February 9, 2019 • 48 mins
We're all wired to enjoy different forms of music, but for some of us the wiring is missing entirely. Join Robert Lamb and Christian Sager as they explore the curious conditions of amusia and auditory agnosia in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. (Originally published July 28, 2016)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into that old vault. And this is
going to be an episode from July that you actually
did with our old friend Christian Seger. Yeah, this episode
gets into the topic of a museum and some related
conditions in which an individual does not get music. And
(00:26):
I don't mean in the sense that, like you know,
they just don't get funk or they don't get this
particular genre. Don't understand why everybody likes Eric clapton solo career, right,
But yeah, the idea that music could just not be
connecting with certain brains, uh, the way that it does
with the rest of us, that sounds very interesting. I'm intrigued.
Maybe I'll give it a listen. All right, well, let's
(00:48):
go ahead and dive into minds of musical emptiness. Welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(01:08):
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger. Hey, Robert,
have you ever met a person who doesn't like music?
I do not think I've ever met anyone who just
across the board doesn't like music. I've certainly met plenty
of people who seem to dislike music in certain scenarios
because I'm the kind of type of types of music,
(01:30):
you mean, well, types of music, but also music in
certain situations, like I've certainly known people who don't like
music while driving. I'm of the mindset I want music
on all the time, just about music of my own choose,
but music. I know a lot of our colleagues have
difficulty writing while there's music on. I don't have that problem,
(01:51):
although I do like sort of cultivate playlists of stuff
that helps me to write, you know, mostly instrumental stuff
that sometimes there's certain music that I can listen to
that has vocals that I can listen to all writing.
But yeah, so you know, I know, like you like,
I've known like various sort of iterations of people who
can't listen to music during certain times. I've only met
(02:11):
like one or two people in my life who just don't.
They literally say I don't like music, and that's so alien,
so difficult for us to comprehend, because it's like hearing
someone say, oh, I don't I don't like food, Like
I don't like drinking liquids. It almost seems in human
in a way. And I think like when you hear that,
at least in my experience, people will kind of think like, oh,
(02:32):
that's the trade of a psychopath, right, But it's not.
It's actually not. We've talked about psychopaths on the show
and that hasn't come up as one of the symptoms.
But also, as we're going to talk about today, this
is a real brain condition. Yeah, at least a couple
of different conditions we're going to discuss, and I think
they both serve to remind us just how tenuous our
(02:55):
sensory experience of the world really is. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, like,
think about you and me, right, Like, the audience probably
knows if they don't already, that you are really into
electronic music, and you cover it for stuff to blow
your mind, i'd say weekly, right, Yeah. And um, and I,
as many people have heard on other episodes, grew up
(03:16):
in the punkin metal scene and still listen to a
lot of that stuff, which a lot of people find
unlistenable and dissonant, including you know, my wife, and um,
I'm okay with that, but it's interesting because dissonance plays
into these diseases as well. Well, here's a quick question
for you, and I think this helps to sort of
this helps a lot of us, uh try and comprehend
(03:37):
what some of these conditions are. Like, Like what what's
the type of music that you just really don't get
that you just you can't really listen to, you don't understand,
and and you're just willing to say, yeah, I that
is not from me usually like NPR style jazz. I
don't want to just say jazz in general, because there's
plenty of stuff that's being done in that area that's
(03:59):
interesting and I like, but like that kind of like
background elevator music jazz, you know what I mean? Like
that that drives me crazy. It's like fingers on a chalkboard.
For me. It's I have to say jazz as well.
And part of this could be I mean, the view
I guess is that jazz takes some getting used to.
You have to be you have to immerse yourself in it.
(04:19):
And I like some jazz, and I like jazzy elements
and some of the music I listened to from time
to time, But it's that jazzy jazz that spacey jazz
that that completely unhinged jazz that just kind of gives
me the shape something. We think of this joke on
Parks and Rack. I don't know if you remember this,
but the their local MPR station, they had a show
(04:39):
and they would say jazz plus jazz equals jazz. Whenever
I hear something like that, I'm like nope. During the channel.
I often think about it that it's maybe like a
like a strong alcoholic property. You know, something strong liqueur
(05:00):
that you would never drink on your on its own,
but you would use in a recipe or you would
certainly used in using a mixed drink. So I often think, well,
that is that is the strong, undeluded stuff that is
not for me. Yeah, but you can put a like
a shot of it, or like I will. I don't
drink clearly so shots a lot, but you know a
little bit. It's like adding grenadine to your to your
(05:23):
soda or something like to drink and given a little flavor. Well,
like punk is is one of those things. I think
about this sometimes it's like pure punk. I've just it's
not my scene, it's not what I dig. But I
have certainly loved groups that have elements of punk in
their sound. They neither come out of punk or find
some of their musical genre to combine it with, Like
um oh the Poges come to mind. Yeah, like a
(05:46):
little bit of Irish music, a little bit of punk music.
It's really I would be hard pressed to want to
listen to Irish or punk music on their own, but
when these two come together, then I you know, I've
always enjoyed it. Yeah, No, I can definitely see that,
even like having spent many a year in basements watching
just like crusty punk bands just hammering out four chord songs. Uh,
(06:08):
I can understand where you're coming from, and that that
sort of has led to like what a lot of
our I guess, like popular alternative music is nowadays. Right,
it's sort of like a fusion of punk and jazz
or punkin metal, or where Joe and I were just
talking the other night about SKA like nineties and how
that was sort of something like that. Yeah. Well, okay,
(06:29):
enough about our musical interests, but so clearly we're human
beings who love music. We've got opinions about music. We
like to talk about it, we like to listen to it,
we go to shows um. But there's people out there
who don't. And it's not just because you know they don't,
they don't go to things like that, or they're just
not it's because there's literally something going on in their
(06:51):
brain that makes it so that they're incapable of enjoying music. Right,
something's wired differently, Some systems are online in a slightly
different array, and we will get into into these in
a moment, but before we do, without would be helpful
to just go ahead and give a nice overview of
the cognitive experience of music, just basically what's going on
(07:11):
when we process it. So music is of course a
deep part of our cognitive architecture. It changes our mood,
it heightens our emotions, it summons and banishes memories, It
affects the manner in which we preceive perceived time. Even
we can actually use it to treat illnesses of the
mind and body. So it's powerful stuff. It's potent stuff
(07:32):
that's not even just with human beings. There's been research
done on plants that music affects plants, so we're talking
about some serious magic here. There are parts of the
brain that respond to music that that don't respond to language.
There are separate parts of the brain that respond to melody,
to the melody of language, different than these different for
the parts of the brain the respond to the melody
(07:52):
of music, they're parts of the brain that deal with movement, attention, planning,
and memory, and these all respond to music even though
they don't have anything to do with the actual auditory process.
So there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Yeah,
and and we don't fully understand it yet. I mean,
I would say this research well, you know, we'll talk
about it later, but really, only in the last century
(08:13):
have we even been aware of this as a medical condition.
But only in maybe the last twenty or thirty years
has there been like real deep research into what this means. Yeah,
and certainly there's a lot of wonderful research out there
about our relationship with music, and we can't cover it
all here, but just a couple of i think illuminating
studies to to touch on here. Um In in recent years,
(08:34):
we found that you can look to the brain via
f m R I, and specifically you can look at
brain activity in the nucleus incumbents. This is involved in
the formation of expectations, and we can actually tell if
a person is enjoying the music they're listening to. By
looking at at brain activity in this region, if it's
(08:54):
meeting their musical expectations and matching up with the stored
templates of what you've heard before, then you see stuff
light up. Um yeah, I could absolutely believe that given
my experience with music. Yeah, Like if you're just like A,
I don't know, Like here's an example, Like I walk
around sometimes and I'll just have like my entire music
library on shuffle on my phone or something like that,
(09:15):
Like one like really great song for my high school
days will pop up, and it's like I can feel
like whatever those lights are that are going on in
my brain just activate, you know. Yeah. Yeah. The expectation
plays such an interesting role in our experiencing music because
on one hand, there's there's something that happens when a
when a melody or a tune or the lyrics take
(09:36):
you to that place you're expecting it to go. But
then also when it goes to a slightly different place
where it kind of you think it's going to turn
left and it turns right, like that animates you as well.
It's it's it's almost like narrative without words, really ah, yeah,
that's a really interesting way to put it. I um,
I'll just do a little bit of subjective experience here
(09:56):
to throw in here. I'm not like, personally a big
fan of The Cure, but a friend of mine is,
uh and if he's listening her, this is your story.
So The Cure just played in Atlanta recently, like I
think like two weeks ago. Did you know about this?
Oh yeah, I have. I have some friends who are
really they went to this show. So the way that
he told me was that, like, apparently this tour was
like you know, they're going to be playing all their
(10:18):
greatest hits or whatever, but that was sort of like
a different arrangement of the musical instruments. So he was
really excited because he's like, well, I'm gonna hear the
songs that I love, and it's gonna be played by
the guys who wrote them, but they're going to be
playing them in very different ways than I'm used to
and that's a wholly new experience. Oh yeah, I've had
that experience with I guess tool has been. It seems
(10:40):
like the kind of band that would do something like that.
They'll play with the intro on something and so the
live version, at first you're not sure what it's going
to be, but then then you realize, oh, it's it's
this track, it's that track, whatever the particular track may be.
