Friedrich Nietzsche once
stated, without music, life would be an error." He even claimed that
music help him to get the abyss of philosophy in which he danced with the
darkest side of human existence and predicament. Men's affection to music
dating back to the days of Neanderthal* age and there are evidence of musical
instruments such flutes made out of the elephant tusks and swan bones. Bible
Old Testament, the books of Samuel depict the story of King Saul and David with
an echo of musical enchantment. "And it came to pass, when the evil spirit
from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so
Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him." Old Testament, Samuel-1, 16:23. The
soul of King Saul get rid of trouble while he listen to
the harp played by David, in a sense, it was a medicine for his soul
which failed and distracted at mental stress management.
Today, both psychologists and
neurologists alike, investigating why human mind has such an affinity with
music and how does it work on the human brain! Whom the majority concluded,
music has a tremendous effect on mental mechanism as it effect upon the electro
chemical transmitting process of neurons. The valleys of neurons respond to
music in a tremendous way. As we know the neurotransmitters are the key
components of brain for its functional process, the musical impact on it will
redefine the personal and behavioral traits of men. The eminent American
clinical neurologist and author Oliver sacks explore in his latest book
Musicophilia about this phenomena. As a clinical neurologist, Oliver Sacks
comes with evidence from his patients who suffered musical hallucinations and
other music related mental disorders. While he examines the patients with
amusia disorder, he concluded that mere sound and music has different function
and impact on limbic system. The sensation of music reach beyond the auditory
cortex, the region which deals with auditory function in brain, thus, the
people with the deficiency of amusia can hear the normal sound pattern and
cannot recognize music and rhythm as it does work with normal
people. "There are forms of rhythm deafness, slight or
profound, congenital or acquired. Che Guevara was famously rhythm-deaf; he
might be seen dancing a mambo while the orchestra was playing a tango…In
general, though, forms of rhythm deafness are rarely total, because rhythm is
represented widely in the brain." Musicophilia- page 99.
"In late 2006, Peretz introduce
me to D.L., an intelligent, young-looking seventy-six years old woman who has
never "heard" music, though she seems to hear, recognize, remember
and enjoy other sounds and speech without difficulty." Musicophilia- page
103.
Dr. Cicoria, who strikes with a
thunder bolt transformed to a musical enthusiasm, his musical aspect changed
tremendously while the electrical charge went through his neural pathway. This
experience leads him to a unique mental condition where he acquired a distinct
capacity to deal up with music. The certain changes took place in the chemistry
of his brain; as a consequence, the mental aspect toward music reconstructed
itself in a different way. "He himself, he grow to think, had had a sort
of reincarnation, had been transformed and given a special gift, a mission,
"to tune in" to the music that he called, half
metaphorically, "the music from heaven" Musicophilia-page 7. There
are so many solid evidence from the temporal lobe seizures to whom music and
auditory hallucination are common and affecting their psychic process either
positively or vice versa. Oliver Sacks examine another patient, Salimah M., a
chemist who underwent for a brain surgery in order to remove a tumor from her
right temporal lobe. Even in her case, the after effect was different and she
became more musical in her life, she says "what happened after the surgery
–I felt reborn. That changed my outlook on life and made me appreciate every
minute of it"
Some people have drastically negative
effect with music, their musical skills and hallucinations can lead them to
conditions such seizure, panic and other mental disorders. In Dostoyevsky's
Karamazov Brothers, Pavel Smerdiacove, illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov, an epileptic man who has a musical kindness.
He expose to it while sit and sang with his girlfriend in a Public Park and we
are unable to know that why he sang behind the bushes and what equilibrium he
might have obtained from the soothing stream of music! We either don't know
that his musical tastes blow on him the epileptic seizure it its full force.An
eminent music critic of 19th century, Nikonov, had face trouble
with music during his last days, he ran away from music as he feel mentally
mess up, seizure, whenever he hear it. Eventually he gave up his profession and
ran away from the street where the devil drums were playing.
