cc  >> Clint Sprott: I'd like to  welcome you to the Chaos and  Complex Systems Seminar.  This is a seminar, as you know,  that's been meeting for 16  years, right here in this room,  every Tuesday at noon.  So we hope you'll come often.  Today, we have Russell Gardner,  a retired psychiatrist.  Russell is a graduate of the  University of Chicago.  He's actually a Wisconsin  native.  I know he's lived and worked in  many places around the country,  including the east coast, and  North Dakota, Texas.  He's affiliated with the Medical  College of Wisconsin and the  University of Wisconsin Medical  School.  He has very wide-ranging  interests, and he's going  to talk to us today about  conjectures on "Music, Artistry  and the Brain."  Russell.  >> Russell Gardner: Thank you. 

 Good morning.  These are conjectures.  And some of them are mine, some  of them are the conjectures of  others.  I should add to that a caveat,  we were just talking, I'm not a  musician.  But I'm curious about music.  Maybe all the more so because  I'm not a musician.  Musicians such as Myrna --  fascinate me, and so forth.  >> Myrna: Is that the only thing  about me that fascinates you?  >> Gardner: You're nonplussing  me, this is important, Myrna,  I'm on stage.  Anyhow, now, is there a contrast  between science and art?  Certainly there are folks who  say there's a science-art  divide.  CP Snow, midcentury, wrote a  series of novels in which she  talked about these two cultures  and how that worked. 

 Joseph Conrad, 50 years earlier  than that, talked about how  thinkers and scientists prepare  us for the hazards of living,  but artists of all kinds  highlight our capacities for  delight and wonder.  One kind of version, but this is  not sort of an adversarial  contrast.  Jonah Lehrer is very modern.  This is a journalist who has  read about science, and who also  writes very well.  And we heard him last week at  the Book Festival, actually,  when he talked about  marshmallows, and the like,  which I won't go into.  But his earlier book was  "Proust as a Neuroscientist."  And in this book, he makes the  point that artistry and artistic  workings sometimes anticipate  later domains of science  discovery and science interest.  For example, Proust and the  whole neurobiology of smell and  odor, and memory, Stravinsky, on  how you initiate a new kind of  musical form that apparently  there was a riot when the  "Rights of Spring" was first  played, because it was so novel  and so upsetting to the people  who had come there, not  expecting to hear that, of all  things.  Where upon, of course, when news  got out, people were very  interested in hearing about the  "Rights of Spring," and so it  became popular all the more so.  Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and  Cezanne are others whom he gives  a little discussion of how they  anticipate later findings.  Now, George Steiner, whom I  quoted in my abstract, and who's  a literary critic, except he  doesn't like literary critics. 

 I guess all literary critics  except him, does he not like.  But he's extremely wise.  And I find him such an  interesting person to read.  He makes the points, "We write  about books or about music or  about art because 'some primary  instinct of communion' would  have us share with and  communicate to others an  overwhelming enrichment."  Now, I'll tell you a little bit  about something I discovered as  a result of the arts immersion  group to which I belong, and so  forth, and to which Myrna  belongs.  My own history, I call myself a  poet first because I got third  prize at the University of  Chicago in a poetry contest.  And I figure, that defines me as  a poet.  I've never stopped writing  poetry.  I don't publish very much  poetry, although I have  published in Free Verse, and  others.  I present and read poetry quite  often.  Visual artist, because I started  even before I got my medical  degree, doing these shirt  boards. 

 In my third year of medical  school, I had to iron shirts and  ties.  And so, I had these wonderful,  glossy pieces of cardboard.  I was reading about Rorschach,  so I put some ink on it and kind  of move it around.  It looked like modern art, and  that excited me.  I liked that.  I had great fun with that.  I think most of those, none of  them survived, of course.  I also became a scientist.  A psychiatrist in New York.  And there, too, I was continuing  to do research. 

 A prose writer, of course,  writing up the results, but also  in other kinds of things.  And then I went to North Dakota  to head up a Division of  Psychiatry in the Department of  Neuroscience.  So, for ten years, I was  administrator-organizer  educator.  And then of course, a therapist,  all along.  I'm a graduate of New York --,  and that kind of thing.  So, I didn't focus or specialize  in only one thing.  I was always doing--  He discovered when he wanted  to put this amplifier in--  This notebook.  And I always have in it, you  know, a set of cards.  I'm always doodling on those  cards.  So, I seem to be restless. 

