You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human by Victoria Williamson Page B
Authors: Victoria Williamson
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anterograde amnesia, respectively. In reality this means Clive has little to no idea of his past or conception of the future. He is stuck in a time window of a few seconds – the present moment. You can ask him a question but by the time he gets a few sentences into his answer he will have forgotten what you said. That is the length of his memory span.
Two things seem to have survived this dreadful destruction, nearly 30 years on: Clive’s love for his wife Deborah, and his music. There have been a few documentaries of Clive over the years and if you watch one you will see that he greets Deborah with joy and rapture whenever she walksinto a room, as if he has not seen her for years, even if she has just stepped out to make tea. And Clive still enjoys playing the piano.
The videos I have seen show Clive playing from a musical score, so even though he may not be able to play from memory any more (no one has ever confirmed to me that he can) he retains the memory of how to sight read music. He also plays with emotional inflection, showing that some of the techniques he once learned about the art of musical performance remain with him: all this despite having no episodic memories of his musical training or his illustrious and successful musical career.
Clive may be an extreme case of memory loss but he is not alone. In 2012 Carsten Finke and collagues 24 reported the case of an amnesic cellist. The German patient, known only as ‘PM’, suffered from the same rare illness as Clive and also had severe damage to his memory. His doctors had no idea that he could still remember music until he was spotted playing his cello at home by neighbours. PM had not wanted to play for anyone since his recovery: he felt he was no longer very good. This fact alone suggests that PM had some memory, deep down, for his previous musical abilities.
Spurred on by this discovery, the doctors carried out tests on PM’s musical memory to see which elements may have survived. They played him two pieces of music at a time and asked him which he recognised. One of the two pieces was always a well-known concerto or sonata that he would have heard before his illness, such as the first movement from Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor (1843). The other was a more recent piece, similar in style and instrumentals but composed after his illness, such as the Andante/Reflection piece from Max Richter’s Waltz with Bashir soundtrack (2008). PM successfully identified 93 per cent of the older pieces of music.
The doctors then played PM the new pieces later that same day. Even though he had no episodic memory of having heard them before, he was able to identify 77 per cent. This result suggests that not only has PM retained memories of music from his past but he is also capable of learning new music. This latter ability has been described as ‘astonishing’ by his doctors.
Finally, just to show that tales of music memory survival are not limited to cases of herpes encephalitis patients, Séverine Samson and her colleagues have reported relatively spared memory for music in two different brain disorders, medically intractable epilepsy and Alzheimer’s, despite both populations having severe verbal memory impairments. 25
The burning question is: how and why does musical memory survive in these and other cases of memory loss. Is musical memory special? 26
There are a number of reasons to suspect that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Some of these reasons have to do with the memorable structure of music, which I have already outlined in the section on musical memory as ‘The Star’ ( page 171 ). I also believe that musical memories survive because of the way they are processed in our minds.
Firstly, for many people music is a motor skill (as for Clive and PM), like riding a bike. Not a great deal is known about what happens to memories when a skill moves from requiring great demands on our attention and focus (when we first learn to walk
Two things seem to have survived this dreadful destruction, nearly 30 years on: Clive’s love for his wife Deborah, and his music. There have been a few documentaries of Clive over the years and if you watch one you will see that he greets Deborah with joy and rapture whenever she walksinto a room, as if he has not seen her for years, even if she has just stepped out to make tea. And Clive still enjoys playing the piano.
The videos I have seen show Clive playing from a musical score, so even though he may not be able to play from memory any more (no one has ever confirmed to me that he can) he retains the memory of how to sight read music. He also plays with emotional inflection, showing that some of the techniques he once learned about the art of musical performance remain with him: all this despite having no episodic memories of his musical training or his illustrious and successful musical career.
Clive may be an extreme case of memory loss but he is not alone. In 2012 Carsten Finke and collagues 24 reported the case of an amnesic cellist. The German patient, known only as ‘PM’, suffered from the same rare illness as Clive and also had severe damage to his memory. His doctors had no idea that he could still remember music until he was spotted playing his cello at home by neighbours. PM had not wanted to play for anyone since his recovery: he felt he was no longer very good. This fact alone suggests that PM had some memory, deep down, for his previous musical abilities.
Spurred on by this discovery, the doctors carried out tests on PM’s musical memory to see which elements may have survived. They played him two pieces of music at a time and asked him which he recognised. One of the two pieces was always a well-known concerto or sonata that he would have heard before his illness, such as the first movement from Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor (1843). The other was a more recent piece, similar in style and instrumentals but composed after his illness, such as the Andante/Reflection piece from Max Richter’s Waltz with Bashir soundtrack (2008). PM successfully identified 93 per cent of the older pieces of music.
The doctors then played PM the new pieces later that same day. Even though he had no episodic memory of having heard them before, he was able to identify 77 per cent. This result suggests that not only has PM retained memories of music from his past but he is also capable of learning new music. This latter ability has been described as ‘astonishing’ by his doctors.
Finally, just to show that tales of music memory survival are not limited to cases of herpes encephalitis patients, Séverine Samson and her colleagues have reported relatively spared memory for music in two different brain disorders, medically intractable epilepsy and Alzheimer’s, despite both populations having severe verbal memory impairments. 25
The burning question is: how and why does musical memory survive in these and other cases of memory loss. Is musical memory special? 26
There are a number of reasons to suspect that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Some of these reasons have to do with the memorable structure of music, which I have already outlined in the section on musical memory as ‘The Star’ ( page 171 ). I also believe that musical memories survive because of the way they are processed in our minds.
Firstly, for many people music is a motor skill (as for Clive and PM), like riding a bike. Not a great deal is known about what happens to memories when a skill moves from requiring great demands on our attention and focus (when we first learn to walk
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