Shakespeare
defined music as the food of love, "Give me some music; music, moody food,
of us that trade in love" (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.5.1-2), but the modern studies on human mind shows that music also
can thunder and rain on the electro chemical property of brain. Susequantly,
music can give a feeling of ancient agony instead of being the food of love.
Alas, his fears were justified
The Heavens thunders and roar and majestically
(Presto, summer, Four Season,
Vivaldi)
A
lost paradise "syndrome" has been over flowed in the entire history
of men. His art and philosophy shows a remarkable intimacy to the concept of a
garden where the man, or something not up to the men was in a comfortable mode
and the serpent of conscious wasn't yet emerge. Mozart felt the origin of music
from heaven and possibly the purpose of music, to evoke the memories of heaven
which were forgotten by the evolutionary process of man. Individually, the
growth from unconscious to self or from the comfortable womb to the earthly
desert put us at a mountain peak where we sadly play violin as the musician of
"Titanic" concerting on the top of drowning
ship.
Music
has considered as a memory nourishing tool as it effect the cognitive regions
of brain. The students with musical lesson yield more learning skills than
those who are not. Oliver Sacks even suggests that music is the only
non-chemical component for the Parkinson and post encephalitic treatment. The
clinical studies strongly support the hypothesis that music can cure, stabilizes
and even bright up the brain. Albert Einstein reportedly has a relation with a
violin in his childhood and his biographers observe a playing string in between
violin and his early speech difficulties.
Once the capacity to memories lost, the identity of a
person will be in dilemma; it will lead him to the fogy landscape of past in
which he cannot reflect himself at all. Alzheimer's disease causes a person to
loss his short term memory and his personality will dry off once he farewell to
the memories. There are musical therapies for Alzheimer's disease almost
everywhere in the world. "Among
non-pharmacological approaches the use of music is particularly beneficial
because it touches hard-wired areas of the brain and can elicit positive
reactions in patients even in the later stages of the disease.
Part of the difficulty and challenge of Alzheimer's disease is that it disturbs
psychological integrity - memory, context, identity, language, and
relationships - through an irreversible process of brain atrophy."(BBC - Radio
4 - The Material World 16/10/2003).
"The
persistence of memory" , a famous painting of Salvador Dali try to explain
that how the memory fight against time and space for its own existence. The
melting clocks and deformed self-portrait horribly remind us that how miserable
will be our entity without music and memory!
Anyway,
with an adaptive function, men's neurobiological evolution has
made music as an essential feature for his survival.Isabelle Peretz, a neuropsychologist
at the University of Montreal states that "I believe music is in our
genes, but belief is not science".
Seasons
of mind
Human mind has been an interesting topic from the very ancient period; its complexities have discussed by Socrates to Michel Foucault and the possibilities have been explored by religious mystics such Sufi, Zen and yogic schools of India. Their experiments, somehow, helped them to overcome the issues like mental stresses and attain more meditated mind positioning. Human brain acquire data through the sense organs; eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin are the five organs on behalf which the mind, the kingdom of body, abode in human head. In all of the most creatures, the eyes are outstretched to the front side and ears meditating to backwards! Even in biological and anatomical sense, the ears are more associated with past rather than future as it does with eyes. Thus, we can assume that sound, by the same reason music, has more to do with what has already happened and became the part of past. Men hear music and awaken to memories easily than anything else.
The
spiritual advantage of music has noted by a Persian Sufi, Al Ghazali in his
alchemy of happiness "Such are those of pilgrims who celebrate the glories
of the house of god at Mecca in song, and thus incite others to go on
pilgrimage, and of minstrels whose music and songs stir up martial ardors in
the breasts of their auditors and incite the to fight against infidels.
Similarly, mournful music which excites sorrow for sin and failure in religious
life is lawful; of this nature was the music of David" -chapter 5. Mostly
all of the religious sects accompany music in their rituals unconsciously and
the song of soul or the agony of existence expressed through the musical celebrations.