 I always seem to have to do  something with my fingers.  So, it was kind of a career  issue.  And you know, why don't you  focus, for god's sake, on your  research, for example.  That's why I became an educator  and chairman instead of a  grant-earning research  scientist.  Novelty seeking.  I feel good to have had a  traveler spouse, Susie, who's in  the audience, who makes sure  that we go various places all  over the world.  That's good for somebody who's  pretty curious.  Now, Arts Immersion, which is  several years old, and is  constituted by about a dozen and  a half people, who were  compatible to get together.  We get together monthly.  Two headliners per meeting,  sometimes in the group,  sometimes not. 

 And we decided not to really go  only with visual art, because  you know, people, not only  myself, are interested in  multiple things, but Richard,  for example, did not only  photography, but also memoirs  and founded his publishing  company, Borderland Books.  And Kerry Hill also does both  photography and prose.  I'm not going to go through  everyone.  And Katrin Talbot, who does  painting, music and poetry.  And then, she's the last one  there.  And David Smith, who does  painting and music composition.  So finally, with this group, at  least, I felt like a swan and  not an ugly duckling.  So, what does instinct mean?  We'll go now down to the  questions.  What does instinct mean?  Does sound production and  appreciation in non-human  animals bear on the subject?  Why do people perform and why  listen?  Where and how in the brain does  art generally and music  specifically gain its place in  humans?  How do artistic people,  including musicians, compare and  contrast with other people?  How does music compare and  contrast with other means of  artistic expression?  How does the musical  communication share features of  other communications, and how  may it stand unique?  Instinct.  Well, I wrote something for a  handbook on stress, I think, on  instinct, so I know a little bit  about the history of the  subject. 

 It's not used, pretty much, in  present day science.  But George Steiner can be  excused, as literary critic.  And it means, historically,  untaught, inherited,  stereotypical, goal-directed  behaviors, or behavior chains,  that is, doing.  I believe that not only doing,  but also perceiving and wishing  for music, for example being an  audience member refers to George  Steiner's meaning as well.  Certainly it happens early.  Jo Simons, one of our Arts  Immersion group, she's also at  Community Music School, Music  Together, Mommies and Babies.  She tells a few illustrative  tales.  For a 1.5-year-old,  the 45-minutes of a lesson,  she found peaceful.  But so glad, she said, she  didn't have to see the child any  more, you know.  As a music teacher,  she only has to deal with them  for 45 minutes. 

 But those are nice 45 minutes.  But the mother said, as she  finished, that's the most  peaceful of my entire week with  this child.  And the other story that Jo  told, was that she had,  in her Mommies and Babies group,  she grooves on music  for zero to three-year-olds.  By the time they're three, you  may be too late, says she.  And she had 26 nine-month-olds  in a circle.  She began to tune her guitar,  and they all started shouting  out, attending to what she was  doing.  What is this lady doing?  And others were quite surprised  at that.  Okay, non-humans.  Now I'm looking at a doctor who  talked about the Neanderthals,  and so forth, in his recent  book.  This is not his point,  actually. 

 I should have made sure it  wasn't.  This is a point I shared last  Friday, actually.  They had a guest speaker in  psychology.  Usually, we study differences  amongst various creatures.  But he was studying  commonalities amongst all kinds  of living creatures, and the  sounds they make and the  communications they do.  They were making the point that  breathing and movement, being a  vertebrate and depending on  breathing makes a difference on  how it is that we then  articulate to each other,  depending what size you are, of  course, whales versus small  creatures are different.  Now, going to--  Monkeys and apes do use  deliberate vocalizations to  enhance sociality.  That seems quite clear.  It used to be thought it was  random or only for alarms.  Gelada monkeys and gibbons  explicitly use rhythm, melodies,  synchronization, turn-taking. 

 And pair-bonded gibbon couples  are famous for their duets.  They really sound quite lovely.  I heard some of them last Friday  in that seminar.  African apes use multi-modal  systems, gestures as well as  vocalizations.  Ethiopian monkeys not only  vocalize, they use rhythms,  fast, slow, staccato glissando,  fast-beat, as well as  end-accented.  Melodies with evenly spaced  musical intervals.  Now, their context and uses  pretty much function the same as  human speech and singing,  according to Bruce Richman, who  is the guy who worked with these  mountain monkeys.  So, with the same underlying  body structures, musical  elements may or may not realize,  depending on species, because  you can't see a straight line  between, you know, the ancestors  of the monkeys and apes.  Apes don't do all of these  things.  They don't have what the  mountain monkeys have. 

