Reading fascinating stories of patients with brain deficits is always the best pastime for me. Today I was reading Oliver Sacks' great classic The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and I have to agree that this book is more than a documentation of neurological disorders, but really is a inquiry into the very nature of what makes us human in brain terms.
What strikes me the most is the repeated discussion on the power of music and art to harmonize brain functions. In one case, one man with perfect eye function has completely lost his visual processing and live in a world of pure music. He recognize people not by their face, but only by their voice and 'body music' (he is not blind, he can see well). In another case, a man has long lost his ability to retain short-term memory and always lives as if this moment is the year of 1945, when he is 19 years old. His intelligence is fine but cannot solve complicated problems because he quickly forgot the previous steps and the question. He has lived in a Home for several years but cannot remember and identify any one he sees everyday. However, when he comes to the church, participate in the religious activity and singing, he exhibited great power of attention and concentration for quiet a while. He came to enjoy gardening, and managed to remember quite well the path and structure of the garden when he cannot remember the layout of his home where he lived for years. This is the power of music and art. I think language is more complicated and another example, where the brain processing exhibit some effect of modularity and is able to function relatively well despite the total loss of other general functions. It also shows that, as brain plasticity has shown, a cognitive task like playing music and learning a new language has the effect of generally activate multiple brain regions and improve the general cognitive performance of the brain. I believe this is a great hope for any brain patients. Thinking of it from the perspective of evolution, I have a new insight. Patel has hypothesized that even though there is no evidence that music is an advantage for selective adaptation, music is a powerful invention that once invented, the human race would never live without it. He made an analogy with fire, and cited that music has also changed our brain structure forever. I think the power of music as demonstrated in Sacks' patients is yet another evidence that music and art in general has a special place in the cognitive functioning of human brains. Invoking a cognitive task like music is much beneficial to the brain's cognitive functioning as well as pleasure stimulation, and perhaps that is one reason we cannot live without it once we have cultivated experience with it. It involves the part of human experience that is fundamental and harmonizing. It is perhaps part of both a cause and result of the higher cognitive functioning that defines us as human. If we consider the two-way interaction of brain evolution and human culture, perhaps what defines us as human might have emerged from both nature and culture.
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