And there's this, you know, a physical experience of excitement
to when I was, you know, still involved in the
music scening just go into a lot of shows. The
(11:02):
thing that was always the most impressive to me, and
that just showed like a real class act, professional touring band,
was when they could play an entire set without stopping,
Like they would just start and their songs. They had
figured out ways to weave their songs in and out
of one another, so they would just play like a
really tight thirty forty minutes set and then boom they
(11:22):
were done, got off on stage. And that is the
kind of thing that just floors you. It's just like
you don't have time to stop and breathe and kind
of judge them, uh for other factors like whatever they're wearing,
or what they say in between songs or something. You're
just like bombarded. Well, that's one of the reasons that
I've been so into DJ mixes over the years that, uh,
(11:44):
it's not quite the same as a as a band
performing the entire set without stop. But this the idea
that you can take various musical elements and and a
talented DJ can create a seamless tapestry of sound. I
love that, and certainly you get those six surprises. Those
expectations net Or skewed throughout that sonic narrative as well.
(12:04):
So all right, we're clearly establishing that we're music nerds.
We love music, and whatever parts of the brain that
don't work for for some of these people, they're they're
lighting up like fireworks for us. Now. Another key point, though,
is certainly you've been to a concert or performance and
you've been experiencing the music, and maybe you've seen somebody
like clearly their significant other drug them here and they're
(12:27):
not enjoying it, or they got When you said drugged them,
I thought like ruderally gave them drugs so that they
would just sit put. But yeah, that's that's that's possible,
depending on the because I've seen you both. Yeah, so
you've seen people that are not into it, or they're
they don't they're clearly the first time, or maybe they
you don't feel like they could possibly be enjoying the
(12:48):
music on the same level as you are. Yeah, possibly
and certainly like and I have to applaud my wife again,
like she's indulged me by you know, sometimes I can't
get a friend to go with me to a particular
kind of thing. She's like, all right, you know, let's
I'll go with you. You know, we'll go see Converge
and High on Fire. And she's just sitting there like
shaking her head while I'm like really into it, you know, Um,
(13:12):
so yeah, I get that. Well. It's interesting because despite
all of our very musical taste, in our varying levels
of engagement with particular types of music, particular performances, the
brain experiences that we have are actually pretty consistent among
most people. There was a two thousand thirteen study publishing
the European Journal of Euroscience, and they found that if
(13:33):
two people listened to the same track, one inexperienced fan
of the music and another not the other one just
like a newcomer, you know, there's been dragged in there
by their spouse, you're still going to see the same
synchronization in several key brain areas and similar brain activity.
So as much as you you know, might like to
(13:53):
think you're experiencing your favorite band and an entirely different
cognitive level than the you know, the dumb guy next
to you with the glories on his fingers. Um, that
doesn't seem to be quite the case. We're still engaging
like the same networks. I wonder if this is similar
to like research that's been done on depression and anxiety
(14:13):
in that like, Um, the more you listen to the
songs over and over again, right, Like, it's maybe it's
like a like writing over the same pathway of the
brain over and over and over again, so it makes
it easier for that experience to happen. It's happening in
the same way for everybody, but it's just kind of
going through the brain. I don't know how to describe
(14:34):
this other than with like road metaphors, right, Like, it's
like going down the same road, but it's just like
going down faster for for us or something an expectation,
right yeah, where the road is going to turn, where
it's gonna split, etcetera. Yeah, interesting, huh. I wonder if
anybody's done research on that, Like the the the experience
of having music encoded to the brain as being similar
(14:58):
to the sort of expectations that encode anxiety into people. Yeah,
we'll have to follow up on that, because I know
there have been a number of studies that have looked into,
you know, the potential therapeutic aspects of music as well
as the role of music and in various emotional states. Yeah. Right,
and you think about it, like some of the emotional
(15:18):
states that are created by listening to music have very
similar symptoms to anxiety. Huh. All right, maybe that's a
future episode. We'll have to dig deep for that one.
But let's take a quick break and then when we
come back, we're going to talk about the condition of
a musia or tone deafness. All right, we're back. So
(15:43):
this first one, tone deaf deafness amusia. I feel like
this is going to be the one where we're going
to see far more listeners who can share experiences with this. Certainly,
we've probably all encountered people with varying levels of tone
deafness over the years, and it seems like tone deafness
has variations on it, like extremes or you know, some
(16:04):
people have it to to less an extent than others.
The term congenital amusia is what we use to denote
tone deafness that you're born with. It's been described in
medical literature for more than a century, and it manifests
basically as a severe deficiency in processing pitch variations. Now
(16:26):
this extends to impairments in musical memory and recognition, as
well as what we traditionally think of his tone deafness
as like bad singing or the inability to tap in
time with music. Right. Um, everybody's right now is probably
thinking of like the person who I don't know was
inquired or something like they just couldn't hit the notes. Yeah. Um.
(16:47):
Some literature also refers to a musia as dis melodia
or dismusia, but the term amusia is generally agreed to
be preferable because it acknowledged just the possibility that there
exists as many forms of congenital amusias as there are
forms of acquired amusias. And what I mean by that
(17:09):
is accidental brain damage, So you can hurt yourself a
variety of ways that will also produce this effect. Now,
to clarify, congenital means present from birth, but it is
possible to acquire a musia through brain damage in life.
The very first study that looked at. This was done
(17:29):
in eighteen seventy eight by a guy named Grant Allen,
and he was investigating a thirty year old man with
a neurological lesion that gave him this, as he referred
to it then severe musical handicap um. And maybe some
of you out there wondering right now, like I can
relate to this, is this me? Well it could be
a recent study found that out of a hundred people
(17:52):
who self declared themselves as having a handicap for music,
only twenty two So actually, exhibit did the traits of
a musea after they were tested with a formal questionnaire
and the way that this questionnaire worked. It tested your
aptitude for scale, interval, and contour information as well as
(18:12):
melodic organization dimension, rhythm and meter, and temporal organization dimension.
They also tested memory recognition ability connected to music. Now,
those who are tone deaf are generally unable to hear
the differences in pitch and tone that the rest of
us here we joke about this, right you know that
(18:34):
there's always like uh, and I imagine with like movies
like Pitch Perfect or TV shows like Glee, like there
must be tons of joke about jokes about tone Definitely.
It seems like every long running show ever has had
at least an episode where, oh, it's the person who
can't sing, but they don't realize they can't sing it. Yeah.
So it's a common enough of a thing that it
shows up in some pop culture narrative and we all
recognize it. Uh. We use the phrase really to describe
(18:57):
people who don't understand simple commun unication strategies to write,
like like even outside of it, we've turned into this
metaphor for like, ah, well, he's tone deaf, so that's
why he doesn't understand what we're talking about here. It's
not even we're using it on a on a level
beyond like its actual medical application. Right at its most extreme, though,
(19:18):
people who are tone deaf are unable to even perceive
music the same way that the rest of us do.
And it comes down to an actual difference in their
brain structure. Uh. And it's different from those like you know,
Robert and myself for whom music comes naturally. Okay, it's
actually defined as a learning disability. There's a team from
(19:40):
the University of Montreal who have first published an empirical
study on it, and that's their delineation. So, for instance,
most children, and I didn't realize this, but this is
probably a common experience for you. Most children learned to
sing at the same time that they're learning to speak, right,
so they're like kind of like singing words. Like I
was a babysitting a friend of ours four year old
(20:00):
the other night, and he was singing constantly. But then
he would just kind of talk to himself too. Oh yeah,
that's my experience with my son Bastion is um. There's
a lot of a lot of talking at this point
he's four, but there's also a lot of singing. He
will just burst into song about the silliest things, to
the point we're just like, all right, you just you
can't sing about butter anymore. I just just eat, don't
(20:22):
play with the butter, and don't sing about the butter,
just consumed. But well, that sounds like he is not
tone deaf, because tone deaf children don't do this singing
when they're younger. Uh. And this is where this this
woman seems to be like the expert on this, Like
every study I was looking at she was somehow involved in.
Her name is Isabelle Perette's. And that's when she gave
(20:45):
it the official disorder congenital amusia. It's innate in these
people's brain, the lack of musical perception, and it's also hereditary. Uh.
They found that congenital amusia is genetically transmitted. Thirty of
the people who have first degree relatives with this cognitive
disorder also have it. However, if you look at control groups,
(21:09):
only three percent habit and control and control group families. However,
congenital amusia doesn't seem to result from any particular family environment.
It's not like, I don't know, uh, you can somehow
connect it to like alcoholics or something like that. Right, Like,
there doesn't seem to be an environmental source that's causing this.
It seems to be genetic. Remember, though genes don't specify
(21:33):
cognitive function, they actually influence brain development. So the next
step that these researchers are looking at is, let's identify
the genes that relate to these neuroanatomical anomalies that are
found in the brains of people who have amusia. Now, interestingly,
that three percent control group almost lines up exactly with
what they've found to be the percentage of people in
(21:55):
the population who have it. Four percent seems to be
the number of people in general population who are a music.
They grow up with normal exposure to music and are
otherwise capable of doing everything else everybody else does. They're intelligent,
they're educated. This only affects their ability to recognize pitch
in music, and it doesn't apply to language. This is
(22:17):
the really fascinating part, right. The musics can process speech
as well as environmental sounds like I don't know, like
an animal's cry or something right, or voices. They can
understand all of that. They can even understand the pitch
changes in different languages like you know a little Chinese.
I spent some time in China. You know how important
pitch is to the difference in words. They're fine with that,
(22:39):
but it's only with the music that they have this
pitch problem. Well, it reminds me of some of the
bits we we discussed earlier about how our brains process music,
and the idea that your brain is processing its separately
from the music itself, based on all of these other factors.
