MUSIC AND THE BRAIN:
An Interview with Dr. Gary Loren McCallister
by
The One Man Mormon Blues Band (OMMBB)*
In the fall of 2007 Dr. Gary McCallister (MAC) of the Mesa State College Biology Department presented a series of public lectures concerning the effect of music on the brain from a biological perspective. Because of the interest in his lecture series we recently asked a local musician to interview Dr. McCallister for the readers of this web page.
The One Man Mormon Blues Band (OMMBB)* has been producing music under the Flaming Moth Productions label for the last several years. Because of his personal relationship with Dr. McCallister we thought he could provide a more informal view of the subject of music and the brain.
OMMBB - Thank you for meeting with me today, Dr. McCallister. So, to get to the bottom line as quickly as possible, is it true that listening to music makes you smarter?
MAC - I really wish it would. But I have wasted a good portion of my life listening to music, with little to show for it intellectually.
OMMBB - What is so compelling about music that makes people do that; listen to it I mean, if there is no benefit?
MAC - Well, I didn't say there was no benefit. I said I did not think it had benefitted me intellectually. But it has sure been fun.
OMMBB - Well, should a parent really give their children music lessons just so they can have fun all their life?
MAC - Hmmmm! I guess there surely ought to be more to life than that.
OMMBB - Well, I mean shouldn't we be more concerned with practical matters in public education?
MAC - I'm not sure if we want our children to have fun or not. One can't really tell by what we put them through called public school. It seems clear that most folks think adults shouldn't have too much fun.
OMMBB - OK, tell me what do you lecture about then? What does music have to do with the brain?
MAC - That's a little hard to explain without understanding what the brain is really for. See, humans mostly think the brain is for thinking. But thinking isn't actually what most folks think it is.
OMMBB - Huh?
MAC - Most of us think about thinking as if it were some great intellectual feat such as solving algebraic problems, playing chess, or composing a symphony. But, in fact, the conscious part of the brain is highly compartmentalized into five lobes. However, four of those lobes are devoted entirely to sensing and responding to the environment. So it seems clear the purpose of our brains is to successfully negotiate the physical world. Our sensory system gathers information and we continuously make decisions and take actions based upon that data.
OMMBB - But don't we use our brain for thinking?
MAC - Sure. The frontal lobe has no direct connection to the sensory lobes, and so it uses indirect information from these sensory areas to plan ahead and manipulate abstract ideas. This is where we do what we traditionally call thinking, which is deal with abstractions.
OMMBB - What do you mean by abstraction?
MAC - An abstraction is anything that you cannot hold in your hand. Anything like algebraic x, freedom, love, or even the thought of thinking is an abstraction. In one sense this means that abstractions are not real. But of course, that does not mean they are not important. In fact many abstractions such as freedom and love are tremendously important. In fact, the concept of abstract thinking is exactly why music is important to the brain.
OMMBB - So only the frontal lobe thinks?
MAC - Not exactly. See, computers can "think" like we do in the sense of composing music, playing chess or solving math problems. What they can't do is wake up, turn off the alarm clock while uttering the appropriate words, dress, fix breakfast, drive to work, see their friend driving in a car the other way while traveling at precisely five miles an hour over the speed limit, and get out the cell phone and dial their number while parallel parking. See our brains normal, natural function is to negotiate the physical world. We then use that information in the frontal lobe to "think".
OMMBB - So our experiences in the physical world fuel our thoughts?
MAC - Exactly. I often challenge people in my lectures to try and discuss an abstract concept without using physical adjectives. Our language is filled with "big" ideas, "little" melodies, "loud" colors, "high" goals, "low" morals, and even politically right and left.
OMMBB - Since listening to music is part of our physical sensations, why doesn't it have an effect on our brains? And how can physical sensations make us smarter anyway?
MAC - Whoa! One question at a time, OK? First, I didn't say listening to music didn't affect our brains. I said it didn't make us necessarily smarter. Listening to music may, in fact, have many effects on our brains, depending on our surroundings, the type of music, our mood, and so forth. Music can awaken our attention, relax our tensions, stimulate ideas, or just be a pleasant sensation. But none of those are the same as actually improving abstract thought. However, to understand how physical sensations can make us smarter requires a little more biological understanding of the brain.
OMMBB - So music can have an effect on intelligence. I think I am getting confused.
MAC - Listening music may not have an effect on intelligence, or the ability for abstract thinking, but LEARNING TO PLAY AN INSTRUMENT can have a tremendous effect.
OMMBB - So learning to play an instrument is different than just listening.
MAC - Absolutely!
OMMBB - So because I can play the mandolin I am smarter than people who can't?
MAC - I think we can make an exception in your case.
OMMBB - Well, this interview has taken a nasty turn.
MAC - All I mean is that the way it works is that learning to play doesn't make you smarter than others. It makes you more capable of abstract thinking than you would have been without the music education.
OMMBB - OK, explain how learning to play an instrument can help someone think abstractly.
MAC - Your brain, like the rest of your body is composed of cells. There are numerous kinds of cells, but simplistically the functional cells of the nervous system are called neurons. These are cells that have the capability to have an electrical current run along their cell membrane. This is one stimulates on part of the cell, an electrical current spread out from that point along the cell membrane until it more or less runs into itself somewhere.
OMMBB - That is so cool! We're kind of like an electric eel?
MAC - Well, I guess you could say that, in a small way, sort of. The voltage is pretty small compared to an eel. And actually the eel uses a set of stacked cells to generate greater voltage, a little like a battery with its stacked plates. Now that I think about it, this is not really anything like an eel, except for the exchange of sodium in the membrane. Besides, eels aren't even really eels, they are . . . this has nothing to do with music and the brain.
OMMBB - Oh. Sorry. What about the neurons?
