You’d feel deeply concerned if one morning you woke up and discovered you couldn’t talk. If you had previously spoken five languages but found you could no longer traffic in any of them, that deep concern might turn to panic.
This happened to Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin. He suffered a stroke in the language areas of his brain in 1959, rendering him aphasic. Aphasia, as you recall, is the inability to express or comprehend language, including reading and writing. All five languages appeared to go up in smoke. Wrote one scientist about Shebalin, rather mundanely:
“The stroke left him without speech and deaf to the spoken world.”
This disability affected most of his daily activities with one important exception. And that exception turned out to be everything.
While the stroke did a thorough whack-job on the Russian composer’s speech-related abilities, it completely spared his ability to write music. And to embed intelligible lyrics into what he composed. Speech disability? Hardly, or, at least, not completely. He wrote a symphony, two sonatas, a musical comedy, several choral works and two operas.
How in the world is that possible? How can anyone supposedly impervious to speech write an opera? Can the blame be laid on that musical module we’ve been discussing these last few entries? Might it be independent of speech?
Researcher Isabelle Peretz, a world authority on music and the brain, certainly thinks so. She explains:
“The current evidence is consistent with the existence of neurally separable music and speech modules in singing and speaking … Brain lesions can selectively interfere with speaking while singing remains essentially intact.”
As does composing for opera, apparently.
INTO THE BRAIN
Researchers call conditions like Shebalin’s “aphasia without amusia.” Scientists investigate this condition seek to characterize the speech independence of the brain’s musical module. Their efforts include examining people with the opposite condition: stroke patients who lose the ability to sing but retain the ability to talk. These patients can’t sing tunes they’ve known all their lives, but they can still remember - and verbally recite - the lyrics to those same songs. They speak typically, too, their voices rising and falling in predictable, normal ways.
Separable modules indeed.
Scientists have begun to identify the neural substrates behind the musical module. One fruitful research effort involves an area called Heschl’s gyrus. It’s a folded region, just above your ears, deep within the part of the brain that also includes the primary auditory cortex (which, as also mentioned previously, is where the brain processes most auditory stimuli). People with selective musical deficits often have something wrong with their Heschl’s. Scientists interested in the relationship between speech and music are especially fascinated with that gyrus, for the region processes both speech and music.
This fact is something Shebalin might have told you were he still alive. Especially if you sang it to him.
REFERENCES
Peretz, I. "Music, Language and Modularity Framed in Action." Psych Belgica 49, no. 2/3 (2009): 157-75.
Peretz, I. et al. "Singing in the Brain: Insights from Cognitive Neuropsychology.". Music Perception 2, no. 3 (2004): 373-90.
Brust, J. C. "Music and the Neurologist. A Historical Perspective.". Ann N Y Acad Sci. 930 (2001): 143-52.
My Aunt couldn't speak in her demential induced decline. But she could sing every hymn.
Thanks John
Always enlightening - another great read!