So I guess it stands a reason someone with even
you know, fairly significant um a musica here could still
(23:03):
listen to say, a track with some really engaging lyrics,
of course, and they're gonna get some sort of lyrical
experience out of it. Yeah, and maybe maybe even something
that is I'm thinking of some of the more some
of the least musical music that I like, some of
the more noise oriented stuff, Like maybe they could listen
to that and appreciate that on some level that is
(23:24):
not as tied to the music, but still somehow tied
to a sonic experience of the thing. We are going
to get back to that. Yeah, there's a there's uh
a way that dissonance in particular plays into both regular
music listening experience and a music listening experience. But there's
actually some music acts that are recorded that are fluent
in several languages, so this is it doesn't at all
(23:45):
affect their other communicative abilities. Uh. And the way that
they figured this out was they use these tests that
were originally designed to assess the presence and specificity of
musical disorders and patients with brand damage. The big one
seems to be the difficulty in detecting bit related changes, right,
especially when that extains into dissonance, which a musical subjects
(24:09):
have little sensitivity too. So that's interesting, right. So Uh,
people who love music. When you create music that has
dissonance in it, when tones are playing over one another
that don't match up the right way, and it just
sounds like kind of white noise, some people hate that, right.
Like I dated a girl once too. I remember putting
on a record in a car and she just said,
(24:29):
turn this off. It just sounds like insects. Uh. And
she wasn't wrong, but she probably wasn't in music because
they have very little sensitivity to dissonance. Okay, So I
so one with this condition could very well be an
exclusive fan of say like Nurse with Wound or early
(24:53):
into New Boton, very like throw a xylophone down a
hallway sort of music. That's what I'm kind of wondering
is if like these experimental noise fans that are just
super into it and that's all they listened to. I
wonder if you could have a musia and not even
know it because that's sort of your genre of choice. Um.
(25:15):
It doesn't appear, unfortunately, to be something that can be
quote unquote fixed either. Peretz's team has tried teaching kids
with the musica to like music. Actually, they basically they
gave them MP three players, and they said listen to
this for thirty minutes a day. Not only did the
kids fail to improve on their tests, but they how
poorly they scored on the test correlated to how much
(25:38):
they reported listening to the music. Um. So the next
steps to to see if there's any kind of way
to reverse this. Seemed to be some kind of remediation
training programs that might improve pitch perception and memory. The
very least, this will help us understand the neurological basis
for this so that we can use it to diagnose
other learning disorders. To you, so, what what's going on
(26:02):
in the brain here? Right? Like, let's zoom in, take
a look at the brain and figure out what exactly
the deal is. Well, there's a study by a team
in France and they used m EG scanners to figure
this out. A music people's brains stem from delayed or
impaired functioning in their frontal and auditory cortex. They also
had physical abnormalities in those areas of the brain, with
(26:25):
more gray matter and less white matter than usual. Now,
this is something that's come up on the show a
couple of times when we're talking about everything from brain
disorders to drug usage. Right, Like that white gray matter
balance seems to be pretty important again. People with music,
they don't enjoy music, but they're capable of enjoying all
the other pleasures the rest of us are. Right, It's
(26:46):
not like they're dead inside, right, it's just this one area,
and arguably an area that that certainly has nothing to
do with their survival or ability to to move and
enjoy life and and and partake of our culture. They're
just not into the musical aspect of it. Yeah, I
mean they like food, they like money, they like sex.
This has all been tracked in UH. There was a
(27:07):
March six article in the Journal of Current Biology. They
looked at this UM. So, Okay, we know it's innate
or it's acquired. We know it prevents people from processing
music the way they do. There's also another way to
look at this, another terminology called specific musical and hedonia. UH.
And this is what another studies authors called the inability
(27:30):
to expla experience pleasure from music in general. So if
a musia is the like disease, the extreme version where
you can't appreciate music at all, is this specific musical
and hedonia. And in their study they divided thirty people
into three even groups, and they were asked to do
(27:50):
what they called a music task, where they listened to
classical pieces of music and then they rated them. Then
they were asked to do a monetary incentive delay task.
Basically the is gambling um and usually both would induce
an emotional reaction in the brain. The researchers analyze the
heart rate of their subjects and how much they perspired. Now,
(28:14):
some were quote emotionally oblivious to music that they could
tell what they were supposed to be feeling. So they
heard the stuff they knew they were supposed to be
having some kind of feeling, but their brain wasn't registering it.
Their brain registered okay, there's some reward system in place.
When I'm when they were playing around with the money
and gambling, that was lighting up, but not when they're
(28:35):
listening to music. So I'm wondering, this is just me
here and maybe I'm way off, but do you think
a museum can also affect a person's timing and tapping
in terms of like fine motor control? Because I'm thinking, like,
if you can't tap out a beat along to a song,
(28:55):
would that affect your fine motor control in terms of
like trying to find don't know, I'm thinking about like
platform video games where you're trying to like jump from
one thing to another at just the exact right time,
sort of like it was like the old school platformers
where they were just insanely difficult and you essentially had
to know like the exact beats to hit the exact key.
There's to that, right, And I'm wondering if that affects
(29:19):
them as well, or like Simon game comes to mind.
Oh yeah, that would be a perfect example. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
like they would just be unable to do Simon. I'm
curious about that. Again, it comes down to like a
small loss like Simon wouldn't be a big deal. But
I would imagine if the fine motor control extended into
other aspects of your life that might be difficult. I mean,
(29:39):
certainly there was a time when like the predominant game
video game was those insane platformers, and if you were
not able to partake of those, I mean, you felt
like you were missing out a little bit, Like I
was just always kind of horrible at them, and I
remember feeling a little left out like I had never
beat Like I don't think I bade any of those
old Nintendo games, and and I did feel like this
(30:02):
or something something wrong with me that I haven't beat
Super Mario Brothers too. I can sort of remember that, yeah,
because especially like our generation, the way we played like
we all would just huddle around the TV and the
console right for hours at a time. I remember playing
like Mega Man for like ten hours straight into the
middle of the night with my buddies, and we would
like switch off, right. But yeah, you would sort of
(30:24):
get laughed at if you weren't as like, oh you
can't make that one little jump? Come on, you know,
thank god they got EASi here. Okay, So Robert tell
us a little bit more about agnosia and how it's
related to a musea. Well, agnosia in Greek means not
(30:48):
knowing and um and if. From a broad standpoint, agnoja
refers to a number of different neural disorders that basically
in which the subject experience is an inability to inability
to process different sensory information. Now what sort of information
this varies a lot. Some experience and inability to recognize
(31:09):
and identify objects or persons or aspects of objects or persons. Uh,
the sense itself is not defective, however, it's just how
you're processing it. So it's not that you can't hear,
it's not that you can't see. It's there's no memory loss.
And it might be limited to a single sense, it
might be more than one. So what I immediately thought
of here was all of our sacks famous study of
(31:31):
the man who mistook his wife for a hat, which
was about a guy who had a brain disorder and
literally like couldn't perceive the difference between his wife when
he saw her in his hat. Uh, And all of
your Sacks was famous for doing all kinds of studies
like this. But this that seems like maybe a more
extreme version of agnosia. Well, there are a number of
(31:52):
different versions of it that have been either officially or
unofficially identified, So just a few here it There's there's
finger agnosia. This is an inability to recognize the fingers
of the hand. There's a more famous one, and certainly
Oliver Sacks don't um study this one a good bed.
And this is a prosopagnosia. This is face blindness. So
(32:15):
you look at a face, it's not that you can't see,
it's not even that you can't see a face. It's
not like on that that wonderful episode of Hannibal, where
it's like a swirly like blank thing. Right, It's it's
not that as wonderful as that was visually in that show.
It's not really what of facial face blindness is like.
But still you you can't you look in at the face,
You're seeing the face, but you can't really identify what's
(32:36):
going on. You can't like put the markers together to
identify it as being different from one face or another. Right,
There's also a phone agnosia, which is voice blindness. There's
time agnosia, which is an inability to interpret the passaging
of time. And there's also semantic agnosia, and this is
object blindness. And without being fresh on the details of
(32:57):
the hat situation, that seems like that that would be
the related classes. Probably, Yeah, And I have to say, um,
and I have to bring this up in a bigeeki
about it since I'm currently reading the latest book in
our Scott Baker's Prince of Nothing. Yeah, you have told
me about this numerous times, and so has a friend
of the show, ec Steiner. Yeah, Yeah, I look forward
(33:17):
to chatting about this latest book with Steiner because it's uh,
the title is a Great Ordeal. But throughout the entire
series there's this tragic, undying elder race known as the
non Men. Okay, so they're like humans, but they're very
alien in many respects. They've been around forever, they're they've
had all these traumatic experiences, and there are a few
(33:37):
different differences that like very notable differences between them and humans, like,
for instance, they're you know, they're ghastly and pale, kind
of google ish. They there Keith are all fused together.
But the one that I've always found really fascinating was
the revelation that they can't see paintings. Interesting, they deal
almost exclusively with scroll dimensional three dimensional representations. That would
(34:00):
would definitely work for Steiner since he's working. For those
of you who don't know who we're talking about, this
is a friend of ours who has actually done work
for the show before, especially for our video series. Um
he's worked with me on comic books before in two
dimensional formats, but he actually sculpt it, like these huge
set pieces that we used for the Monster Science series here.
He did this wonderful Cathulu piece that we have here
(34:23):
in the office, and uh, there's the giant cyclops skull
that you can see in the background and a couple
of those. So he's worked with us on the show before. Yeah,
and so maybe he's he himself is one of the
non men um He might be. But I've seen people
interpret this like painting blindness, if you will, and maybe
it maybe it's something to do with oh well, they
can't see colors, the color blindness. But I can't help
(34:44):
but wonder if this is, uh, if this would be
some sort of like painting agnosia. Certainly, our Stan Baker
works so many neuroscientific and philosophical ideas to his work.
I would not be surprised at all of that was
a partial inspiration for it. Okay, Yeah, I like that.