 And they're the common ancestry  with humans, not the monkeys.  Well, the monkeys, too.  The monkeys have common  ancestors, but you can't trace  melody and music in a straight  line from some monkey to us, in  other words.  But with the same underlying  body structures, you may or may  not get things played out.  That depends on the species and  how that species adapts.  Now, what about humans?  Well, moving together in time is  the title of this slide.  And apparently, when humans came  out, when the pre-humans came  out of the jungle and started  occupying the Savannah where it  was hot, standing taller really  made a big difference in how  they could cool themselves.  I remember a Scientific American  article on who the hair pattern  on the head beautifully shades  exactly when you start  calculating, and they did all  the calculations.  It's how the sun comes down, and  so forth, and so on.  So, a lot of our adaptation,  early on, like in Africa, had to  do with staying cool, and  bi-podality was partly as a  result of that. 

 Now, with bipedalism, came a  downward movement of the larynx,  which then eclipsed the larynx,  which then eclipsed the larynx  to a greater capacity for  speech.  And rhythm, this is a quote from  him, "Rhythm... a most central  feature of music is essential  to efficient walking, running,  any complex coordination of  our peculiarly bipedal bodies."  Quite different from our  relative, the great apes,  from whom we diverged some  millions of years ago.  Now, William McNeill, an  historian on the history of  warfare, reported in a footnote  in his book on warfare, the  history thereof, of how he was a  recruit into the Army at the  onset of World War II, when  suddenly the entire country was  mobilized.  After you know, the decision was  made that we would participate  on the European Front, and in  addition, we had the Eastern  Front.  So, they didn't have guns yet,  when he first came.  But they had carved wooden  replicas of guns, and they did  drills with replicas.  And he discovered that he looked  forward to this.  On the hot sand of the San  Antonio area, he discovered it  felt good to do the drill.  And he started thinking about  this as moving together in time  with other people.  And he elaborated this in his  last book, which is called  "Moving Together in Time, in  which, you know, he talks not  only about drill, and how it was  a distinct advance in the way  that armies get deployed, and  therefore helping the generals  and so forth conquer whatever  they conquered, but also there's  dance. 

 And think about it.  When we applaud at a concert,  right?  We're moving together in time.  And frequently, if there is a  standing ovation, you know,  people tend to watch other  people, and whether they're  going to stand or not, to know  whether they're enthusiastic  enough about the concert to do  the standing ovation.  Now, as it happens, I have done  a lot of work with movement  disorders.  It turns out that using the  tremendously strong  anti-psychotics the so-called  phenothiazines, as well as  haloperidol, and the like, cause  not only the initial Parkinism,  which is a movement disorder,  slowing of speech, slowing of  movement, the shuffling gait,  which then need to be countered  with other drugs, but also when  you have a long-term use of  these drugs, sometimes you  develop a consistent and chronic  hyperkenisia with the people  unable to stop their movements.  And these all involve the  so-called basal ganglia, which  are way subcortical, and which  are disturbed not only in  Parkinism and other movement  disorders.  And there, the reinforcing  neurotransmitter called dopamine  is sharply diminished.  And you may remember  "Awakenings," remember Oliver  Sacks' first book?  The one that gained him great  fame, "Awakenings," in which  people with post encephalitic  parkinism that they acquired  from the sleeping sickness  epidemic from 1918, in which  they had these tremendously  depleted basal ganglia.  And they were literally in their  prisons, their body prisons.  They used L-dopa, which is a  precursor to dopamine. 

 There were enough neurons,  apparently, that could utilize  that, so these people suddenly  woke up and began their  capability, now moving again.  So that excited him greatly.  And it was also true that music  was a factor there.  We'll go into a little more  detail on that later when  I talk more about Oliver Sacks.  So now the issue  of where in the brain.  Howard Gardner is not  my relative.  I could only wish I had his  capacity and his prolific  writing.  He is really quite amazing over  the years.  And he started as a wish to  become a developmental  psychologist.  But because he was very  interested in how the arts  registered in the brain, he  joined an aphasia clinic as a  neuropsychologist. 

