2. A Strangely Familiar Feeling: Musical Seizures

[bleachededen]

Chapter 2.
A Strangely Familiar Feeling: Musical Seizures

[bleachededen]

This chapter was surprisingly short. Here we are introduced to a few people who have the sensation of hearing "familiar" music just before a seizure. When asked if they could identify the music they say feels so familiar, even the trained musician cannot come up with an actual melody to put a finger on, but all of them say that it feels like something they have heard, maybe in childhood, and can't distinguish whether or not it is coming from inside their heads or from an outside source. The trained musician laments his situation, saying that he "loves music, and have built my career around it, so it is ironic that music is also my tormentor."

I find this particular statement very telling of someone who clearly has insight into his own mind as well as his profession. I find myself in the same sort of situation, where I cherish analyzing myself and the world around me, and yet this causes me anxiety to the point where I most times cannot even interract with even people close to me in the most trivial of ways. I think so much that I lock myself inside my own head and won't even answer people's phone calls because I am afraid to face them after all of the analyzing and daydreaming I've been doing.

This is also relevant to our fiction book discussion, Don Quixote, in which the title character goes insane from reading too much about knights and chivalry. His love of these fictions is inevitably what ends him, and is an interesting subject to think about in correlation with this chapter's ideas.

This chapter also sets us up for the next chapter, in which we are introduced to cases in which music actually causes seizures.

[GaryG48]

It is interesting to note that the patient stories emphasize that the aural manifestations of music do not seem to "cause" seizures but to precede them. Temporal lobe epilepsy is reasonably well understood. It has physical causes. It manifests all kinds of hallucinations including aural ones.

The long footnote in this chapter pretty much explains the phenomena described here. I find it telling that the professional musician cannot identify the "music" he "hears" before his seizures. Contrast that with the little boy who hums an identifiable song before his seizures. Perhaps the little boy's are not temporal lobe?

[Veneer]

The trained musician laments his situation, saying that he "loves music, and have built my career around it, so it is ironic that music is also my tormentor."

I find this particular statement very telling of someone who clearly has insight into his own mind as well as his profession. I find myself in the same sort of situation, where I cherish analyzing myself and the world around me, and yet this causes me anxiety to the point where I most times cannot even interract with even people close to me in the most trivial of ways. I think so much that I lock myself inside my own head and won't even answer people's phone calls because I am afraid to face them after all of the analyzing and daydreaming I've been doing.

Sometimes the examined life is not worth living. I have done this myself, and come to the conclusion that I am, at times, a waste of human flesh. Missed opportunities...hell ignored opportunities. Let life bump you around rather than taking the bull by the horns.

These aural preludes to a seizures remind me of an article that I read about 2 years ago on migraine headaches, which my wife suffers from. Many people exhibit color patterns before the pain. According to this article, a migraine is literally a brain storm...the neurons start firing in area somewhere in the cerebellum or brain stem (can't remember) in a storm like pattern. The storm begins to move, when it passes through the visual cortex the color patterns are experienced. The storm then moves elsewhere (again I can't remember) and the pain begins. There is no profound difference in the storm between the visual cortex and the area where the pair results other than perhaps intensity. So in a round about way, migraine sufferers get to experience a visual representation of pain. Well actually it is a visual representation of the storm. The storm is not pain per se. Pain is the experience of storm passing or settling through what ever area of the brain that results in that pain.

Here is a better explanation:

http://headacheandmigrainenews.com/what ... fic-story/

[Saffron]

Interesting post Veneer. I have read quite a bit about migraines, being a suffer myself. They seem to be somewhat related to seizures. In the same way that some seizures have a warning that one is coming (a taste, music...), migraines also have them. It is interesting to me that what we experience as "real" is coming out of our brains. It is very hard to contradict what our brains are telling us is real even when we can logically say that it doesn't make sense. Let me explained better with an example. A specific type of brain injury interferes with a person's ability to connect the feelings for an object (including a person) and the visual image of that object. A man suffered an injury incurring this type of damage. When he saw his mother he thought she was an imposter because he did not have the feeling for her linked to the image of her anymore. When he heard her on the phone he did not have this problem -- it was mom. I find this chapter intriguing because it is getting at this very problem -- how can we tell if our brain is not telling us the truth! Or how do we know what we know.

[GaryG48]

"how can we tell if our brain is not telling us the truth! Or how do we know what we know."

Epistemology, where philosophy intersects with cognitive science and psychology gets squeezed out. James Crick, of Watson and Crick, DNA research fame, was deep into cognitive science in his last years, trying to answer that very question. So far, lots of questions but few if any answers from Sack's anecdotes.

[Saffron]

"how can we tell if our brain is not telling us the truth! Or how do we know what we know."

Epistemology, where philosophy intersects with cognitive science and psychology gets squeezed out. James Crick, of Watson and Crick, DNA research fame, was deep into cognitive science in his last years, trying to answer that very question. So far, lots of questions but few if any answers from Sack's anecdotes.

A very interesting and thought provoking book is On Being Certain, by neurologist Robert Burton. The book is full of example of why we can't completely trust that our brains are presenting an accurate picture of reality and how we know what we think we know.

Here is a YouTube link to a talk Burton gave at Google.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL12c4d0ro4

[GaryG48]

A very interesting and thought provoking book is On Being Certain, by neurologist Robert Burton. The book is full of example of why we can't completely trust that our brains are presenting an accurate picture of reality and how we know what we think we know.

It was an interesting lecture, thank you Saffron. I also did not know about googletalk so thank you again. Looks like Plato was right, all we perceive are but shadows on the wall of the cave.

I'm going to get Burton's book.

[Veneer]

Saffron
I started to watch the video, but at 55 minutes I must defer to later, but thank you for bringing up this book. I placed it on my wish list at Amazon. This is a subject that I have been interested for quite some time, how do we know what is real. Our senses lie to us so how can we trust our brains? One of the things that I have contemplated is high speed driving. Every now again I run into some reference about someone with a fast car trying it out on public roads. At 60 mph one is traveling 88 feet per second, at 120 mph that is 176 feet per second, or a little better than 1/2 the length of a football field. I am not sure what the transit time is from the retina to the visual cortex, and the time required to process an image but there is a time associated with this and it is one of the reasons that movies or television work. You simply change the frame rate faster than a person can process the image and voila at set of still pictures becomes a fluid motion. You can also get a flavor for this by looking at the digital clock in your microwave (at least the older ones) in the dark. If you sweep your eyes rapidly across the display, you will for moment see a track of numbers interrupted by dark spots. The display flashes faster than what we can see, but rapidly moving your eyes will leave a track of images when the display flashes on and dark intervals when it is off on your retina. The point of this all being that we can't possibly see everything. To simplify this, which is probably an over simplification, if we consider the frame rates of TV or computers at roughly 30 frames per second, we could use this as some basis of vision rate. So when driving at 120, one is moving almost 6 feet in one 30th of second. When you think about the amount of image processing that has to go on, it gets kind of scary. Nascar ( I am not a fan) is truly amazing.

I have read different places that eye witness accounts are highly unreliable. It seems that our brains take an event, try to make sense out of it in a story form, and then remembers the story rather than the actual event.

Again thanks for the tip on this book, I am looking forward to reading it.

[GaryG48]

Veneer,

Much of what you wrote is included in the lecture. For example, we are told the time necessary for an image to travel from the retina to the visual cortex is 90 milliseconds. Then we must add processing and reaction time.

I think you will like the lecture. It is about 44 mins. the rest is Q&A which is more about young Google employees trying to impress their bosses with their erudition than anything else and can be skipped without losing much.