I that yeah. Yeah. But all of these conditions, the
(35:04):
real ones that we've discussed here, there are examples where
again you're the stimuli is entering through your senses, but
then something is messed up, the wiring is crossed, there's
there's something in many cases physically damaged in the brain
that is permitting the proper processing of that stimula. Yeah,
and where this enters the musical realm is auditory agnosia,
(35:28):
and they're essentially two different versions. Here. There's classical auditory agnosia,
which entails environmental sounds, so this would be like you
hear a bird or a car, but you're unable to
process exactly what that sound is. And then there is
interpretive or acceptive agnosia, and this entails music and gets
more into this, this idea of musical agnosia. I guess
like here's a good point for me to probably clarify too,
(35:51):
because I have this. I don't know about you, but um,
I have a good bit of tenitis um from all
my years going to shows, and even though I want
ear plugs, yeah, I still hear that whistling at night
and if everything's quiet, I just hear a high pitched
wine all the time. Um. And this isn't that though, right,
Like that's that's an actual like we actually have an
(36:13):
episode of brain stuff about that, um, But that's part
of your ear drum being affected and then connecting to
your brain. This is totally different. This is just brain
right now. In some of the case and we'll look
at a couple of case studies here, uh in a minute.
In some of those you do see like actual deftness
occurring as well. But but yeah, for the most part,
(36:34):
we're talking about the about not a physical hearing loss.
So examples of this go back at least as far
as nineteen o five. I was looking at some articles
about this, and the reference a physician only referred to
is Bond Vincini and another one by the name of
(36:54):
Lammy L. A. M Y. And both of those, uh
encountered individuals who who had difficulty with music so they
could In the first one, the nineteen five case, the
patient could still process musical information, but could no longer
recognize well known tunes. Um he could pick out a
wrong note in a famous tune, but he couldn't name
(37:14):
that tune. And in the nineteen o seven case from
Lammy L. A. M Y described a patient who could
transcribe his national anthem but didn't know what it was.
That's interesting, huh. And I'm assuming that given their names,
they probably weren't transcribing the American national anthem, right. I
(37:37):
think these were both, Uh at least said the first
one was Italian. I'm not certain about Lamby. Again, I
look to try and find some more information about these
individuals as possible. That from motor head did something. Certainly
those may be lost of time, alright. So the thing
to keep in mind is there's a lot of variety.
(37:59):
Here's an example two thousand and eleven a case that
was reported by Zang Kaga and I. She of a
twenty seven year old woman with long term severe hydrocephalis.
This is abnormal accumulation of cerebro spinal fluid in the brain,
and this was due to congenital spina bifida. She gradually
lost her hearing, but she experienced quote severe difficulty in
(38:22):
distinguishing verbal, environmental, and musical instrument sounds as her hearing
left her. She continued to enjoy music, however, and could
she could because she could sense the rhythms by simply
turning up the music allowed enough to feel the vibrations,
and this allowed her to actually summon the memories of
emotional associations that she had made with the music prior
(38:44):
to her hearing loss. Okay, that's nice. Yeah, I think
it's kind of beautiful. I mean it gets into this
idea that we discussed earlier, that the brain is processing
music in a few different ways, and if one of
those bridges happens to break down. It doesn't mean, you know,
the information can't get across, and the vibrations alone are
enough to sort of trigger those emotional associations. Is interesting. Yeah,
(39:06):
and you can also of course get into I don't
think they got into it as much in the paper,
but you know, you have you have instances where you
can you can use hearing a devices that that that
depend upon like vibrations in the skull as opposed to
you know, straight up you know your drumstizations. Yeah. Now
compare all of this to an earlier case. This was
(39:29):
present in n in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, that
of A and this was I think the case itself
was first studied in the seventies, but it was a
forty year old nurse referred to as c N who,
following a series of surgeries at age thirty five to
repair cerebral aneurysms in each of her temporal lobes, complained
that she was no longer able to pick out the
(39:50):
simplest overlearned tune, you know things, the tunes you should
have known just by heart. So she no longer recognized
tunes from her own record collection unless they had audible lyrics,
which is, which is interesting. She can only identify them
of the lyrics kicked in. So this is making me
think of people. I listened to a lot of music
that has unrecognizable lyrics, and I'm okay with that, but
(40:12):
I know a lot of people who are like, how
could you listen to that you don't know what they're saying.
I wonder if that's connected. I don't know, because maybe
it's just an aesthetic preference. But I often think of
in cases like that where you can't quite understand what
the the the vocalist is saying. It's like Tom York
comes to mind. Certainly some of the music a tool
(40:33):
even or or um Sugares another act that comes to mind,
where if I'm not even understanding exactly what's saying, or
I'm only picking up on certain words, like the voice
itself as a musical instrument. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was
just mentioning this the other day to a friend of
mine about Radio Ahead. But that's how I think of
Tom York is less as a lyricist and more as
(40:53):
like a vocal musical contributor, sort of like how Mike
Patton does stuff with his voice and some his side
projects like um, like Phantom Moss where he's not even
really saying things, but he's just like using his voice
as an instrument. Yeah, or like certainly we can all
listen to music in different languages. We can listen to say,
Mongolian throat singing and still enjoy it. Yeah. So the
(41:16):
the the individual in question here, she had no problem
understanding or communicating verbally, but music simply didn't register like
it used to. Musical patterns found no purchase in her mind,
and this made her a near perfect case of music agnosia.
While and it sounds like there's an overlap there with
a musa. So I wonder if, like um, the neurobiologists,
(41:42):
they're really looking into this deeply, if there's just a
terminology overlap here, or if there's some symptoms of agnosia
and some symptoms of as a musea that separate them
out as being totally different. I think that there is
definite overlap here, because I have seen in some of
the papers we're looking at they even you said even
(42:04):
you used them interchangeably or said, this is also known
as a musea. Though, and though there are plenty of cases,
especially in the stuff we covered earlier where a musa
is not describing agnosia and vice versa. So it sounds
like that we need to do a lot more research
on this and sort of better identify these categories. Yeah,
(42:24):
I believe. I believe the experts in these areas are
still trying to get firm ideas of what's going on,
because certainly agnosia is a is a rarity compared to
the more simpler versions of the music. Right, Yeah, you
can have a musa and okay, so maybe this is
the difference. Amusia is the four percent of the population
(42:44):
who are just toned deaf, whereas agnosia or the term
that I was using earlier, me scroll back into the
notes to find it specific musical and hedonia those sound
like the the extreme version of it where you just
don't process music at all, Right, And I think that's
(43:07):
I think that's where we see the overlap. Yeah, and
those conditions where we're talking, especially when we're talking about
brain injuries UM, physical trauma to the brain, physical changes
to the brain, the result in these symptoms. Now in
the treatment of agnosia UM. The analogy I made earlier
about the two bridges, that's ultimately where we see the
main treatment or coping mechanisms, and that is that if
(43:30):
one bridge is out, there are other bridges. There are
other ways that we consume music, that we that we
take music in and so we we see in various
cases where it basically information is just presented in other
modalities with that connect to the patients. So it's just
a different way of connecting with the music. It's interesting
(43:50):
that you use the term bridges because from what I
can tell, the causes that lead to and these are
the physical causes that lead to agnosia UM usually are
around the occipito temporal border in the brain of the
ventral stream right connecting parts of the brain together, the
(44:10):
bridges between that that gets damaged, and this could be
lesions on the parietal or temporal lobes. It can be
produced from head injury or a stroke, or infection or
carbon monoxide poisoning, all kinds of things, right, Um, But
these lead to all the kinds of ignosia, not just
the auditory ones we're talking about also visual and tactile
(44:31):
that you know, we're focusing on auditory today, But that bridge,
if that's severed, that's where that sense kind of goes. Hey,
why are ye all right? So this is what I'm wondering,
and this is what I'd like to see more research of,
you know, leading us out for the future. What effects
do a musia or agnosia have on other behaviors like
(44:53):
we've we've seen okay, yes, these people understanding uh language,
still right, and they're they're capable of being functional in
society and working and being intelligent and educated. But what
kind of personalities develop from a person who just doesn't
have music in their life. It's a good question I'd
(45:13):
love to hear from from any listeners on this. Certainly,
the the data we were looking at in the papers
we were reading, they seem, if anything, it seems like
most of the time the researchers are surprised at how
how well the individual does you know, so it's it
I don't see a lot maybe in the more severe
cases where it's affecting you know, greater sound agnosia in general,
(45:36):
or or other types of of a stimulus coming into
the brain, But for the most part, it doesn't seem
to handicap them significantly. I mean, they're still able in
many cases to enjoy music. The thing, the one area
that is that is specifically affected. Yeah, I'm also wondering too,
and please listeners chime in on this one as well.
(45:56):
With the rise and popularity of podcasts, I wonder if
that is an outlet for a muse as like there, Well,
I don't like music, but these podcasts are great, so
I'll just load up a bunch of these and listen
to these all the time. I've certainly met people like that,
the people who don't want to drive with music on,
and then inevitably that they want to listen to something right,
(46:17):
and they'll they'll go for a podcast, We'll go for
a radio show, or like a book. Yeah, yeah, interesting, Okay, huh. Well,
I like to balance back and forth between the two.
Sometimes I'm in the mood for music, sometimes in the
mood for a podcast or a book. But that's an interesting,
interesting difference in experiences. Well, it seems like there's a
(46:39):
lot of information that we can learn from you, the
listeners out here about this. I mean, we're scratching the
surface of this pretty much brand new discipline of research.
