music... the mind...
Here's a VERY lengthy musing... it's not even done yet... I was just thinking a lot today.
I've been thinking a lot about schizophrenia lately. I think it fascinates more than almost any other psychological illness. A lot of the conditions we learned about are exceedingly cool, and it's amazing how clearly certain parts of the brain do certain tasks. For example, a lesion in Broca's area causes a "Broca's Aphasia:" the patient knows what he or she wishes to say but is unable to express it. This in fact can even be limited to only speech--some people can still write okay. Then take a Wernicke's Aphasia, in a nearby area; the person sounds "fluent," as in if you heard the person speaking but didn't know English, it would sound like flowing speech. However, the patient will make nonsensical statements and even invent words.
Damage to the right parietal lobe can lead to left-side neglect. The patient essentially neglects the left side of his or her entire world. He might put on a jacket and only put his right arm through the sleeve. Ask him to look in a mirror and he says he's dressed. If you prick his left index finger with a pin, the arm will withdraw but he will deny that he has a left arm.
Ask the patient to copy a picture of a house, and you'll see strange things; the left side of the house will be missing. But not only that, but sometimes the left side of features on the right side will be missing: the right side of the house will have windows, but some of the windows may be missing their left pane. Asking a patient to bissect a line, no matter how long or short, will give you a line with a dash significantly skewed towards the right side.
All of this was for the right parietal lobe. What about a lesion in the left parietal lobe? This particular patient might show a small amount of right-side neglect, but the deficit will be quite small. As it turns out, the right parietal lobe is the principal center for spatial awareness on BOTH sides of the patient's world; therefore, losing the left parietal lobe, in this respect, has a relatively small effect on spatial awareness to the right side.
Another interesting part of the brain: the amygdala. It is "the root of all negative emotions." Without it, people may not respond appropriately to fearful situations. They cannot experience. One person was asked to draw faces of different emotions and when asked to draw fear, the patient was unable to do so; she said she didn't know how to draw a scared face, and upon further prompting, finally drew a figure (not a face) cowering in a corner with hair on end. This woman was neither able to experience fear nor recognize fear.
My point in all of this that, while you can have striking and fascinating symptoms develop from very localized lesions in parts of the brain. Schizophrenia has features that suggest a correlation with certain parts of the brain, but there is no one, single part of the anatomy that expresses it. And what is schizophrenia? It is when the person experiences their internal state as reality, failing to properly take in external sensory stimuli or use judgment from experience to recognize whether their experience is "correct." One key point is that there's no self-awareness of this condition, as opposed to, say, in OCD where one of the defining features is a compulsion which is recognized by the patient as excessive and inappropriate. So on top of everything else, in schizophrenia there is no feedback based on experience and judgment to recognize schizoid experiences as wrong.
Anyways, what really captures me about schizophrenia is that it is the internal state that defines the person's experience. The person still takes in external stimuli, but these don't necessarily comprise the full range of the patient's experience--the person experiences their internal phenomena as real experiences as well.
Part of my struggle with this topic has been simply semantics and how one puts things into words. But in considering schizophrenia, one particular thought has really dominated my mind, in thinking more about the condition. What is schizophrenia like? Of course we see the ravages it causes on people's lives. What is it like for the individual? And what is it like to have the internal state govern one's sense of reality? For many people, delusions are scary and harmful. Can they be otherwise? And I guess what I am pondering is... what about something like music? Are there cases documented of the predominant internal state being musical? What would that be like? I assume musical memories would be replayed. Perhaps one's own creative ideas also would play out more fully. Could it be what Mozart described? I saw a letter once in which Mozart described how he heard music. He composed based on an entire piece of music that was present in his head, in its entirety. He didn't just hear melodies, harmonies, or instrumental timbres, but rather everything at once! He heard the intact piece of music being played, and he could then write it out on paper.
Maybe this also ventures into the idea of the power of music, the essence of music. Music can fill me, drive me, and arouse in me the most intense and passionate emotions. What would it be like for music to do this not only from outside stimuli, or from my memories, but in some sort of even deeper, reality-defining way?
