| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
13 Jul 2005 10:10:40 PM |
| Object: |
Musical brain dysfunctions |
July 12, 2005
Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod
By CARL ZIMMER
Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering
from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.
It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything
from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could
hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager
in
Cardiff, Wales.
"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about
and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like
that ever since."
Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my
lifetime,"
said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another
one,
and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite
honest."
Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St.
Cadoc's
Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his
experience: musical hallucinations.
Dr. Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who
are
investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations
experienced
by Mr. King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that
normally
allow us to perceive music.
They also suspect that many cases of musical hallucinations go undiagnosed.
"You just need to look for it," Dr. Aziz said. And based on his studies of
the hallucinations,
he suspects that in the next few decades, they will be far more common.
Musical hallucinations were invading people's minds long before they were
recognized as a medical condition. "Plenty of musical composers have had
musical hallucinations," Dr. Aziz said.
Toward the end of his life, for instance, Robert Schumann wrote down the
music he hallucinated; legend has it that he said he was taking dictation
from Schubert's ghost.
While doctors have known about musical hallucinations for over a century,
they have rarely studied it systematically. That has changed in recent
years.
In the July issue of the journal Psychopathology, Dr. Aziz and his
colleague
Dr. Nick Warner will publish an analysis of 30 cases of musical
hallucination
they have seen over 15 years in South Wales. It is the largest case-series
ever published for musical hallucinations.
"We were trying to collect as much information about their day-to-day
lives as we could," Dr. Aziz said. "We were asking a lot of the questions
that weren't answered in previous research. What do they hear, for example?
Is it nearby or is it at a long distance?"
Dr. Aziz and Dr. Warner found that in two-thirds of the cases, musical
hallucinations were the only mental disturbance experienced by the
patients. A third were deaf or hard of hearing. Women tended to suffer
musical hallucinations more than men, and the average patient was
78 years old.
Mr. King's experience was typical for people experiencing musical
hallucinations.
Patients reported hearing a wide variety of songs, among them "Don't Cry
for
Me Argentina" and "Three Blind Mice."
In two-thirds of the cases, the music was religious; six people reporting
hearing the hymn "Abide With Me."
Dr. Aziz believes that people tend to hear songs they have heard repeatedly
or that are emotionally significant to them. "There is a meaning behind
these things," he said.
His study also shows that these hallucinations are different from
the auditory hallucinations of people with schizophrenia.
Such people often hear inner voices. Patients like Mr. King
hear only music.
The results support recent work by neuroscientists indicating that
our brains use special networks of neurons to perceive music.
When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the
ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing
sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes
on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more
complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody.
Neuroscientists have been able to identify some of these regions
with brain scans, and to compare the way people respond to
musical and nonmusical sounds.
Only a handful of brain scans have been made of people with
musical hallucinations. Dr. Tim Griffiths, a neurologist at the
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England, performed
one of these studies on six elderly patients who developed
musical hallucinations after becoming partly deaf.
Dr. Griffiths used a scanning technique known as PET,
which involves injecting radioactive markers into the
bloodstream. Each time he scanned his subjects' brains,
he asked them whether they had experienced musical hallucinations.
If they had, he asked them to rate the intensity on a scale from one to
seven.
Dr. Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became
more active as the hallucinations became more intense. "What strikes
me is that you see a very similar pattern in normal people who are
listening to music," he said.
The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the
primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When
Dr. Griffith's subjects hallucinated, they used only the parts of the
brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals
in the brain that they can interpret, Dr. Griffiths suggested. When no
sound
is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random
impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound.
They then try to match these impulses to memories of music,
turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing
more than a song that is hard to get out of the head. But the constant
stream of information coming in from the ears suppresses the false music.
Dr. Griffith proposes that deafness cuts off this information stream.
And in a few deaf people the music-seeking circuits go into overdrive.
They hear music all the time, and not just the vague murmurs of a stuck
tune.
It becomes as real as any normal perception.
"What we're seeing is an amplification of a normal mechanism that's in
everyone," Dr. Griffiths said.
It is also possible for people who are not deaf to experience musical
hallucinations.
Epileptic seizures, certain medications and Lyme disease are a few of the
factors
that may set them off.
Dr. Aziz also noted that two-thirds of his subjects were living alone, and
thus were
not getting much stimulation. One patient experienced fewer musical
hallucinations
when Dr. Aziz had her put in a nursing home, he said, "because then she was
talking
to people, she was active."
There is no standard procedure for treating musical hallucinations. Some
doctors
try antipsychotic drugs, and some use cognitive behavioral therapy to help
patients
understand what's going on in their brains. "Sometimes simple things can be
the cure,"
Dr. Aziz said. "Turning on the radio may be more important than giving
medication."
Despite these treatments, many people with musical hallucinations find
little relief.
"I'm just living with it," Mr. King said. "I wish there was something I
could do.
"I do silly things like talking to myself, hoping that when I stop talking,
the tune
will stop. But it doesn't work that way."
More studies may help researchers find new treatments. Prof. Diana Deutsch,
a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, is planning a
new
scanning study of musical hallucination on people who are not deaf, using
functional M.R.I. Unlike the PET scanning used by Dr. Griffiths, functional
M.R.I. is powerful enough to catch second-by-second changes in brain
activity.
"It might be awhile before we have results, but it's certainly something
I'm very
excited about," Dr. Deutsch said. "We'll see where it takes us."
Dr. Aziz also believes that it is necessary to get a better sense of how
many
people hear musical hallucinations. Like Mr. King, many people have had
their experiences dismissed by doctors.
Dr. Aziz said that ever since he began presenting his results at medical
conferences last year, a growing number of patients have been referred to
him.
"In 15 years I got 30 patients," he said, "and in less than a year I've had
5.
It just tells you people are more aware of it."
Dr. Aziz suspects that musical hallucinations will become more common
in the future. People today are awash in music from radios, televisions,
elevators and supermarkets. It is possible that the pervasiveness of
music may lead to more hallucinations. The types of hallucinations may
also change as people experience different kinds of songs.
"We have speculated that people will hear more pop and classical music
than they do now," said Dr. Aziz. "I hope I live long enough to find out
myself
in 20 years' time."
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://www.rightard.org/
End Republican race hatred: http://www.thedarkwind.org/
.
|
|
| User: "Jez" |
|
| Title: Re: Musical brain dysfunctions |
14 Jul 2005 02:39:50 PM |
|
|
(Fredric L. Rice) wrote in
news:11dbmgl8rk2g6b@corp.supernews.com:
July 12, 2005
Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod
By CARL ZIMMER
Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering
from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.
It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard
everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses
if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a
retired sales manager in
Cardiff, Wales.
"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking
about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been
like that ever since."
Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my
lifetime,"
said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into
another one,
and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be
quite honest."
Hmmm, strange.
I get 'Musical hallucinations', quite often, but I've never had the
'tunes I've heard during my lifetime', thing, just my own stupid tunes,
they appear out of nowhere, sometimes I write them down and record them,
but mostly I don't bother. Never found it annoying though.
Oh well, back to my bloody guitar practise.
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'- Howard Zinn
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "David Rice, Esq." |
|
| Title: Re: Musical brain dysfunctions |
14 Jul 2005 11:15:44 AM |
|
|
On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 03:10:40 GMT, (Fredric L.
Rice) wrote:
July 12, 2005
Neuron Network Goes Awry, and Brain Becomes an IPod
By CARL ZIMMER
Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering
from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.
The book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" includes a similar
case.
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