So let us know what you think about it. I
want to hear your your experiences. Maybe you've met people
who don't like music at all, maybe you're one of
those people, and maybe that's why you listen to the show. Um,
(46:59):
so let us know. You can contact us in all
the usual ways. We are on social media all over
the place, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And then there's
also our landing page, stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you're gonna find all the podcasts, all the
videos we've made, and all of the articles, none of
which are musical based. If you have a musea, you
(47:21):
can consume them and be just fine. That's right. And hey,
if you want to get in touch with us directly,
as always, email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff Works dot com. Well more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
(47:49):
Blow by blas Larger Towns is found by a bottle
prote
Hey, you, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into that old vault. And this is
going to be an episode from July that you actually
did with our old friend Christian Seger. Yeah, this episode
gets into the topic of a museum and some related
conditions in which an individual does not get music. And
(00:26):
I don't mean in the sense that, like you know,
they just don't get funk or they don't get this
particular genre. Don't understand why everybody likes Eric clapton solo career, right,
But yeah, the idea that music could just not be
connecting with certain brains, uh, the way that it does
with the rest of us, that sounds very interesting. I'm intrigued.
Maybe I'll give it a listen. All right, well, let's
(00:48):
go ahead and dive into minds of musical emptiness. Welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
(01:08):
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Seger. Hey, Robert,
have you ever met a person who doesn't like music?
I do not think I've ever met anyone who just
across the board doesn't like music. I've certainly met plenty
of people who seem to dislike music in certain scenarios
because I'm the kind of type of types of music,
(01:30):
you mean, well, types of music, but also music in
certain situations, like I've certainly known people who don't like
music while driving. I'm of the mindset I want music
on all the time, just about music of my own choose,
but music. I know a lot of our colleagues have
difficulty writing while there's music on. I don't have that problem,
(01:51):
although I do like sort of cultivate playlists of stuff
that helps me to write, you know, mostly instrumental stuff
that sometimes there's certain music that I can listen to
that has vocals that I can listen to all writing.
But yeah, so you know, I know, like you like,
I've known like various sort of iterations of people who
can't listen to music during certain times. I've only met
(02:11):
like one or two people in my life who just don't.
They literally say I don't like music, and that's so alien,
so difficult for us to comprehend, because it's like hearing
someone say, oh, I don't I don't like food, Like
I don't like drinking liquids. It almost seems in human
in a way. And I think like when you hear that,
at least in my experience, people will kind of think like, oh,
(02:32):
that's the trade of a psychopath, right, But it's not.
It's actually not. We've talked about psychopaths on the show
and that hasn't come up as one of the symptoms.
But also, as we're going to talk about today, this
is a real brain condition. Yeah, at least a couple
of different conditions we're going to discuss, and I think
they both serve to remind us just how tenuous our
(02:55):
sensory experience of the world really is. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, like,
think about you and me, right, Like, the audience probably
knows if they don't already, that you are really into
electronic music, and you cover it for stuff to blow
your mind, i'd say weekly, right, Yeah. And um, and I,
as many people have heard on other episodes, grew up
(03:16):
in the punkin metal scene and still listen to a
lot of that stuff, which a lot of people find
unlistenable and dissonant, including you know, my wife, and um,
I'm okay with that, but it's interesting because dissonance plays
into these diseases as well. Well, here's a quick question
for you, and I think this helps to sort of
this helps a lot of us, uh try and comprehend
(03:37):
what some of these conditions are. Like, Like what what's
the type of music that you just really don't get
that you just you can't really listen to, you don't understand,
and and you're just willing to say, yeah, I that
is not from me usually like NPR style jazz. I
don't want to just say jazz in general, because there's
plenty of stuff that's being done in that area that's
(03:59):
interesting and I like, but like that kind of like
background elevator music jazz, you know what I mean? Like
that that drives me crazy. It's like fingers on a chalkboard.
For me. It's I have to say jazz as well.
And part of this could be I mean, the view
I guess is that jazz takes some getting used to.
You have to be you have to immerse yourself in it.
(04:19):
And I like some jazz, and I like jazzy elements
and some of the music I listened to from time
to time, But it's that jazzy jazz that spacey jazz
that that completely unhinged jazz that just kind of gives
me the shape something. We think of this joke on
Parks and Rack. I don't know if you remember this,
but the their local MPR station, they had a show
(04:39):
and they would say jazz plus jazz equals jazz. Whenever
I hear something like that, I'm like nope. During the channel.
I often think about it that it's maybe like a
like a strong alcoholic property. You know, something strong liqueur
(05:00):
that you would never drink on your on its own,
but you would use in a recipe or you would
certainly used in using a mixed drink. So I often think, well,
that is that is the strong, undeluded stuff that is
not for me. Yeah, but you can put a like
a shot of it, or like I will. I don't
drink clearly so shots a lot, but you know a
little bit. It's like adding grenadine to your to your
(05:23):
soda or something like to drink and given a little flavor. Well,
like punk is is one of those things. I think
about this sometimes it's like pure punk. I've just it's
not my scene, it's not what I dig. But I
have certainly loved groups that have elements of punk in
their sound. They neither come out of punk or find
some of their musical genre to combine it with, Like
um oh the Poges come to mind. Yeah, like a
(05:46):
little bit of Irish music, a little bit of punk music.
It's really I would be hard pressed to want to
listen to Irish or punk music on their own, but
when these two come together, then I you know, I've
always enjoyed it. Yeah, No, I can definitely see that,
even like having spent many a year in basements watching
just like crusty punk bands just hammering out four chord songs. Uh,
(06:08):
I can understand where you're coming from, and that that
sort of has led to like what a lot of
our I guess, like popular alternative music is nowadays. Right,
it's sort of like a fusion of punk and jazz
or punkin metal, or where Joe and I were just
talking the other night about SKA like nineties and how
that was sort of something like that. Yeah. Well, okay,
(06:29):
enough about our musical interests, but so clearly we're human
beings who love music. We've got opinions about music. We
like to talk about it, we like to listen to it,
we go to shows um. But there's people out there
who don't. And it's not just because you know they don't,
they don't go to things like that, or they're just
not it's because there's literally something going on in their
(06:51):
brain that makes it so that they're incapable of enjoying music. Right,
something's wired differently, Some systems are online in a slightly
different array, and we will get into into these in
a moment, but before we do, without would be helpful
to just go ahead and give a nice overview of
the cognitive experience of music, just basically what's going on
(07:11):
when we process it. So music is of course a
deep part of our cognitive architecture. It changes our mood,
it heightens our emotions, it summons and banishes memories, It
affects the manner in which we preceive perceived time. Even
we can actually use it to treat illnesses of the
mind and body. So it's powerful stuff. It's potent stuff
(07:32):
that's not even just with human beings. There's been research
done on plants that music affects plants, so we're talking
about some serious magic here. There are parts of the
brain that respond to music that that don't respond to language.
There are separate parts of the brain that respond to melody,
to the melody of language, different than these different for
the parts of the brain the respond to the melody
(07:52):
of music, they're parts of the brain that deal with movement, attention, planning,
and memory, and these all respond to music even though
they don't have anything to do with the actual auditory process.
So there's a lot going on behind the scenes. Yeah,
and and we don't fully understand it yet. I mean,
I would say this research well, you know, we'll talk
about it later, but really, only in the last century
(08:13):
have we even been aware of this as a medical condition.
But only in maybe the last twenty or thirty years
has there been like real deep research into what this means. Yeah,
and certainly there's a lot of wonderful research out there
about our relationship with music, and we can't cover it
all here, but just a couple of i think illuminating
studies to to touch on here. Um In in recent years,
(08:34):
we found that you can look to the brain via
f m R I, and specifically you can look at
brain activity in the nucleus incumbents. This is involved in
the formation of expectations, and we can actually tell if
a person is enjoying the music they're listening to. By
looking at at brain activity in this region, if it's
(08:54):
meeting their musical expectations and matching up with the stored
templates of what you've heard before, then you see stuff
light up. Um yeah, I could absolutely believe that given
my experience with music. Yeah, Like if you're just like A,
I don't know, Like here's an example, Like I walk
around sometimes and I'll just have like my entire music
library on shuffle on my phone or something like that,
(09:15):
Like one like really great song for my high school
days will pop up, and it's like I can feel
like whatever those lights are that are going on in
my brain just activate, you know. Yeah. Yeah. The expectation
plays such an interesting role in our experiencing music because
on one hand, there's there's something that happens when a
when a melody or a tune or the lyrics take
(09:36):
you to that place you're expecting it to go. But
then also when it goes to a slightly different place
where it kind of you think it's going to turn
left and it turns right, like that animates you as well.
It's it's it's almost like narrative without words, really ah, yeah,
that's a really interesting way to put it. I um,
I'll just do a little bit of subjective experience here
(09:56):
to throw in here. I'm not like, personally a big
fan of The Cure, but a friend of mine is,
uh and if he's listening her, this is your story.
So The Cure just played in Atlanta recently, like I
think like two weeks ago. Did you know about this?
Oh yeah, I have. I have some friends who are
really they went to this show. So the way that
he told me was that, like, apparently this tour was
like you know, they're going to be playing all their
(10:18):
greatest hits or whatever, but that was sort of like
a different arrangement of the musical instruments. So he was
really excited because he's like, well, I'm gonna hear the
songs that I love, and it's gonna be played by
the guys who wrote them, but they're going to be
playing them in very different ways than I'm used to
and that's a wholly new experience. Oh yeah, I've had
that experience with I guess tool has been. It seems
(10:40):
like the kind of band that would do something like that.
They'll play with the intro on something and so the
live version, at first you're not sure what it's going
to be, but then then you realize, oh, it's it's
this track, it's that track, whatever the particular track may be.
And there's this, you know, a physical experience of excitement
to when I was, you know, still involved in the
music scening just go into a lot of shows. The
(11:02):
thing that was always the most impressive to me, and
that just showed like a real class act, professional touring band,
was when they could play an entire set without stopping,
Like they would just start and their songs. They had
figured out ways to weave their songs in and out
of one another, so they would just play like a
really tight thirty forty minutes set and then boom they
(11:22):
were done, got off on stage. And that is the
kind of thing that just floors you. It's just like
you don't have time to stop and breathe and kind
of judge them, uh for other factors like whatever they're wearing,
or what they say in between songs or something. You're
just like bombarded. Well, that's one of the reasons that
I've been so into DJ mixes over the years that, uh,
(11:44):
it's not quite the same as a as a band
performing the entire set without stop. But this the idea
that you can take various musical elements and and a
talented DJ can create a seamless tapestry of sound. I
love that, and certainly you get those six surprises. Those
expectations net Or skewed throughout that sonic narrative as well.