Seasons
of earth make her more beautiful and memorable, a rhythmic and cyclic mode of
spring can leave a sign of nostalgia while we drying out on the days of summer
and might be with a hope, return to another spring. Men have externally organized
his circumstance with a cyclic mode. If so, Oliver Sacks says that our internal
world brain, also facilitate a seasonal charter for its function in association
with music. Men might have developed his skills to handle external factors
along with a rhythm which not only effect cognitive function, but the motor
functions into body and its movements. "There are, of course inherent
tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads,
our songs are full of repetition" Page 47. An interesting
proposition about the origin of music is that it developed from men's physical
laboring in a distant past and this theory intentionally leaves a question that
why or how music reduces the task of physical labor? "We listen to music
with our muscles", this statement of Nietzsche
somehow contemplate a music muscle correlation at
least. Dancing to music is universal; the unnecessary ego of
mind may loose its muscles while melting away with the heavenly flame of music.
The whirling darwish of Sufis, flamenco music of Spain are example for mental
gardening with the support of physical body and attempt to invite an eternal
spring season to mind which he lost and trapped in an endless summer of
anguish.
There
is solid evidence from the neurological studies which support the importance of
music for mantel activities, but, a reliable question is possible that what
might be the fate of human mind unless otherwise it acquires not the specific
talent to deal with music? Another expert on human mind studies, an
evolutionary psychologist, Steven Pinker, consider music as an auditory cheese
cake without any adaptive functions and he even suggest that music will vanish
from our species as the evolutionary process would go further ahead. On preface
of musicophilia, Oliver Sacks refutes him and broadly exclaim that "there
is, nonetheless, much evidence that human have a music instinct no less than a
language instinct, however this evolved." Page 2, preface. Daniel Levitin,
a neuroscientist cum musician at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
also profoundly rejects Steven Pinker. In his book 'This Is Your Brain on
Music, he enrage at and states that "music has got to be useful for
survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago". We can not say
that without music mankind will cease to exists, but in this given condition,
in which we exist, music has a dynamical effect, nonetheless, it is not proven
yet explicitly. A soul without musical nourishment may be able to remind us a
crap of train engine which lack the proper lubricants for its
mechanical/musical process.
A
self generated music within brain or a musical experience without any external
source from auditory organ can be called as musical hallucination. Music
master, Tchaikovsky reportedly underwent through this tunnel. Why
our brain generates such an experience and what is behind the walls of skull to
reveal about? Oliver Sacks him self, once get into musical hallucination
as he mistakenly guess that it was from an audio external source, but
eventually he confirmed that it was from within his brain itself. The causes
are, mostly observed, when audio outputs fails to reach the auditory cortex due
to the ear damages, deafness occurred by aging and intake of cannabis or any
other external neuron stimulate contents. Although, the auditory hallucination
is reported in schizophrenia and Temporal lob epilepsy patients, Vincent Van
Gogh, a post impressionist Dutch painter was suffered by audio hallucination
and he cut off his ear as it unbearably exploded within himself.
The
musical phantoms in the brain seem to be unbelievable for so many peoples .An
exclusivity noted by Oliver Sacks, most of the musical hallucinations, certain
music and songs they experience, have a deep connection with time and less
connection with individual tastes. The person who get in to it usually 'hear'
the popular songs and music from his past and some even 'hear' the sound
preparations of war which were marched trough the street decades ago, an evil
music to which usually everybody fear to get involved. "Music
hallucinations tend to reflect the taste of the time more than the tastes of
the individual" Page 81, Musicophilia, Page 81. Anyway, this phenomenon of
musical hallucination has deeply affected both musicians and none; some of them
came out with creative feedback. An old lady pastor's story depicted by Oliver
Sacks is interesting, to whom hallucination was in the form of hymn and it
appeared only in religious context. In a sense, the mechanism of brain might
have more functional aims with music hallucinations, like retaining self or
providing music from within, according to psychological needs. Musical
hallucination does not activate the primary auditory cortex as it is neural
gate way for sound from auditory organ, but, the secondary audio cortex, where
the pitch, rhythm and other musical properties being processed. A symphony
organized by brain it self without any external instruments and people with
this music hallucination either enjoy or suffer according to their mental
states as it can be a cooling hymen or a war declaring drum beat.