 And speech, you know, speech is  such an important and vital part  of our overall adaptation, and a  part of our modern life, that we  do know a lot about the  cortex-lesions that tell of  brain specializations.  For example, the Broca area,  which is anterior in the lateral  frontal cortex, sort of third  convolution down, sort of.  And I'm deliberately not showing  you pictures, by the way,  because I want you to envision  it, think about where things are  in the brain, and to locate it  in your own head.  So, Broca's area is frontal.  Frontal is where the executing,  moving, and doing part of the  brain is located.  Whereas the back part of the  brain, the occipital cortex is  way back, it's where vision gets  analyzed and figured out.  And then, the parietal lobe has  a great deal to do with the  other sense capacities.  But temporal lobes, behind the  temples.  These are the temples.  They're called that because  they're time related. 

 And because that's the part of  the hair that changes first as  one grows older.  You get gray in your temples  first, therefore they're  temporal lobes.  Behind here, is where the  temporal lobes are.  And if you envision my hands in  boxing gloves, okay, with the  thumbs included, the thumbs are  the temporal lobes.  This is the frontal lobe,  parietal lobe, occipital lobe,  and the temporal lobes are over  here.  So, now back to Howard Gardner.  So, word understanding is also  on the left in a sensory  convergent area.  It's where the temporal and  parietal lobes come together, I  think frontal lobes, too.  I can't remember.  In drawing, there are hemisphere  differences. 

 The left, they say if you have  damage, if you have a stroke on  the left, you may have  difficulty doing detail work.  If you have right damage, you  may have trouble with overall  composition and your style  changes.  Continuing on to where in the  brain, with music, composers and  performers may retain their  abilities despite aphasia.  For example, Igor Stravinsky,  for him, a right hemisphere  stroke made no difference when  he was 75.  For another lesser known  composer, such a stroke meant no  more composition and lessened  musical enjoyment.  He conceived less the whole  piece at the that time.  There is evidence that increased  experience, increased skill,  increased ability means that  musicians use the left  hemisphere to increasing  degrees, which may be the  difference between Stravinsky  and the lesser known composer.  Let's talk about Mozart.  Everybody knows about Mozart,  and Howard Gardner goes into him  at some length.  He died at 35 years of massive  edema. 

 He had rheumatic fever when he  was young, it may be a sequela  of that, I think.  Apparently, it's completely up  in the air as to what caused his  death.  But the description is that he  had tremendous edema, including  of his hands, and so forth.  And that sounds like  glomerulonephritis to me, which  is a sequela of rheumatic fever,  and so is rheumatic heart  disease, of course, which would  be another factor.  But despite that, he still had  this incredible prodigious  output.  He was just always doing it.  And he did the requiem not long  before he died.  And he said to Haydn, and Haydn  was offended because he thought  it was Mozart referring to  Haydn, this may be the last time  I see you.  He kind of knew.  He said later, on his death bed  apparently, he said, bring me  the requiem manuscript. 

 He had that with him.  It was his requiem that he  wrote.  So he, apparently, conceived of  the piece as a whole.  And interestingly, for those of  us interested in cross modes, he  enjoyed using very different  inks all the time, including  many varied colors, which had  the virtue of allowing people in  examining his musical  manuscripts later to decipher  which he did first and which  parts he did later.  And what he would do, he would  do them in quite different  stages.  He apparently would do the major  things first, and then fill in  the minor or secondary parts of  his themes late, sometimes even  delegating it to someone else to  do.  Apparently, that kind of busy  work wasn't all that interesting  to him, either.  But he did it.  We went to a concert the other  night at the Union, the  Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra  played his overture.  And legend has it that he wasn't  yet finished on the night of the  performance. 

 Apparently, that wasn't quite  true.  It was that he wasn't quite  finished the first night of the  rehearsal, which wasn't all that  long before the performance.  So, his wife kept him up all  night, Constanze, kept him all  night.  You have to give her some  credit, I think, in all of this,  with apparently, drinking fruit  juice or something like that,  and just encouraging him to keep  on doing it because it was due.  Okay, now how do music and  memory relate?  And it is interesting that  college students listening to  ten minutes of a Mozart piano  concerto, a particular one, K48,  did better on spatial IQ scores.  And this seems to be generally  true for classical music or  jazz.  They seem to activate the  spatial reasoning areas to a  degree, whereas atonal and  changing music do not.  So it's not just music, it's  particular kinds of music.  Now, can you read this?  I'm afraid that it came out  differently moving from one  computer to the other.  This is, again, cross modal. 