(12:04):
So all right, we're clearly establishing that we're music nerds.
We love music, and whatever parts of the brain that
don't work for for some of these people, they're they're
lighting up like fireworks for us. Now. Another key point, though,
is certainly you've been to a concert or performance and
you've been experiencing the music, and maybe you've seen somebody
like clearly their significant other drug them here and they're
(12:27):
not enjoying it, or they got When you said drugged them,
I thought like ruderally gave them drugs so that they
would just sit put. But yeah, that's that's that's possible,
depending on the because I've seen you both. Yeah, so
you've seen people that are not into it, or they're
they don't they're clearly the first time, or maybe they
you don't feel like they could possibly be enjoying the
(12:48):
music on the same level as you are. Yeah, possibly
and certainly like and I have to applaud my wife again,
like she's indulged me by you know, sometimes I can't
get a friend to go with me to a particular
kind of thing. She's like, all right, you know, let's
I'll go with you. You know, we'll go see Converge
and High on Fire. And she's just sitting there like
shaking her head while I'm like really into it, you know, Um,
(13:12):
so yeah, I get that. Well. It's interesting because despite
all of our very musical taste, in our varying levels
of engagement with particular types of music, particular performances, the
brain experiences that we have are actually pretty consistent among
most people. There was a two thousand thirteen study publishing
the European Journal of Euroscience, and they found that if
(13:33):
two people listened to the same track, one inexperienced fan
of the music and another not the other one just
like a newcomer, you know, there's been dragged in there
by their spouse, you're still going to see the same
synchronization in several key brain areas and similar brain activity.
So as much as you you know, might like to
(13:53):
think you're experiencing your favorite band and an entirely different
cognitive level than the you know, the dumb guy next
to you with the glories on his fingers. Um, that
doesn't seem to be quite the case. We're still engaging
like the same networks. I wonder if this is similar
to like research that's been done on depression and anxiety
(14:13):
in that like, Um, the more you listen to the
songs over and over again, right, Like, it's maybe it's
like a like writing over the same pathway of the
brain over and over and over again, so it makes
it easier for that experience to happen. It's happening in
the same way for everybody, but it's just kind of
going through the brain. I don't know how to describe
(14:34):
this other than with like road metaphors, right, Like, it's
like going down the same road, but it's just like
going down faster for for us or something an expectation,
right yeah, where the road is going to turn, where
it's gonna split, etcetera. Yeah, interesting, huh. I wonder if
anybody's done research on that, Like the the the experience
of having music encoded to the brain as being similar
(14:58):
to the sort of expectations that encode anxiety into people. Yeah,
we'll have to follow up on that, because I know
there have been a number of studies that have looked into,
you know, the potential therapeutic aspects of music as well
as the role of music and in various emotional states. Yeah. Right,
and you think about it, like some of the emotional
(15:18):
states that are created by listening to music have very
similar symptoms to anxiety. Huh. All right, maybe that's a
future episode. We'll have to dig deep for that one.
But let's take a quick break and then when we
come back, we're going to talk about the condition of
a musia or tone deafness. All right, we're back. So
(15:43):
this first one, tone deaf deafness amusia. I feel like
this is going to be the one where we're going
to see far more listeners who can share experiences with this. Certainly,
we've probably all encountered people with varying levels of tone
deafness over the years, and it seems like tone deafness
has variations on it, like extremes or you know, some
(16:04):
people have it to to less an extent than others.
The term congenital amusia is what we use to denote
tone deafness that you're born with. It's been described in
medical literature for more than a century, and it manifests
basically as a severe deficiency in processing pitch variations. Now
(16:26):
this extends to impairments in musical memory and recognition, as
well as what we traditionally think of his tone deafness
as like bad singing or the inability to tap in
time with music. Right. Um, everybody's right now is probably
thinking of like the person who I don't know was
inquired or something like they just couldn't hit the notes. Yeah. Um.
(16:47):
Some literature also refers to a musia as dis melodia
or dismusia, but the term amusia is generally agreed to
be preferable because it acknowledged just the possibility that there
exists as many forms of congenital amusias as there are
forms of acquired amusias. And what I mean by that
(17:09):
is accidental brain damage, So you can hurt yourself a
variety of ways that will also produce this effect. Now,
to clarify, congenital means present from birth, but it is
possible to acquire a musia through brain damage in life.
The very first study that looked at. This was done
(17:29):
in eighteen seventy eight by a guy named Grant Allen,
and he was investigating a thirty year old man with
a neurological lesion that gave him this, as he referred
to it then severe musical handicap um. And maybe some
of you out there wondering right now, like I can
relate to this, is this me? Well it could be
a recent study found that out of a hundred people
(17:52):
who self declared themselves as having a handicap for music,
only twenty two So actually, exhibit did the traits of
a musea after they were tested with a formal questionnaire
and the way that this questionnaire worked. It tested your
aptitude for scale, interval, and contour information as well as
(18:12):
melodic organization dimension, rhythm and meter, and temporal organization dimension.
They also tested memory recognition ability connected to music. Now,
those who are tone deaf are generally unable to hear
the differences in pitch and tone that the rest of
us here we joke about this, right you know that
(18:34):
there's always like uh, and I imagine with like movies
like Pitch Perfect or TV shows like Glee, like there
must be tons of joke about jokes about tone Definitely.
It seems like every long running show ever has had
at least an episode where, oh, it's the person who
can't sing, but they don't realize they can't sing it. Yeah.
So it's a common enough of a thing that it
shows up in some pop culture narrative and we all
recognize it. Uh. We use the phrase really to describe
(18:57):
people who don't understand simple commun unication strategies to write,
like like even outside of it, we've turned into this
metaphor for like, ah, well, he's tone deaf, so that's
why he doesn't understand what we're talking about here. It's
not even we're using it on a on a level
beyond like its actual medical application. Right at its most extreme, though,
(19:18):
people who are tone deaf are unable to even perceive
music the same way that the rest of us do.
And it comes down to an actual difference in their
brain structure. Uh. And it's different from those like you know,
Robert and myself for whom music comes naturally. Okay, it's
actually defined as a learning disability. There's a team from
(19:40):
the University of Montreal who have first published an empirical
study on it, and that's their delineation. So, for instance,
most children, and I didn't realize this, but this is
probably a common experience for you. Most children learned to
sing at the same time that they're learning to speak, right,
so they're like kind of like singing words. Like I
was a babysitting a friend of ours four year old
(20:00):
the other night, and he was singing constantly. But then
he would just kind of talk to himself too. Oh yeah,
that's my experience with my son Bastion is um. There's
a lot of a lot of talking at this point
he's four, but there's also a lot of singing. He
will just burst into song about the silliest things, to
the point we're just like, all right, you just you
can't sing about butter anymore. I just just eat, don't
(20:22):
play with the butter, and don't sing about the butter,
just consumed. But well, that sounds like he is not
tone deaf, because tone deaf children don't do this singing
when they're younger. Uh. And this is where this this
woman seems to be like the expert on this, Like
every study I was looking at she was somehow involved in.
Her name is Isabelle Perette's. And that's when she gave
(20:45):
it the official disorder congenital amusia. It's innate in these
people's brain, the lack of musical perception, and it's also hereditary. Uh.
They found that congenital amusia is genetically transmitted. Thirty of
the people who have first degree relatives with this cognitive
disorder also have it. However, if you look at control groups,
(21:09):
only three percent habit and control and control group families. However,
congenital amusia doesn't seem to result from any particular family environment.
It's not like, I don't know, uh, you can somehow
connect it to like alcoholics or something like that. Right, Like,
there doesn't seem to be an environmental source that's causing this.
It seems to be genetic. Remember, though genes don't specify
(21:33):
cognitive function, they actually influence brain development. So the next
step that these researchers are looking at is, let's identify
the genes that relate to these neuroanatomical anomalies that are
found in the brains of people who have amusia. Now, interestingly,
that three percent control group almost lines up exactly with
what they've found to be the percentage of people in
(21:55):
the population who have it. Four percent seems to be
the number of people in general population who are a music.
They grow up with normal exposure to music and are
otherwise capable of doing everything else everybody else does. They're intelligent,
they're educated. This only affects their ability to recognize pitch
in music, and it doesn't apply to language. This is
(22:17):
the really fascinating part, right. The musics can process speech
as well as environmental sounds like I don't know, like
an animal's cry or something right, or voices. They can
understand all of that. They can even understand the pitch
changes in different languages like you know a little Chinese.
I spent some time in China. You know how important
pitch is to the difference in words. They're fine with that,
(22:39):
but it's only with the music that they have this
pitch problem. Well, it reminds me of some of the
bits we we discussed earlier about how our brains process music,
and the idea that your brain is processing its separately
from the music itself, based on all of these other factors.
