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 transcendent. 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.
