Jonathan Berger writes: Neurological research has shown that vivid musical hallucinations are more than metaphorical. They don’t just feel real, they are, from a cognitive perspective, entirely real. In the absence of sound waves, brain activation is strikingly similar to that triggered by external auditory sounds. Why should that be?
Music, repetitive and patterned by nature, provides structure within which we find anchors, context, and a basis for organizing time. In the prehistory of civilization, humans likely found comfort in the audible patterns and structures that accompanied their circadian rhythms — from the coo of a morning dove to the nocturnal chirps of crickets. With the evolution of music a more malleable framework for segmenting and structuring time developed. Humans generated predictable and replicable temporal patterns by drumming, vocalizing, blowing, and plucking. This metered, temporal framework provides an internal world in which we construct predictions about the future — what will happen next, and when it will happen.
This process spotlights the brain itself. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen hyphenated the term for his craft to underscore the literal meaning of “com-pose” — to put together elements, from com (“with” or “together”) and pose (“put” or “place”). When we imagine music, we literally compose — sometimes recognizable tunes, other times novel combinations of patterns and musical ideas. Toddlers sing themselves to sleep with vocalizations of musical snippets they are conjuring up in their imagination. Typically, these “spontaneous melodies,” as they are referred to by child psychologists, comprise fragments of salient features of multiple songs that the baby is piecing together. In short, we do not merely retrieve music that we store in memory. Rather, a supremely complex web of associations can be stirred and generated as we compose music in our minds.
Today, amid widely disseminated music, we are barraged by a cacophony of disparate musical patterns — more often than not uninvited and unwanted — and likely spend more time than ever obsessing over imagined musical fragments. The brain is a composer whose music orchestrates our lives. And right now the brain is working overtime. [Continue reading…]