So I guess it stands a reason someone with even
you know, fairly significant um a musica here could still
(23:03):
listen to say, a track with some really engaging lyrics,
of course, and they're gonna get some sort of lyrical
experience out of it. Yeah, and maybe maybe even something
that is I'm thinking of some of the more some
of the least musical music that I like, some of
the more noise oriented stuff, Like maybe they could listen
to that and appreciate that on some level that is
(23:24):
not as tied to the music, but still somehow tied
to a sonic experience of the thing. We are going
to get back to that. Yeah, there's a there's uh
a way that dissonance in particular plays into both regular
music listening experience and a music listening experience. But there's
actually some music acts that are recorded that are fluent
in several languages, so this is it doesn't at all
(23:45):
affect their other communicative abilities. Uh. And the way that
they figured this out was they use these tests that
were originally designed to assess the presence and specificity of
musical disorders and patients with brand damage. The big one
seems to be the difficulty in detecting bit related changes, right,
especially when that extains into dissonance, which a musical subjects
(24:09):
have little sensitivity too. So that's interesting, right. So Uh,
people who love music. When you create music that has
dissonance in it, when tones are playing over one another
that don't match up the right way, and it just
sounds like kind of white noise, some people hate that, right.
Like I dated a girl once too. I remember putting
on a record in a car and she just said,
(24:29):
turn this off. It just sounds like insects. Uh. And
she wasn't wrong, but she probably wasn't in music because
they have very little sensitivity to dissonance. Okay, So I
so one with this condition could very well be an
exclusive fan of say like Nurse with Wound or early
(24:53):
into New Boton, very like throw a xylophone down a
hallway sort of music. That's what I'm kind of wondering
is if like these experimental noise fans that are just
super into it and that's all they listened to. I
wonder if you could have a musia and not even
know it because that's sort of your genre of choice. Um.
(25:15):
It doesn't appear, unfortunately, to be something that can be
quote unquote fixed either. Peretz's team has tried teaching kids
with the musica to like music. Actually, they basically they
gave them MP three players, and they said listen to
this for thirty minutes a day. Not only did the
kids fail to improve on their tests, but they how
poorly they scored on the test correlated to how much
(25:38):
they reported listening to the music. Um. So the next
steps to to see if there's any kind of way
to reverse this. Seemed to be some kind of remediation
training programs that might improve pitch perception and memory. The
very least, this will help us understand the neurological basis
for this so that we can use it to diagnose
other learning disorders. To you, so, what what's going on
(26:02):
in the brain here? Right? Like, let's zoom in, take
a look at the brain and figure out what exactly
the deal is. Well, there's a study by a team
in France and they used m EG scanners to figure
this out. A music people's brains stem from delayed or
impaired functioning in their frontal and auditory cortex. They also
had physical abnormalities in those areas of the brain, with
(26:25):
more gray matter and less white matter than usual. Now,
this is something that's come up on the show a
couple of times when we're talking about everything from brain
disorders to drug usage. Right, Like that white gray matter
balance seems to be pretty important again. People with music,
they don't enjoy music, but they're capable of enjoying all
the other pleasures the rest of us are. Right, It's
(26:46):
not like they're dead inside, right, it's just this one area,
and arguably an area that that certainly has nothing to
do with their survival or ability to to move and
enjoy life and and and partake of our culture. They're
just not into the musical aspect of it. Yeah, I
mean they like food, they like money, they like sex.
This has all been tracked in UH. There was a
(27:07):
March six article in the Journal of Current Biology. They
looked at this UM. So, Okay, we know it's innate
or it's acquired. We know it prevents people from processing
music the way they do. There's also another way to
look at this, another terminology called specific musical and hedonia. UH.
And this is what another studies authors called the inability
(27:30):
to expla experience pleasure from music in general. So if
a musia is the like disease, the extreme version where
you can't appreciate music at all, is this specific musical
and hedonia. And in their study they divided thirty people
into three even groups, and they were asked to do
(27:50):
what they called a music task, where they listened to
classical pieces of music and then they rated them. Then
they were asked to do a monetary incentive delay task.
Basically the is gambling um and usually both would induce
an emotional reaction in the brain. The researchers analyze the
heart rate of their subjects and how much they perspired. Now,
(28:14):
some were quote emotionally oblivious to music that they could
tell what they were supposed to be feeling. So they
heard the stuff they knew they were supposed to be
having some kind of feeling, but their brain wasn't registering it.
Their brain registered okay, there's some reward system in place.
When I'm when they were playing around with the money
and gambling, that was lighting up, but not when they're
(28:35):
listening to music. So I'm wondering, this is just me
here and maybe I'm way off, but do you think
a museum can also affect a person's timing and tapping
in terms of like fine motor control? Because I'm thinking, like,
if you can't tap out a beat along to a song,
(28:55):
would that affect your fine motor control in terms of
like trying to find don't know, I'm thinking about like
platform video games where you're trying to like jump from
one thing to another at just the exact right time,
sort of like it was like the old school platformers
where they were just insanely difficult and you essentially had
to know like the exact beats to hit the exact key.
There's to that, right, And I'm wondering if that affects
(29:19):
them as well, or like Simon game comes to mind.
Oh yeah, that would be a perfect example. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
like they would just be unable to do Simon. I'm
curious about that. Again, it comes down to like a
small loss like Simon wouldn't be a big deal. But
I would imagine if the fine motor control extended into
other aspects of your life that might be difficult. I mean,
(29:39):
certainly there was a time when like the predominant game
video game was those insane platformers, and if you were
not able to partake of those, I mean, you felt
like you were missing out a little bit, Like I
was just always kind of horrible at them, and I
remember feeling a little left out like I had never
beat Like I don't think I bade any of those
old Nintendo games, and and I did feel like this
(30:02):
or something something wrong with me that I haven't beat
Super Mario Brothers too. I can sort of remember that, yeah,
because especially like our generation, the way we played like
we all would just huddle around the TV and the
console right for hours at a time. I remember playing
like Mega Man for like ten hours straight into the
middle of the night with my buddies, and we would
like switch off, right. But yeah, you would sort of
(30:24):
get laughed at if you weren't as like, oh you
can't make that one little jump? Come on, you know,
thank god they got EASi here. Okay, So Robert tell
us a little bit more about agnosia and how it's
related to a musea. Well, agnosia in Greek means not
(30:48):
knowing and um and if. From a broad standpoint, agnoja
refers to a number of different neural disorders that basically
in which the subject experience is an inability to inability
to process different sensory information. Now what sort of information
this varies a lot. Some experience and inability to recognize
(31:09):
and identify objects or persons or aspects of objects or persons. Uh,
the sense itself is not defective, however, it's just how
you're processing it. So it's not that you can't hear,
it's not that you can't see. It's there's no memory loss.
And it might be limited to a single sense, it
might be more than one. So what I immediately thought
of here was all of our sacks famous study of
(31:31):
the man who mistook his wife for a hat, which
was about a guy who had a brain disorder and
literally like couldn't perceive the difference between his wife when
he saw her in his hat. Uh, And all of
your Sacks was famous for doing all kinds of studies
like this. But this that seems like maybe a more
extreme version of agnosia. Well, there are a number of
(31:52):
different versions of it that have been either officially or
unofficially identified, So just a few here it There's there's
finger agnosia. This is an inability to recognize the fingers
of the hand. There's a more famous one, and certainly
Oliver Sacks don't um study this one a good bed.
And this is a prosopagnosia. This is face blindness. So
(32:15):
you look at a face, it's not that you can't see,
it's not even that you can't see a face. It's
not like on that that wonderful episode of Hannibal, where
it's like a swirly like blank thing. Right, It's it's
not that as wonderful as that was visually in that show.
It's not really what of facial face blindness is like.
But still you you can't you look in at the face,
You're seeing the face, but you can't really identify what's
(32:36):
going on. You can't like put the markers together to
identify it as being different from one face or another. Right,
There's also a phone agnosia, which is voice blindness. There's
time agnosia, which is an inability to interpret the passaging
of time. And there's also semantic agnosia, and this is
object blindness. And without being fresh on the details of
(32:57):
the hat situation, that seems like that that would be
the related classes. Probably, Yeah, And I have to say, um,
and I have to bring this up in a bigeeki
about it since I'm currently reading the latest book in
our Scott Baker's Prince of Nothing. Yeah, you have told
me about this numerous times, and so has a friend
of the show, ec Steiner. Yeah, Yeah, I look forward
(33:17):
to chatting about this latest book with Steiner because it's uh,
the title is a Great Ordeal. But throughout the entire
series there's this tragic, undying elder race known as the
non Men. Okay, so they're like humans, but they're very
alien in many respects. They've been around forever, they're they've
had all these traumatic experiences, and there are a few
(33:37):
different differences that like very notable differences between them and humans, like,
for instance, they're you know, they're ghastly and pale, kind
of google ish. They there Keith are all fused together.
But the one that I've always found really fascinating was
the revelation that they can't see paintings. Interesting, they deal
almost exclusively with scroll dimensional three dimensional representations. That would
(34:00):
would definitely work for Steiner since he's working. For those
of you who don't know who we're talking about, this
is a friend of ours who has actually done work
for the show before, especially for our video series. Um
he's worked with me on comic books before in two
dimensional formats, but he actually sculpt it, like these huge
set pieces that we used for the Monster Science series here.
He did this wonderful Cathulu piece that we have here
(34:23):
in the office, and uh, there's the giant cyclops skull
that you can see in the background and a couple
of those. So he's worked with us on the show before. Yeah,
and so maybe he's he himself is one of the
non men um He might be. But I've seen people
interpret this like painting blindness, if you will, and maybe
it maybe it's something to do with oh well, they
can't see colors, the color blindness. But I can't help
(34:44):
but wonder if this is, uh, if this would be
some sort of like painting agnosia. Certainly, our Stan Baker
works so many neuroscientific and philosophical ideas to his work.
I would not be surprised at all of that was
a partial inspiration for it. Okay, Yeah, I like that.