 This is another story.  Have any of you ever heard of  Albrecht Haushofer, who died at  the age of 42 in 1945.  After three months of living in  the Moabit prison in Berlin,  imprisoned by Hitler.  His father, actually, had  provided Hitler with the idea,  or the implementation of the  idea of --.  So his father, at least, part of  the family was part of the inner  clique.  Not really, though, because  apparently Hitler got the idea  and that was it, partly because  I suppose Karl Haushofer's wife  was Jewish.  So Albrecht himself was half  Jewish.  But he was implicated in an  assassination attempt on Hitler  in 1944.  Albrecht Haushofer really,  really wanted that to be at  peace, and he wasn't.  He wrote 80 sonnets during his  three month imprisonment. 

 Never wrote sonnets before.  But it's a tribute to the  enormous cultural richness of  the Weimar Republic that he knew  everything.  He was tremendously cultured,  knowledgeable.  He wrote plays, apparently, he  did write those then, and so  forth.  And he wrote this sonnet which,  in addition to writing and so  forth, I found myself  translating.  I didn't like the translation  from German that I was reading,  so I carry this one.  It goes like this.  He's in prison.  He's in solitary.  He has access to a pen and some  paper. 

 He doesn't have much, so he does  all his compositions in his head  and then finally, when he gets  it done, he writes it down.  He must have had tremendous  powers of concentration.  I hear him play a violin, one of  those who down below carry out  the duties of the watch.  We hear it rough and bumpy,  novice played, tune obscure.  But my thoughts catch upon it.  I'm musing go to thoughts of a  noble Stradivarius I would often  hear and how my friend, it's  master, would play upon it.  My mind then felt so full at  home in hearing such music.  Now I suffer from this fumbling,  awkward, unclear.  Yet this too feels music.  What the crude rude hands  render, what they manage to  entice from the cheap crude box,  this is music, too. 

 However tone and tune uncoaxed.  Yes, music in these prison  shadows, however split asunder.  Ah, I hear Mozart now in that  clumsy place down below, though  Mozart wouldn't have scolded as  I do now.  No, surely no.  But what we now know of Mozart,  he probably would've scolded.  So, the evolution of music.  This is now Calvin and  Bickerton.  Bickerton is a linguist, a  linguistic thinker.  Calvin is a neuroscientist.  Success in hunting and  cooperation, he felt, they feel,  put the limelight on the higher  intellectual functions we so  prize: syntax, logic, games, and  music. 

 And Calvin makes the point that  humans exploited a unique  eco-niche for their hunting by  using throwing, okay?  Throwing as a hunting device.  Throwing stones, or for the one  million years of the so-called  Chilean hand axe, that they've  never, it doesn't really quite  work to have a handle on that  hand axe.  Mithen thought it was because it  was so beautiful, you know, they  did it for the beauty of it.  But Calvin thinks it's because  they would throw them.  For example, you would throw one  of these things, and it was  sharpened on the edges, and it  would hit an animal in the herd  and stun the animal for a  moment, whereupon they would  rush in, the rest of them, and  dispatch the animal and use it  for the meat, obviously.  And he points out that  increasing skill for this  probably accounts more than any  other neuro function for the  increase in size of the human  brain, which is, by the way,  three times heavier than the  chimpanzee brain, and has six  times the amount of surface area  cortex than does the chimpanzee  brain.  And of course, there is the  sexual difference, with the  larger male shoulders, which  attributes to the males being  the hunter specialists.  But that's, you know, that's  some millions of years.  The first actual music  instrument, archaeologically  discovered, is a bone flute.  This was discovered not too long  ago, at least described and  depicted, talked about, articles  written about, from Germany, and  apparently, a particular place  in Germany, where many such  kinds of things have been  discovered. 

 A griffon vulture bone is what  gave rise to this flute.  And a replication in wood showed  that it made melodic tones.  So 40,000 years ago, that's when  certain music had already been  well implemented in the culture,  and probably came to Europe from  wherever those immigrants came  from.  And nearby, and this was a theme  of cross modal arts, was the  figurine of a busty nude woman.  Now let's talk about Oliver  Sacks.  And he quotes WH Auden, who came  to see the people in Awakenings,  who were treated with L-dopa.  And Auden said every disease, he  feels, is a musical problem with  a musical cure.  We've already talked about how  they responded.  No, we didn't.  Anyhow, these frozen  Parkinsonian patients could  temporarily respond to music at  some other point aside from the  L-dopa point. 