I've been thinking a lot about schizophrenia lately. I think it fascinates more than almost any other psychological illness. A lot of the conditions we learned about are exceedingly cool, and it's amazing how clearly certain parts of the brain do certain tasks. For example, a lesion in Broca's area causes a "Broca's Aphasia:" the patient knows what he or she wishes to say but is unable to express it. This in fact can even be limited to only speech--some people can still write okay. Then take a Wernicke's Aphasia, in a nearby area; the person sounds "fluent," as in if you heard the person speaking but didn't know English, it would sound like flowing speech. However, the patient will make nonsensical statements and even invent words.
Damage to the right parietal lobe can lead to left-side neglect. The patient essentially neglects the left side of his or her entire world. He might put on a jacket and only put his right arm through the sleeve. Ask him to look in a mirror and he says he's dressed. If you prick his left index finger with a pin, the arm will withdraw but he will deny that he has a left arm.
Ask the patient to copy a picture of a house, and you'll see strange things; the left side of the house will be missing. But not only that, but sometimes the left side of features on the right side will be missing: the right side of the house will have windows, but some of the windows may be missing their left pane. Asking a patient to bissect a line, no matter how long or short, will give you a line with a dash significantly skewed towards the right side.
All of this was for the right parietal lobe. What about a lesion in the left parietal lobe? This particular patient might show a small amount of right-side neglect, but the deficit will be quite small. As it turns out, the right parietal lobe is the principal center for spatial awareness on BOTH sides of the patient's world; therefore, losing the left parietal lobe, in this respect, has a relatively small effect on spatial awareness to the right side.
Another interesting part of the brain: the amygdala. It is "the root of all negative emotions." Without it, people may not respond appropriately to fearful situations. They cannot experience. One person was asked to draw faces of different emotions and when asked to draw fear, the patient was unable to do so; she said she didn't know how to draw a scared face, and upon further prompting, finally drew a figure (not a face) cowering in a corner with hair on end. This woman was neither able to experience fear nor recognize fear.
My point in all of this that, while you can have striking and fascinating symptoms develop from very localized lesions in parts of the brain. Schizophrenia has features that suggest a correlation with certain parts of the brain, but there is no one, single part of the anatomy that expresses it. And what is schizophrenia? It is when the person experiences their internal state as reality, failing to properly take in external sensory stimuli or use judgment from experience to recognize whether their experience is "correct." One key point is that there's no self-awareness of this condition, as opposed to, say, in OCD where one of the defining features is a compulsion which is recognized by the patient as excessive and inappropriate. So on top of everything else, in schizophrenia there is no feedback based on experience and judgment to recognize schizoid experiences as wrong.
Anyways, what really captures me about schizophrenia is that it is the internal state that defines the person's experience. The person still takes in external stimuli, but these don't necessarily comprise the full range of the patient's experience--the person experiences their internal phenomena as real experiences as well.
Part of my struggle with this topic has been simply semantics and how one puts things into words. But in considering schizophrenia, one particular thought has really dominated my mind, in thinking more about the condition. What is schizophrenia like? Of course we see the ravages it causes on people's lives. What is it like for the individual? And what is it like to have the internal state govern one's sense of reality? For many people, delusions are scary and harmful. Can they be otherwise? And I guess what I am pondering is... what about something like music? Are there cases documented of the predominant internal state being musical? What would that be like? I assume musical memories would be replayed. Perhaps one's own creative ideas also would play out more fully. Could it be what Mozart described? I saw a letter once in which Mozart described how he heard music. He composed based on an entire piece of music that was present in his head, in its entirety. He didn't just hear melodies, harmonies, or instrumental timbres, but rather everything at once! He heard the intact piece of music being played, and he could then write it out on paper.
Maybe this also ventures into the idea of the power of music, the essence of music. Music can fill me, drive me, and arouse in me the most intense and passionate emotions. What would it be like for music to do this not only from outside stimuli, or from my memories, but in some sort of even deeper, reality-defining way?