A
person with lost hearing capacity possibly has a tendency to develop an
orchestra within his brain in order to get rid of the musical nothingness. Once
the ears shut down and the inner world became silent, the secondary auditory
cortex may become hypersensitive and held responsibilities to facilitate a
musical extravaganza in brain. Beethoven's deafness during his last days,
Oliver Sacks observes that might have strengthened his musical imagery to
create effective compositions even since his deafness.
Language
and music, the wings of consciousness
The
controversy is going on by decades over the doctrine of human language; in
1950's, the eminent MIT linguistic, Noam Chomsky, proposed a unique theory on
language, in which he suggest that human mind has an innate capacity and
brain wired property to acquire language. The evolutionary advantage
of this phenomenon makes men unique from other species and it is universally
available to any 'functional' human brain, thus, he named it universal grammar.
The biological correlation of language has made tremendous impact on linguistic
and cognitive psychology since it was revealed and experiments on primates like
chimpanzees were conducted to prove their language abilities, a chimpanzee even
named as nim chimpsky in order to mock Noam Chomsky.
On
this context, Oliver Sacks suggest that if there is a universal grammar for
language, does it possible to assume any universal rules for music as it is
exclusively a human property as language in a broad sense? 'We human are a
musical species no less than a linguistic one'. The complexity of human
language is higher than music or any other human mental activity, but, a
singing mind might have emerge before a long time of language and this ability
of musicality of our forefathers might helped their brain to acquire language
and other complicated mental activities! The holes on bone flutes of 50000
years ago, secretly tell us the stories of men who spiritualize a long time
before the advent of heartless words. Steven Mithen, author of 'Singing
Neanderthals: The origin of music, language, mind and body', suggest that
language and music have a common origin as he observe a
protomusic-cum-protolanguage characteristic in Neanderthal mind.
The
rare talent, Absolute Pitch, ability to recognize of any music note without the
reference to other note, have a correlation with language in its origin. Daniel
Dautsch, an expert of AP studies suggests that Absolute Pitch have been a vital
fact to the origin of both speech and music. 'Jenny Sffran and Gregory
griepentrong at university of Wisconsin compared eight months old infant to
adults with and without musical training in a learning test of sequences. The
infants, they found, relied much more heavily on absolute pitch cues; the
adult, on relative pitch cues'-Page 129. This experiment leads them to conclude
that absolute pitch is universal to infants and the development of language
necessities inhibits absolute pitch as language is more than a tone, contains
endless meaning.
Broca
area, the region of brain processing language, peach skills, on left hemisphere
can be activated or disinhibited in aphasia* patients with the musical
connotations. Frozen shelf of words seems to melting away and dancing to self,
while the music pours over the library of frozen neurons. There are successful
stories of aphasia patients who recover speaking abilities when they expose to
music therapy. Even if the regions are different for language and music
activities in the brain, the interactions of these different faculties modulate
its functions effectively in the presence of music. Both language and music contain
a physical body of sound in general and blends of music and language are plenty
in our culture; our songs are made with language and kept in music, maybe, a
trick to remember, recite and even to survive. If we imagine, the
human consciousness as a flying bird on the horizon of earth, then, of course,
language and music are the wings to perform his journey to the unknown destiny
of men.
Synesthesia:
dancing colors of music
An
unusual cross wiring in brain which create a wonderful blend on perception by
showing colors on numbers, feeling shapes on taste and hearing music with
smell. The famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote about this strange
experience in his biography decades ago, there are others too, even if it a
rare phenomenon. V.S. Ramachandran, an expert on behavioral neurology and
psychophysics, recently held experiments with the support of fMRI (Functional
magnetic resonance imaging)shows the brain responds on the Synesthesia peoples.