 And also, Oliver Sacks describes  this Harry C. with a massive  frontal lobe damage from  berry aneurysm, that just sort  of destroyed his anterior medial  frontal lobes.  And Harry C. was emotionless,  except when singing.  He read the paper every day,  but he did so without emotion,  without interest, and so forth.  He just did it, kind of a  compulsion, something to do.  But when he was singing, he  would come alive, and the  emotions of the song would be  there.  And very communicative, and so  forth.  And as soon as he stopped  singing, done, over.  One of Sacks' neuropsychologist  colleagues, well, how do you  know it's just not a kind of  echolalia or some kind of  frontal lobe uncovering thing.  And of course, we don't know.  But nonetheless, frontal  temporal lobe dementia may  uncover musical abilities and  interests that may help us  discover what that's all about. 

 Sort of learning something  normal about pathology.  Along those lines, we have the  hypermusicality of Williams  Syndrome.  Any of you heard of Williams  Syndrome?  It was first described in 1961,  by Dr. Williams, obviously.  And these are most engaging  people.  I've had the pleasure of working  with some.  They have very low IQs, like  below 60.  And it's due, we now know, to a  chromosome 7 deletion.  There's just a segment of that  DNA that's not there.  These are the so-called cocktail  party children.  They all have a similar kind of  facial structure, although in  the cases I saw, I didn't see  it. 

 But it's sort of an elephant  face.  They have an ability to engage  you in conversation, like at a  cocktail party, nothing very  deep.  It's kind of superficial, and so  forth, but they're very, very  social.  Very social.  My patient was so sociable, and  he had a girlfriend, and he  would talk to her in such great  length, and so boringly.  She was retarded, too.  And so she would just sit down  the phone and walk away, and  he'd go on talking and talking,  and so forth.  Relatively large vocabularies,  given their IQs.  And there are storytellers who  use audience-hookers, such as  "lo and behold," that kind of  thing.  Completely involved in music. 

 And this was something I hadn't  known.  I don't remember.  I think my patient did.  I'm trying to think back on it.  But I didn't attune to that.  I don't have Oliver Sacks'  tremendous capacity for full  absorption, and what's going on  in his patients.  But according to him, playing,  listening and communion with  others are key.  Now, this is the big case  of Oliver Sacks' book,  "Musicophilia."  It's a story of Tony C.,  42 years old, an orthopedic  surgeon who was well regarded  in his community,  not particularly musical at all.  He had a few lessons as a kid,  took some piano lessons.  But it was at a family  gathering, they had this thing  in upstate New York. 

 So, he's on a payphone.  You can tell this is before, you  know, the present age of  handheld devices, iPhone, and  all that.  And all of a sudden, he got  knocked to the ground and saw  some flame, so he  retrospectively accounts, come  out of that earpiece.  And then he had this, as he  described to Oliver Sacks, he  accounts a near-death blue-white  light experience.  As it happened, a nurse is  directly behind him, in line for  the phone.  And she immediately did CPR.  And it was almost like he had  this enormous peace, he said,  what are you doing, leave me  alone kind of thing.  Then he said, "I'm a doctor."  Se said, "A few minutes ago,  you weren't."  And so, he recovered.  He had some memory sequela.  He felt kind of slowed down. 

 He went to the neurologist  because that was the case.  They said nothing.  The cardiologist said, look,  you're either dead or alive,  and you seem to be alive still.  So, he had some difficulty,  but not his skill.  He was as good in surgery as he  was before.  Not a problem.  Then he found himself, after  about four or five weeks,  interested in classical music.  He listened to Chopin, for  example, piano.  And he acquired different  recordings, and then wished to  play the piano.  He just found himself,  envisioned himself onstage,  playing the piano. 

 And so, he played again.  He was very rusty, of course,  and his fingers were not adapted  to this.  He took lessons and he kept on  doing it.  He found himself completely  preoccupied with music.  He found himself less interested  in Chopin, as time went on.  He had music in his head.  He wanted to play that.  So, he was composing.  And of course, he didn't know  musical notation, so it was a  problem.  But he got somebody to show him  something about that. 

 He certainly wanted to play it.  And his wife essentially said  enough with this.  He wasn't that interested in the  kids anymore, and so forth.  He felt he had been saved for a  reason, a religious experience,  on a mission to tune in to music  from heaven.  He read everything he could  about near death, so that's why  this account that Oliver Sacks  gives us may be a little  suspect, a little bit tainted by  what he read.  He could newly see light and  aura about people's heads.  Music in his head, not  hallucination.  Oliver Sacks asked if he was  sure this was not hallucination.  He said, no, it's inspiration.  It's a new creation. 

