker melody, or train

of melodies,which forms an almost constant background to my

3 6 M U S I C O P H I L I A

thoughts. Evenwhen I am hardly conscious of this, it produces a feeling of painandgrief. My brother is gravely ill,andthis music, plucked out from ten thousand tunes by my unconscious, is Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of a Most BelovedBrother. As I was dressing this morning after aswim, I was reminded,

n o w I was onlandagain, ofmypainful,arthritic oldknees‐andI thought too about my friend Nick, who would be visiting that day. With this there suddenly popped into my head an old nurs‑ ery rhyme that was popular in my childhoodbut that I hadprob‑ ably n o t 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 m a n came rolling home.” Now I myself was an old m a n with painful knees who wanted to be rolled home‐and Nick (punned asknick-knack) hadenteredinto it too. Many of our musicalassociations are verbal, sometimes to the

point of absurdity. Eatingsome smokedWhitefish (whichI adore) earlier in this Christmas season, I heard in my mind “O Come Let Us Adore Him.” Now the hymnhasbecome associatedwith Whitefishfor 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 OldLamplighter’‐afairly obscure song which he hasheardjust afew times in his life. . . . Obviously, the lyrics are storedin hisbrainandlinkedto the music,but are somehow only

IIIretrievable through the music without the words

Music on the Brain:ImageryandImagination 37

I recently spent several hours with a composer, grilling him about his musical imagery. He finally excusedhimself and went to the 100. On emerging, he told me that he had hearda song in his head‐a song that had been popular forty years earlier but that, at first, hecouldnot identify. Hethenrecalledthat the first lineof the songwas “Only five minutes more . . .” I acceptedthis asahint from his unconscious, and made sure to keep him only five minutes more. Sometimes there are deeper associations which I cannot

fathom bymyself‐the deepest of these I seem to keep, asif by a sort of agreement with my unconscious, for sessions with my analyst, who is encyclopedically musical,and often able to iden‑ tify the fragmentary and off-key sounds that are sometimes as muchasI can reproduce. And, of course, the greatest literary analysis of a musicalasso‑

ciation is that given by Proust, in his deciphering of ”the little phrase” of Vinteuil’s that runs through the entire structure of Remembranceof Things Past. But why this incessant searchfor meaningor interpretation? It

is n o t clear that any art cries out for this and, of all the arts, music surely the least‐forwhile it isthe most closely tiedtothe emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representationwhatever. We may goto aplay to learnabout jeal‑ ousy, betrayal, vengeance, love‐but music,instrumentalmusic, can tell usnothing about these. Music can have wonderful, for‑ mal, quasi‐mathematical perfection, andit can have heartbreak‑ ing 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 evenhallucination)simplybecause one likesi t ‑ this is reason enough. Or perhaps there may be no reason at all, asRodolfoLlinaspoints out.

3 8 M U S I C O P H I L I A

Llinas, 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 ascrucial to the production of ”action-patterns” (for walking, shaving, play‑ ing the violin, and so on). He calls the neural embodiments of these action‐patterns l’motor tapes.” Llinasconceives of allmen‑ tal 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 some‑ times of that odd form of musical imagery when a song or tune suddenly pops into the mind:

The neuralprocesses underlyingthat which we call creativ‑ i ty have nothingto dowith rationality. That is to say, if we look at howthe braingenerates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is n o t born out of reasoning.

Letus think again of our motor tapes in the basalganglia. I should like to suggest to you that these nuclei do n o t always wait for atape to becalledup for use by the thalamo‑ cortical system, the self. . . . In fact, the activity in the basal ganglia is running all the time, playing m o t o r 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 asa continuous, random, motor pattern noise genera‑ tor. Here andthere, a pattern or portion of a pattern escapes, without its apparent emotional counterpart, into the con‑ text of the thalamocortical system.

Music on the Brain:ImageryandImagination 39

“Andsuddenly,” Llinasconcludes, “youhear asongin your head or out of seemingly nowherefindyourself anxious to play tennis. Things sometimes just come to us.” Anthony Storr, apsychiatrist, writes eloquently in Music and

the Mind of his own musical imagery and wonders ”what pur‑ pose is served by music running in the head unsummoned and perhaps unwanted?” He feels that such music generally has a positive effect: ” I t 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 externalworld.” It has the additionalbonus of drawingattention 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 “benefi‑ cent” and “biologically adaptive.”3 Our susceptibility to musical imagery indeedrequires exceed‑

ingly sensitive andrefinedsystems for perceivingandremember‑ ing music, systems far beyond anything in any nonhuman primate. These systems, it seems, are assensitive to stimulation from internal sources‐memories, emotions, associations‐as to external music. A tendency to spontaneous activity and repeti‑ tion seems to bebuilt into themin away that hasno 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 back‑ groundofmy mind,or smell aromas of imaginarymealscooking,

3. William James, by contrast, wrote about our ”susceptibility to music”; hepresumably meant this to include our susceptibility to musical imagery aswell. But he saw this as having “no zoological utility,” asreflecting no more than “a mere incidentalpeculiarity of the nervous system.”

4 O M U S I C O P H I L I A

even though I am exposed to such perceptions every day. I do have fragments of poetry and sudden phrases darting into my mind,butwithnothinglikethe richnessandrange of my sponta‑ neous musicalimagery.Perhapsit is n o t just the nervous system, but music itself that has something very peculiar about i t ‐ i t s beat, its melodic contours, so different from those of speech, and itspeculiarly direct connection to the emotions. It really is avery oddbusiness that allof 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 makingandlisteningto 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.