I that yeah. Yeah. But all of these conditions, the
(35:04):
real ones that we've discussed here, there are examples where
again you're the stimuli is entering through your senses, but
then something is messed up, the wiring is crossed, there's
there's something in many cases physically damaged in the brain
that is permitting the proper processing of that stimula. Yeah,
and where this enters the musical realm is auditory agnosia,
(35:28):
and they're essentially two different versions. Here. There's classical auditory agnosia,
which entails environmental sounds, so this would be like you
hear a bird or a car, but you're unable to
process exactly what that sound is. And then there is
interpretive or acceptive agnosia, and this entails music and gets
more into this, this idea of musical agnosia. I guess
like here's a good point for me to probably clarify too,
(35:51):
because I have this. I don't know about you, but um,
I have a good bit of tenitis um from all
my years going to shows, and even though I want
ear plugs, yeah, I still hear that whistling at night
and if everything's quiet, I just hear a high pitched
wine all the time. Um. And this isn't that though, right,
Like that's that's an actual like we actually have an
(36:13):
episode of brain stuff about that, um, But that's part
of your ear drum being affected and then connecting to
your brain. This is totally different. This is just brain
right now. In some of the case and we'll look
at a couple of case studies here, uh in a minute.
In some of those you do see like actual deftness
occurring as well. But but yeah, for the most part,
(36:34):
we're talking about the about not a physical hearing loss.
So examples of this go back at least as far
as nineteen o five. I was looking at some articles
about this, and the reference a physician only referred to
is Bond Vincini and another one by the name of
(36:54):
Lammy L. A. M Y. And both of those, uh
encountered individuals who who had difficulty with music so they
could In the first one, the nineteen five case, the
patient could still process musical information, but could no longer
recognize well known tunes. Um he could pick out a
wrong note in a famous tune, but he couldn't name
(37:14):
that tune. And in the nineteen o seven case from
Lammy L. A. M Y described a patient who could
transcribe his national anthem but didn't know what it was.
That's interesting, huh. And I'm assuming that given their names,
they probably weren't transcribing the American national anthem, right. I
(37:37):
think these were both, Uh at least said the first
one was Italian. I'm not certain about Lamby. Again, I
look to try and find some more information about these
individuals as possible. That from motor head did something. Certainly
those may be lost of time, alright. So the thing
to keep in mind is there's a lot of variety.
(37:59):
Here's an example two thousand and eleven a case that
was reported by Zang Kaga and I. She of a
twenty seven year old woman with long term severe hydrocephalis.
This is abnormal accumulation of cerebro spinal fluid in the brain,
and this was due to congenital spina bifida. She gradually
lost her hearing, but she experienced quote severe difficulty in
(38:22):
distinguishing verbal, environmental, and musical instrument sounds as her hearing
left her. She continued to enjoy music, however, and could
she could because she could sense the rhythms by simply
turning up the music allowed enough to feel the vibrations,
and this allowed her to actually summon the memories of
emotional associations that she had made with the music prior
(38:44):
to her hearing loss. Okay, that's nice. Yeah, I think
it's kind of beautiful. I mean it gets into this
idea that we discussed earlier, that the brain is processing
music in a few different ways, and if one of
those bridges happens to break down. It doesn't mean, you know,
the information can't get across, and the vibrations alone are
enough to sort of trigger those emotional associations. Is interesting. Yeah,
(39:06):
and you can also of course get into I don't
think they got into it as much in the paper,
but you know, you have you have instances where you
can you can use hearing a devices that that that
depend upon like vibrations in the skull as opposed to
you know, straight up you know your drumstizations. Yeah. Now
compare all of this to an earlier case. This was
(39:29):
present in n in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, that
of A and this was I think the case itself
was first studied in the seventies, but it was a
forty year old nurse referred to as c N who,
following a series of surgeries at age thirty five to
repair cerebral aneurysms in each of her temporal lobes, complained
that she was no longer able to pick out the
(39:50):
simplest overlearned tune, you know things, the tunes you should
have known just by heart. So she no longer recognized
tunes from her own record collection unless they had audible lyrics,
which is, which is interesting. She can only identify them
of the lyrics kicked in. So this is making me
think of people. I listened to a lot of music
that has unrecognizable lyrics, and I'm okay with that, but
(40:12):
I know a lot of people who are like, how
could you listen to that you don't know what they're saying.
I wonder if that's connected. I don't know, because maybe
it's just an aesthetic preference. But I often think of
in cases like that where you can't quite understand what
the the the vocalist is saying. It's like Tom York
comes to mind. Certainly some of the music a tool
(40:33):
even or or um Sugares another act that comes to mind,
where if I'm not even understanding exactly what's saying, or
I'm only picking up on certain words, like the voice
itself as a musical instrument. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was
just mentioning this the other day to a friend of
mine about Radio Ahead. But that's how I think of
Tom York is less as a lyricist and more as
(40:53):
like a vocal musical contributor, sort of like how Mike
Patton does stuff with his voice and some his side
projects like um, like Phantom Moss where he's not even
really saying things, but he's just like using his voice
as an instrument. Yeah, or like certainly we can all
listen to music in different languages. We can listen to say,
Mongolian throat singing and still enjoy it. Yeah. So the
(41:16):
the the individual in question here, she had no problem
understanding or communicating verbally, but music simply didn't register like
it used to. Musical patterns found no purchase in her mind,
and this made her a near perfect case of music agnosia.
While and it sounds like there's an overlap there with
a musa. So I wonder if, like um, the neurobiologists,
(41:42):
they're really looking into this deeply, if there's just a
terminology overlap here, or if there's some symptoms of agnosia
and some symptoms of as a musea that separate them
out as being totally different. I think that there is
definite overlap here, because I have seen in some of
the papers we're looking at they even you said even
(42:04):
you used them interchangeably or said, this is also known
as a musea. Though, and though there are plenty of cases,
especially in the stuff we covered earlier where a musa
is not describing agnosia and vice versa. So it sounds
like that we need to do a lot more research
on this and sort of better identify these categories. Yeah,
(42:24):
I believe. I believe the experts in these areas are
still trying to get firm ideas of what's going on,
because certainly agnosia is a is a rarity compared to
the more simpler versions of the music. Right, Yeah, you
can have a musa and okay, so maybe this is
the difference. Amusia is the four percent of the population
(42:44):
who are just toned deaf, whereas agnosia or the term
that I was using earlier, me scroll back into the
notes to find it specific musical and hedonia those sound
like the the extreme version of it where you just
don't process music at all, Right, And I think that's
(43:07):
I think that's where we see the overlap. Yeah, and
those conditions where we're talking, especially when we're talking about
brain injuries UM, physical trauma to the brain, physical changes
to the brain, the result in these symptoms. Now in
the treatment of agnosia UM. The analogy I made earlier
about the two bridges, that's ultimately where we see the
main treatment or coping mechanisms, and that is that if
(43:30):
one bridge is out, there are other bridges. There are
other ways that we consume music, that we that we
take music in and so we we see in various
cases where it basically information is just presented in other
modalities with that connect to the patients. So it's just
a different way of connecting with the music. It's interesting
(43:50):
that you use the term bridges because from what I
can tell, the causes that lead to and these are
the physical causes that lead to agnosia UM usually are
around the occipito temporal border in the brain of the
ventral stream right connecting parts of the brain together, the
(44:10):
bridges between that that gets damaged, and this could be
lesions on the parietal or temporal lobes. It can be
produced from head injury or a stroke, or infection or
carbon monoxide poisoning, all kinds of things, right, Um, But
these lead to all the kinds of ignosia, not just
the auditory ones we're talking about also visual and tactile
(44:31):
that you know, we're focusing on auditory today, But that bridge,
if that's severed, that's where that sense kind of goes. Hey,
why are ye all right? So this is what I'm wondering,
and this is what I'd like to see more research of,
you know, leading us out for the future. What effects
do a musia or agnosia have on other behaviors like
(44:53):
we've we've seen okay, yes, these people understanding uh language,
still right, and they're they're capable of being functional in
society and working and being intelligent and educated. But what
kind of personalities develop from a person who just doesn't
have music in their life. It's a good question I'd
(45:13):
love to hear from from any listeners on this. Certainly,
the the data we were looking at in the papers
we were reading, they seem, if anything, it seems like
most of the time the researchers are surprised at how
how well the individual does you know, so it's it
I don't see a lot maybe in the more severe
cases where it's affecting you know, greater sound agnosia in general,
(45:36):
or or other types of of a stimulus coming into
the brain, But for the most part, it doesn't seem
to handicap them significantly. I mean, they're still able in
many cases to enjoy music. The thing, the one area
that is that is specifically affected. Yeah, I'm also wondering too,
and please listeners chime in on this one as well.
(45:56):
With the rise and popularity of podcasts, I wonder if
that is an outlet for a muse as like there, Well,
I don't like music, but these podcasts are great, so
I'll just load up a bunch of these and listen
to these all the time. I've certainly met people like that,
the people who don't want to drive with music on,
and then inevitably that they want to listen to something right,
(46:17):
and they'll they'll go for a podcast, We'll go for
a radio show, or like a book. Yeah, yeah, interesting, Okay, huh. Well,
I like to balance back and forth between the two.
Sometimes I'm in the mood for music, sometimes in the
mood for a podcast or a book. But that's an interesting,
interesting difference in experiences. Well, it seems like there's a
(46:39):
lot of information that we can learn from you, the
listeners out here about this. I mean, we're scratching the
surface of this pretty much brand new discipline of research.
So let us know what you think about it. I
want to hear your your experiences. Maybe you've met people
who don't like music at all, maybe you're one of
those people, and maybe that's why you listen to the show. Um,
(46:59):
so let us know. You can contact us in all
the usual ways. We are on social media all over
the place, Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. And then there's
also our landing page, stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where you're gonna find all the podcasts, all the
videos we've made, and all of the articles, none of
which are musical based. If you have a musea, you
(47:21):
can consume them and be just fine. That's right. And hey,
if you want to get in touch with us directly,
as always, email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff Works dot com. Well more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com.
(47:49):
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