Different sensory pathways get involved in the brain and bring forward some
strange experiences such seeing music, hearing color and tasting shapes. A
hypothesis has speculated by him that this phenomenon might have help for the
origin of language and metaphor.
What
does, then, synesthesia can do with music? Musical synesthesia can
produce colors on music; they can see certain colors in association with music,
somehow, their musical perception has an unusual correlation with fusiform
gyrus where the color sense been process in brain. The cross wiring of our
sense modules in brain, unbelievably can act on people with synesthesia.
Pablo
Picasso has work with so many musical instruments in his paintings and his
hidden passion for music is obvious as he is an Andalusian chap, where flamingo
music was common alike bullfight in his times. The appearance of musical
instruments in his painting, in a sense, reminding us the unconscious relation
of music embedded in colors and forms.
Of
course, Nietzsche was the one who evolve eternally around the music among
philosophers. Both Bizet and Wagner, great musicians of his time,
intensely affect him and he seems to be excited on musical rhythm and its power
to evoke the human will. Allusion of music, can be seen plenty in his writings
and thoughts. Karl Marx, an indisputable revolutionary figure of mankind
nourished by music and he was well conceived about the revolutionary power of
music. Hitler's Third Reich, the hell era of history use music for military and
patriotic purpose and the songs of Nazi soldiers echoed in the mind of
holocaust victims for a long time. Dr. Sacks, telling the story of a man,
experience a musical hallucination with the Nazi fanatic songs for decades.
The
studies prove, movements and music are interrelated and our motor actions can
be controlled or altered with the rhythmic and musical exposure. Psycho-
physical immobility has been considering an illness as it can be transfix a
person in an uncertain abyss of existence. Movement, considered as the silent
music of body by William Hervey. Parkinson patients, according to
Dr. Sacks, lost their rhythmical stream, thus, they lost in a flat infinity
forever. "When we walk, our steps emerge in rhythmical stream, flow that
is automatic and self- organizing. In Parkinsonism, this normal automatism is
gone." Page 248. Within a body context, in a single human body, music
indisputably showing its magic as it interacts with motor, cognitive and other
functions of human entity. But, does music goes beyond it? Is any
collective functions, rather than a personal, generate by music in the depth of
social mind? "Antony Storr, in his excellent book music and mind,
stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and
communal, to bring and bind people together and dance together."
This
synchronization and oneness by music can be seen everywhere in human
civilization. The harvest songs, war songs and other group songs are reciting to
gain such an oneness where they may reduce the toiling labor and rest at mental
relaxation. "Rhythm and its entertainment of movement (and often emotion),
its power to "move" people, in both senses of word, may well have had
crucial cultural and economic function in human evolution, bringing people
together, producing a sense of collectivity and community" Page 246.the
Revolutionary musicians from all around the world, Gaddar, Bob
Marlin, Victor Jara, Marcel Khalife and many others, sings for political
and social rights and their musical slogans themselves asking for human rights
as it is violated almost everywhere in the world by oppressors.
Music
affect neurons to nations, mind to movements and an individual self to the
social collectiveness. Neuron related diseases like Alzheimer's, Dementia,
Amnesia, Parkinson and Aphasia respond to music, and the healing of these
illnesses, with the help of music have been in practice at so many
hospitals all around the world, especially in United States. Thus, show the
vital role of music to maintain brain and refresh mind in order to attain the
lost 'self '. By the same way, music goes beyond the individual self,
synchronizes groups and societies to accomplish their political and humanistic
rights. From the micro of neuron to the macro of society, music echoing, for
bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth where the entire humanity will dances
with ecstasy of life.
- Even though Neanderthal doesn't has any direct
reference to homosapians
