More lizard brain stuff

For some reason, I’ve got a scene, either from a book or a movie in my head about an Native American custom of going to a hill at sunrise each day to sing the world into being. It seems to me that music is just so close to the soul, our world, and our perception of it. It seems fitting that the latest Doubletake features both new photographs by Danny Lyon (one of my heroes) from the reservation, and an article about “internal music.” A few of the photographs from the magazine, and a few that aren’t there, can be found at Lyon on the Rez. It’s well worth a surf.

The article by Andrew Potok details the work of Connie Tomaino at the Institute of Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Hospital. In brief, it’s an exploration of the function of music in consciousness. Some diseases cause a miscuing between the auditory system and the brain stem, so playing a rhythm to a Parkinson’s patient for example, helps them to walk correctly where they were unable to take a single step before. Fascinating stuff. The conjectures involve the connection with auditory impulses and the emotional processing centers (well discussed in an entry of mine I’m tired of citing). It seems like music can actually substitute or supplant some damaged functions, helping resynchronize an internal clock. This is due to the separate structures of emotional processing vs. temporal processing which I’ve often discussed. However, the article does engage in more simplistic hemispheric hypotheses:

In patients whose language functions have been damaged, as in cases of expressive aphasia, where comprehension is intact but the ability to execute language has been damaged, or with stroke victims, it now seems possible to enhance speech function by singing to their right-brain. A person loses the ability to communicate verbally, but can still sing songs. The centers of speech are dominant in the brains left temporal area, while the part that controls singing is in the right. As a result, some aphasia patients can sing songs even though they are unable to speak. There is clinical evidence that people start recovering the ability to use words and phrases spontaneously.

”Nothing is localized to one part of the brain,” Connie says. “There is constant cross talk. Take the man who couldn’t walk but could dance. It isn’t just the motor cortex that’s involved, but a whole group of locations dealing with the subtlety of movement.”

I suspect the “right / left” thing is Potok’s simplification, not the researcher’s. As I alluded to in the post on Searle, the theories regarding language function in the brain hardly isolate it in one hemisphere. There is a lot of dispute there. However, the idea that sounds are processed differently than other types of input is fascinating. This tends to suggest that there may be different levels of temporal processing going on— a logical temporal ordering, and a musical one. This could help explain the reason why rhythmic sounds help people walk. Music seems to be part of the lizard brain.

I must say I like that idea, myself.