2007 September » The Thinking Meat Project

Wired interview with Oliver Sacks

Being human, Brain and mind 2 Responses »

Sep 292007

Seems like it’s all about music this week at the Thinking Meat Project, which is a nice coincidence because the Lotus World Music Festival is in town (one of the high points of my year) and I’m enjoying a lot of great music this weekend.

Oliver Sacks has a new book out (Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain) that I’m eager to read. Several of his recent New Yorker essays have described people who also figure in the book (including musicologist Clive Wearing, whose story I linked to the other day). Wired has published an enjoyable report of its interview with Sacks.

I was very interested in what Sacks had to say about psychoactive substances and music. He describes an experience he had at the peak of a “a sort of pharmacological mountain” he had ascended, and a similar experience that was mediated solely by music rather than by drugs. I’ve never even smoked pot, much less experimented with anything more intense, so I can’t know what I’d feel if I ever did. However, music and some types of natural surroundings can evoke moments of insight and connectedness and profound spiritual emotion in me that seem to resemble the kind of thing people say they experience when they’re high. Since Sacks was able to compare his own experiences in the two different sets of circumstances, that lends some credence to my idea that maybe what I feel really is similar to some types of drug-induced emotions.

I was also struck by what he had to say about mystical experiences, mostly I suppose because I agree so strongly with it:

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.

Music and language linked in the mind

Being human, Brain and mind Comments Off

Sep 272007

Music and language display some interesting similarities, and two recent news stories underline the parallels between the two capabilities.

At Georgetown University Medical Center, researchers identified two distinct brain systems that are used for processing both music and words. One system is active in understanding the rules that govern the production of music and language (for example, harmony in one case or syntax in the other), and the other is important for memorizing the information contained in music and language (a melody or a phrase, for example). Researchers examined the electrical activity in the brains of listeners who were presented with familiar or unfamiliar melodies. In addition to hearing the melodies themselves, the listeners also heard the melodies with errors inserted into them. There were two types of errors: changed notes that would make a familiar melody sound odd but would not be noticed in an unfamiliar melody, because they’re in the correct key, or changed notes that are in the wrong key and would sound jarring even if the melody were not familiar. The brain wave patterns for the different permutations of familiarity and rule-breaking matched patterns identified with similar situations involving language. This press release from Georgetown has the details.

Some recent work at Northwestern looked at the audiovisual skills that musicians use and found that musical training sharpens abilities that are useful in processing language as well as music. This press release from Northwestern and this article from Scientific American Mind have more info.

There may be potential here for helping kids with literacy problems by cross-training them, so to speak, by teaching them to play a musical instrument. I’ve heard that dyslexia in particular may be linked to problems in distinguishing similar sounds–as I recall, one of the things the Fast ForWord software from Scientific Learning does is to train readers to recognize different speech sounds. So I can see where developing aural acuity through musical training might conceivably be helpful too. This is just speculation at this point though. I wonder if musical training might make it any easier for an adult to learn a new language.

Music, love, and memory

Being human, Brain and mind Comments Off

Sep 262007

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has written a haunting essay for the New Yorker about musician and musicologist Clive Wearing, a man who suffered a brain infection over 20 years ago and ever since has struggled with the worst known case of amnesia. It’s a terrifying story, because Wearing’s life sounds hellishly difficult: he can neither remember his past nor form new memories. He has developed some coping mechanisms to get himself from moment to moment, but after his illness he kept reliving an endless present of apparently just-regained consciousness. Even now it sounds like he is surrounded by a mental darkness that is liable to engulf him.

Two lights shine in the darkness, though: his love for his wife, whom he still recognizes and who still loves and cares for him, and his ability to perform and conduct music. Sacks explains how these attachments and accomplishments, which rely on memory, can persist in the absence of other kinds of memory. He talks about the difference between episodic memory (recalling the day your child was born, or remembering that you went out for pizza yesterday for lunch) and semantic or procedural memory (remembering how to brush your teeth or find and use the can opener in your kitchen). Amnesia typically destroys the former to one degree or another, but leaves the latter intact. Wearing, unable to remember from minute to minute who he is talking to, has learned through physical repetition how to get to the coffee cups in the kitchen, even though he couldn’t tell you where they are. He can also play the piano, sing, and conduct a chorus, apparently with a great deal of sensitivity and intellect.

Musical performance presents fascinating questions about the memories involved. The memory of how to play or conduct a piece is similar to the memory of how to ride a bicycle or perform any other physical task, but musical performance seems to call on capabilities beyond the automatic following of physical procedures. Sacks gives a very moving description of the kind of creativity and engagement with life that Wearing finds in following a piece of music and letting it organize his perception of consciousness with its logic and shape his reality for as long as it lasts.

In Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy : How Music Captures Our Imagination, Robert Jourdain attributes the magic of music to exactly this type of shaping and organizing of conscious experience. Music presents us with an artificial world where we can grasp the subtle structure and relationships embodied in the music, and “…our brains are able to piece together larger understandings than they can in the wokaday external world…”.

“It’s for this reason that music can be transcendant. For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.”

It’s happiness enough that music can do all that for ordinary people with ordinary lives, but it’s a great wonder that it can also do that for someone whose life has been deeply changed by such fundamental losses. When I first started reading the article it seemed like a story of unrelieved sadness, so as I continued reading it was good to see that love and music can still offer sustenance even in very difficult circumstances.

Animals on our radar

Human origins and evolution, Thought and consciousness Comments Off

Sep 252007

What’s the difference between a rhino and a doorknob? (I hope you don’t expect an in-depth answer.) For the purposes of this blog entry, the key difference is that depending on what it’s doing, the rhino can represent a major threat, whereas the doorknob is more or less perennially meek and harmless. Furthermore, rhinos and other animals have been important to hominids (as dangers, food sources, or possibly both) for a very long time.

A recent study provides evidence that people have an ingrained preference for monitoring animate objects much more closely than they do inanimate objects. While a person’s gaze doesn’t linger on the doorknob, or return to it frequently unless it does something exciting like burst into flames, a rhino or other animal is an automatic attention-getter, and we keep tabs on what it’s doing. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Joshua New, who was a grad student at UCSB when the study was done, investigated whether humans have an inborn system for monitoring animals. In their study, people were shown pairs of images that were nearly identical, with just one change. If the change involved an animal, people were able to spot the difference more quickly and accurately than if it involved any kind of an inanimate object (even a bright red minivan set against a savannah scene–an incongruous object of a type we’ve been taught since childhood to watch out for). It just goes to show that you can take the ape out of the savannah but it’s a lot harder to take the savannah out of the ape. This article from Science Daily has the details.

“Honorary apes”

General 2 Responses »

Sep 222007

This article from the Boston Globe summarizes some of the most recent research into avian intelligence. In addition to mentioning the famous African grey parrot Alex, the article discusses wild birds (starlings, New Caledonian and other crows, scrub jays, African greys in the wild) and why intelligence and communication skills to rival humans’ might have evolved in these birds. One theory for how human language emerged is that we needed language to keep tabs on each other (to gossip, in other words) once typical human group sizes grew so big that grooming was no longer adequate as a social adhesive. (For a popular write-up of this idea, see Robin Dunbar’s book Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language.) Birds are also social animals and their communication skills might have emerged and evolved in response to similar social pressures. Because their evolutionary lineage is so distant from ours, and structurally their brains are quite different from ours, this might be one of the most fascinating examples of convergent evolution (independent evolution of similar capabilities or traits in two different species).

The article mentioned something I wasn’t aware of. When scientists first discovered neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) in the adult brain, it was in the brains of songbirds, which generate new neurons when the bird learns a new song. It was that discovery about birds that opened up the study of neurogenesis in other animals, including us.

The latest word in the hobbit debate

Human origins and evolution Comments Off

Sep 212007

Fossilized bones of a mysterious undersized and small-brained hominid discovered several years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores have given rise to plenty of controversy. Are they, as their discoverers claim, the remains of a distinct species, Homo floresiensis, or are they the same species as us, but simply microcephalic (born with unusually small brains)? The debate goes back and forth. The latest evidence sounds fairly convincing to me: The wrist bones of the hominid resemble those of a modern chimpanzee or an early hominid, and are very unlike those of a modern human, indicating that the bones do belong to a previously unknown species of human and are not simply evidence of deformed modern humans. You can read more at the New Scientist and MSNBC/Newsweek.

Discover interview with Steven Pinker

Books, General Comments Off

Sep 202007

Discover Magazine has published an interview with Steven Pinker in which he talks about some of the subjects he has covered in his books, and also about the things that draw him to particular topics. It’s an enjoyable read.

Tracing the origins of genus Homo

Human origins and evolution Comments Off

Sep 192007

This New York Times story describes the current state of research into the deep ancestry of the genus Homo, in particular efforts to fill in a gap in our knowledge extending from about two million years ago to about three million years ago. Some interesting things must have been happening during this rather sparse period in the hominid fossil record, but it’s frustratingly difficult to try to narrow down what they could have been and to answer questions about the evolutionary history of Homo erectus and Homo habilis. I’m intrigued by the suggestion that some Homo habilis moved out of Africa to Europe, where the geographical separation could have facilitated their evolution into a separate species, Homo erectus, some of whom then returned to Africa. This would explain how Homo erectus came to live alongside Homo habilis in Africa, as they evidently did for several hundred thousand years. But so far, the sequence of events is unclear, and the story of human origins is definitely still being deciphered.

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