 Now we turn to Alice Flaherty.  Have any of you heard of Alice  Flaherty, or Midnight Disease?  She's a Boston neurologist, who  wrote a book that quite captured  me, because I worked with a  number of people with temporal  lobe epilepsy when I was in my  research fellowship.  And the TLE syndrome--  This is Shirley Ferguson,  my teacher then, at the time.  She said, you know, you have  hypergraphia, which means they  write all the time.  And we now know from Dr. George  Ojemann, who is William Calvin's  surgeon colleague, that it's a  left scarring, of the left  temporal lobe.  Then you get the hypergraphia  particularly.  He said he can always tell,  instantly, where that lesion is,  when he's seeing the patient for  the first time, without looking  at the history, because the  patient will bring their own  history that's this thick, okay,  of notes they've made on their  condition.  Often, not particularly well  written, or decipherable, easily  understood.  And in fact, it's not that  interesting to them to do a  precise job, because the  important thing is that they're  just doing it.  And they feel pleasure, positive  pleasure from doing it. 

 So, Alice Flaherty talks about  that as well as about other  attributes, including a  manic-like episode that she had  after the birth of her first set  of twins, who were stillborn.  And then, she later on--  That's her only episode of mania  until her second set of twins.  She can't attribute this now to  them being stillborn, because  these were perfectly healthy  little girls, and she still got  another manic episode, with full  degree of psychosis.  And she got over it.  I think she's still on  anti-manic medication, but doing  well.  Apparently hasn't gotten  pregnant yet either since then.  But in any event, this  hypergraphia, she points out, is  an attribute, she is a  neurologist, of TLE.  And as she said, look at Vincent  Van Gogh.  Without ever having succeeded  very much in his art, he was  absolutely driven to do it.  He never sold any during his  lifetime. 

 It was his brother's wife who  finally made him famous by  having an exhibition.  And then people really tuned in  on Van Gogh's tremendous work.  So, the idea of temporal lobe  push comes not only from people  like the orthopedic surgeon, and  with hypergraphia, the  pathologically defined  hypergraphia of temporal lobe  epileptics, but I don't have any  TLE to my knowledge at all.  I don't have seizures.  I don't have hypergraphia.  Well, my point about Vincent Van  Gogh was it wasn't only graphia.  It wasn't only writing.  It's also other forms of musical  production, which you might have  seen, I believe, in someone like  Mozart, who had what I call  temporal lobe push, which isn't  necessarily at all pathological.  So, hypergraphia may be a  symptom of temporal lobe push,  but I see it as an attribute of  people who happen to be artists.  There's a hereditary feature  there. 

 My mother had a high drive for  doing visual art.  My daughter has all kinds of  goals.  She's a black belt, working on  her PhD while a full-time  physical therapist, a mother,  and all that sort of thing.  Her daughter, my granddaughter,  has a real strong push for  drawing and photography.  And as you know, I don't have to  tell you any more, I've had  something like that myself.  And TL pressure may persist  despite old age illness.  Not only did Mozart function  when he was quite sick, but  Renoir did his "Mother and  Child" in his later years,  despite severe rheumatoid  arthritis.  And this was on the cover of  "Archives of General Psychiatry"  this month.  So, I'm going to close now,  pretty soon.  These two things talk about how  music and emotion are closely  associated. 

 And now I'm going to talk a  little bit about the Ern Malley  effect.  Have any of you heard of Ern  Malley, the poet?  Ern Malley wasn't a poet.  He was a fictitious person.  But in 1944, two Sydney,  Australia poets, disgusted with  this new symbolist kinds of  randomly associated stuff, and  you think that's poetry, ah,  enough of it.  So they had a great afternoon  conjuring up Ern Malley.  They took a Shakespeare  concordance of some kind, OED,  and something, and they just,  almost at random, chose words  and phrases and put them  together to make faux poems.  And they sent them, with a cover  letter, saying she was Ern  Malley's sister, that he was a  carpenter who did writing on the  side, and that he tragically  died very young, but left behind  these 25 poems, and is it any  worth to them.  Because she's cleaning things  out, and she's about to throw  them out, but what does the  editor of this, Frozen Penguin,  I think was the name of the  journal.  It fits, next to Australia.  And he thought they were  wonderful. 

