This paragraph is an excerpt from my book Brain Rules for Baby. It’s the story of the late conductor Boris Brott, who eerily – and intimately - knew a piece of music he had never before consciously encountered.
“It just jumped out at me!” Brott exclaimed to his mother. Brott had been at the podium of a symphony orchestra, conducting a piece of music for the first time, when the cellist began to play. He instantly knew heʼd heard this piece before … This was no casual reminder of some similar but forgotten work. Brott could predict exactly what musical phrase was coming next. He could anticipate the flow of the entire work during the course of the rehearsal; he knew how to conduct it even when he lost his place in the score.
This might sound like the stuff of science fiction, reminiscent of our previous discussion about “Rosie,” but its origins may have a plausible explanation - even a revelatory one. Boris’ mother had been a professional cellist, and played the very piece Boris was conducting while she was pregnant. And not just that piece. “All the scores I knew by sight were the ones she had played while she was pregnant with me,” Brott later said in an interview.
Brott’s extraordinary story represents an encapsulation of everything I wanted to say about auditory processing in this substack series (we’re starting a new subject next week). We’ve covered so much ground, I thought it prudent to summarize our journey.
SUMMARY OF AUDITORY PROCESSING
You might recall we started with some basics about sound, then quickly switched to the brain biology capable of processing it. This included discussing the auditory cortex, that “space in the brain near your ears.”
We next moved to the nuts-and-bolts of sound perception, starting with “bottom-up” processing. Thee brain begins parsing various features of the incoming auditory information, delivering them to specialized regions throughout the organ for further processing. The canonical specialists lie on separate hemispheres. We discussed that the left hemisphere processed certain verbal components of incoming speech (mostly), while the right hemisphere processed its emotional content (mostly).
Before perception could occur, however, the brain fired up its so called “top-down” processing features. These features provided commentary – and even editing functions - on the received auditory information. We discovered our top-down processors often compared new material with previously stored auditory memories. Based on what it found, our brains were quite willing to insert “fake” information into the current stream.
Our final discussion focused on music, primarily the work of Isabelle Peretz, Robert Zatorre and their colleagues. They’d been investigating the so-called “music module” in the brain, a collection of far-flung circuits whose primary mission was to process music.
In all these discussions, I have tried emphasis one seminal fact: you don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. This is something that researchers are only barely beginning to understand. I wanted to explain the wonder – and the mystery - of how the brain processes sound. And to demonstrate how far we have to go before we fully appreciate it. That’s something researchers interested in the Boris Brott’s childhood know about in spades.
WHERE WE’RE GOING NEXT
Two changes are coming next week. The first is the topic, as mentioned above. We’re going to leave the world of sensory perception for now and take up a topic that is distillable to a single question: “how does the brain pay attention to something?”
The second change concerns the format. I’m moving to a video-mostly format, embedding visual files to accompany the written substack entries as we sojourn through the world of attentional states. The videos won’t be long – usually around 3 minutes or so - roughly the time it takes most people to read past text-only entries.
I hope you enjoy the changes - or at least find them marginally tolerable!
REFERENCES
Medina, J. Brain Rules for Baby. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2010, p. 31
Chorna, O. et al "Neuroprocessing Mechanisms of Music During Fetal and Neonatal Development: A Role in Neuroplasticity and Neurodevelopment." Neural Plast 20 (2019): 3972918.
I have always had a keen interest in the human body and mind. Your series reminds of a childhood experience. When I as a kid in the 60's and early 70's, my mom would receive a monthly subscription to Readers Digest. There was a series of articles regarding particular organs. The title would be something like "I am Joes kidney" or "I am Janes uterus". When the day of delivery got close, my anticipation would build. Hoping that this particular issue would have a Joe/Jane article.
Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge in interesting, layman's terms.
Very interesting piece!