Today I’m going to introduce you a book that I really enjoyed during my undergraduate studies in psychology and that has, in part, surely influenced my choice of specialisation in neuropsychology. The book musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, published in 2009, describes the link between music, the brain and humans. Neurologist with a passion for music, he tells stories of several patients he has met in his life who are affected by neurological difficulties and have a special relationship with music. He also uses examples from famous authors and researchers to illustrate his points. In this brief presentation, I will focus on particular chapter entitled « seduction and indifference », from the fourth part of the book « emotion, identity and music ».
In neuroscience, it’s accepted to separate intellectual operations from emotions. This current is brought by psychology, which also makes this distinction between cognition and affects. For a long time, researchers were only interested in the intelligible aspect of music, and it is only recently that the affective aspect of music has been investigated. However, according to O. Sacks, « music is as essentially emotional as it is intellectual ». Our sensitivity to one or the other facet depends on our mood, circumstances and the music we listen to. The diversity of reactions to music shows that the appreciation of each of these facets is not based on the same brain mechanisms. A rare phenomenon that may also reflect this dissociation is the sudden and isolated loss of the ability to experience musical emotions while the person retains the ability to analyse the formal nature of the music. This is particularly true in cases of head injury or stroke. The reverse is also possible, as illustrated by Isabelle Peretz and her colleagues who studied “amusia”, the inability to form judgements about the structural, intelligible aspect of music while still being able to feel emotions while listening to it.
With regard to the inability to feel emotions about music, Oliver Sacks recalls an exchange with Temple Grandin, a brilliant scientist who presents an autism spectrum disorder. This exchange was about a concert of Bach’s music that Temple Grandin had opportunity to hear. Specifically, it was about Bach’s two- and three-voices inventions. When Oliver Sacks asked Temple Grandin what she thought about the music, she replied that it was ingenious. Oliver Sacks then asked her again if she liked the music, and she replied that while the music gave her intellectual pleasure, it didn’t move her in the way it does for most people who hear it. There was no emotion running through her when she heard the music, she could only appreciate its formality. However, Temple Grandin’s case isn’t typical of all people with autism spectrum disorder. Indeed, Oliver Sacks discusses of his own professional experience and a documentary : The music Child, about how sensitive people with autism spectrum disorder can be to music. The documentary focuses on the pioneering work of Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins, special educators and composers, who have been providing music therapy to people with autism since the 1960s. The practice is known to reduce stress, agitation and stereotyped movements and to improve communication in people with autism spectrum disorders. Music is now commonly used with people with somatic, neurological or psychiatric pathologies. It’s a valuable tool that is now widely recognized in the medical world and can benefit many patients.
I really liked this part of the book, especially this passage. It illustrates how complex the aspects of music are and how everyone, depending on multiple factors, can be receptive or not. In my opinion, there is still a lot to discover about the interaction between music and the brain. The mysteries of how music affects us are far from being discovered. In psychology and neuropsychology, it’s important to study this question when we see the positive effects of music on certain people affected by psychiatric, neurologic disorders or neurodegenerative diseases, among others. Whoever we are and whatever aspect of music affects us the most, it bring something to each of us and I think it’s important to continue to study music in order to better understand it and ourselves.
Vocabulary :
- Head injury or stroke : traumatisme crânien ou accident vasculaire cérébral
- Widely : largement
- Pioneering work : un travail pionnier