 He published them.  Then gradually there came word  that it was all a hoax.  And so, the two poets then  disclosed everything, making of  course, this editor look pretty  ridiculous to the journal  public, to everybody else.  But then they said, you know,  these are still really good  poems.  And as you see, this book, okay,  this book of collected poems,  not only talks about and has the  approximate two dozen poems,  but it also has the whole  discussion, the whole  description of what happened  here, and so forth, and raises  the question, where does art  exist?  If it wasn't in the mind of the  artist generating these poems,  then where is it?  Is it in the audience who  thought these were poems, even  though they weren't?  And even after they were clearly  demonstrated to be hoax derived,  they still thought they were  poems.  I mean, where is it, after all?  And of course, you know,  Shakespeare is pretty good, and  the OED puts in together a lot  of interesting things, so this  kind of seeming chance may not  have been a seeming chance as it  was.  And some people say well, poets  put these together.  Yeah, they had a great time  doing it on an afternoon, and  lord knows how much they were  drinking along the way, and that  sort of thing, but who knows how  the thing worked, and so forth.  So I think that's a very  interesting story.  Where is the art?  Is it in the mind of the  beholder?  Is it in the mind of the artist?  And what about this?  You have flowers. 

 Now, flowers are a work of, some  of these of course are conjured  up with breeding experiments,  and that sort of thing, but  there they are.  Maybe the breeder did it.  Now, this of course, is the  photographer.  Is it the photographer who did  the art?  But you know, we look at it and  we find it, well, I find it very  pleasant to look at.  There's the texture of the  petals.  There's the arrangement.  There's the symmetry and so  forth.  Is this art?  Did the insects do it, you know,  in choosing, and the orchid  plant reacting to it?  Then, also, of course, we have  changing tastes.  I believe that not only doing,  but perceiving and wishing for  music refers to George Steiner's  meaning.  Audience interpretations vary in  time. 

 We know that from not only  Stravinsky, but also Cezanne,  Kandinsky and Picasso, who were  all rejected when they first  started.  And writing, Anne Frank's diary  was first rejected by some  American and British publishers.  And she is an incredible  phenomenon worldwide.  So a summary of conjectures.  Instinct refers to inborn  attributes, as George Steiner  meant it.  Other animals, they and we  breathe and move, but adaptation  seems a variable expression.  Why do we listen and perform?  To connect with other people.  Where and how in the brain?  Well, all of it, really.  What part is excused from having  participation?  But the frontal lobe doesn't  seem to initiate, socialize,  foster doing.  The posterior cortex seems to  analyze sensory information and  integrate, to some degree. 

 The temporal lobe cortex also  integrates.  And in the medial part, you  know, this part that's on the  inner part of the thumb, right  about in here, that may be  particularly where the push  comes from, where the temporal  lobe epilepsy, it seems to scar  more easily than other places.  And it's not clear why, but if  there's an anoxic injury to the  brain, or a traumatic injury to  the brain, this is where it  seems to injure.  I ask, rather searchingly, some  people who know more about the  brain than I do, as to why.  They couldn't say.  And it seems to connect to  religious meaningfulness.  We saw that in Tom C.,  the surgeon.  But actually, if you look very  carefully at the history of  Saints and religious founders,  and so forth, you see some stuff  that feels an awful lot like  temporal lobe seizure  experience, or exaggerated  experience.  And there have been articles and  books written on that, as well.  More conjectures. 

 Artists and other people are in  some ways all alike.  That is, artists and other  people aren't that different, is  another way to put it, at least  to feel like an audience.  Many people like to hear,  participate, or to look,  visualize, whatever.  Skills and motivation differ.  And early experience may matter,  as Joe Simons repeatedly  emphasizes.  Temporal lobe push may operate  across modes and exist outside  the arts.  How does music communicate  uniquely?  Perhaps emotional, passion,  feelings.  Language, when spoken, can have  music in it, the euphony of  poetry.  Visual art, of course,  communicates all these kinds of  things, too.  I'm going to finish with a quote  from Joseph Conrad, who I find  just a wonderful, wonderful  writer. 

 He says, "The artist, whether  painter, composer or author,  speaks to our capacity for  delight, for wonder, to the  sense of mystery surrounding our  lives: to our sense of pity, to  beauty, and pain: to the latent  feeling of fellowship with all  creation-- and to the subtle but  invincible conviction of  solidarity that knits together  the loneliness of innumerable  hearts; to the solidarity of  dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in  aspirations, in illusions, in  hope, in fear, which binds all  people together all humanity--  the dead to the living and the  living to the unborn."  That's it.  That's the end of my talk.  (applause)