MAC - OK. Yea, see a neuron is a little like digital communications. It is either sending an electrical current or it's not. That is a little like a computer and has caused a lot of people to use a computer as an analogy for the brain. But in fact, the brain is far different than a computer, except for this concept of a neuron either being on or off.
OMMBB - What so different than the brain then?
MAC - Well, the difference is at the next stage. Neurons are not wires, and they are only so long, then they must transfer the electrical current to the next neuron. This region is a tiny gap called a synapse. When the electrical impulse arrives at one end of a neuron called the axon, it causes the release into the space of a chemical called a neurotransmitter. The chemical diffuses across this tiny space and when it touches the other side it cause a new flow of electricity down the next neuron.
OMMBB - Isn't that just like a switch, or gate, in a computer?
MAC - Superficially, yes. But in computers, every gate has only two possible outcomes, another way in which the computer is "digital". The electrical message must go either one place or the other.
OMMBB - I don't see how the brain could be any different.
MAC - It is different because most of the time in the brain the "synapse", or gate, can go in multiple directions. In fact, it just isn't that it can go more than two ways; it does go in multiple directions, simultaneously.
OMMBB - That must get complicated. How many ways does it go?
MAC - When a baby is born the neurons in the cerebrum, which is the part of your brain that you are conscious of, have about 1000 connections each.
OMMBB - The message goes one thousand places at once?
MAC - Yep. It's called parallel processing.
OMMBB - How do you make any sense of that? That must be information overload.
MAC - It is. That is one of the reasons that babies have such poor control over their bodies. As information comes into their brains and explodes over thousands of pathways at once, it takes a long time for the child to process the information and send a message back out to an limb to respond properly. Thus they sometimes reach for something only to miss it on the first try. When they finally get their hands on it and try to put it in their mouth, they miss and shove it in their eye.
OMMBB - So that's how I got this scarred eyebrow.
MAC - Don't worry, it gives you character.
OMMBB - I'm not sure I can afford that. So what happens in the brain as a child learns to control their body?
MAC - Well, if you can imagine a synapse with many neurons coming off of it, sending information in all directions, but the person really wants the information to go in only one direction, so they keep trying, and trying. Eventually the body does what it always does when it is stimulated over and over. It grows new tissue. That's the same way you grow new muscle.
OMMBB - It grows another connection? How does that help?
MAC - No, it grows more neurotransmitter in one part of the cell. Or maybe it actually grows a larger surface on the receiving neuron. Maybe it does both. But the end result is always that the message is far more likely to go in one favored direction than another. You have created a favored pathway that is far more efficient at sending the message to where you want it to go. The process is called potentiation and it is probably the simplest kind of learning we somewhat understand.
OMMBB - So learning is biological growth? That's amazing. Maybe I should have paid more attention in biology class instead of learning guitar chords.
MAC - Well, you might have learned them faster if you'd have paid better attention in biology class.
OMMBB - So how does music make you form favored pathways?
MAC - Well, learning is a little more than just this one step. Messages are still going in all directions. You have just created one favored pathway. But the brain is unique because since all neurons are connected to all neurons through this nerve net, there is more than one way to get from the starting stimulus to the location within the brain that you want to send the message. This is why humans have a hard time with precision. There is more than one way to arrive at any given location following all kinds of circuitous routes.
OMMBB - Doesn't the favored pathway take you where you want to go?
MAC - No. From the receptor on the edge of the body, whatever that might be, to your area of conscious thought probably requires numerous synapses, so you have to reconstruct your favorite pathway and numerous intervals. But once you have developed a series of neurons and synapses, you have built a special structure that greatly increases the efficiency of transmission. We call a series of neurons and synapses a k-line or knowledge line.
OMMBB - So you have to build a (what did you call it?), a k-line for each new concept or response? That must be a huge task to build that many k-lines.
MAC - Yes, it is. To give you some idea of just how big, when you are born you have 20 billion neurons in your cerebrum. This is the place where you have conscious thought. Each of these neurons has approximately 1000 connections. However, by the time you reach puberty you still have 20 billion neurons, but now each has about 10,000 connections. That is some net!
OMMBB - How in the world does your body keep it all straight?
MAC - Ahhh! That's where things get interesting. See, as you learn a concept and develop a k-line, you also learn many associated concepts. These k-lines most likely develop as a branch of the first k-line. This organizes sensory information and motor responses to the world into clusters of k-lines so that each idea is associated together along the same path. However, because the whole brain is a giant net, these ideas associated around one k-line are accessible via many different pathways.
OMMBB - Wow! I think I am getting a headache.
MAC - Well, it turns out that music is the perfect example to make what I am talking about more clear. As a person becomes familiar with their instrument they learn where some central note or root is, such as middle C on the piano. They see this position, they touch this position, and they hear this position. Later, as they learn to read music they even learn to recognize symbols for this sound and position. In short they begin to build k lines in an organized way around central concepts.
OMMBB - So do they have to do this for every note?
MAC - In a way. Except that once they have a k-line for some note, they can then build other k-lines for other notes in association with the first note. So that ideas like next in a series, third in a series, black notes, white notes, 1-3-5, and so on all build off the same set of k-lines.
OMMBB - But how does this make them any smarter about anything but music.
MAC - Remember, the brain is a net. There are literally thousands of pathways to the same information. So if you develop a rich experience with some kind of variable that differs over a spectrum, such as a music scale, this can help you later think about and utilize information concerning temperature, volume, or number lines.
OMMBB - I think I get it. Music is a way of providing a rich experience with the physical world so that a person develops a set of highly organized, related, favored pathways on one subject, which can then be exploited to understand other subjects that might be more abstract.
MAC - Exactly! If one understands a scale of sound, levels on intensity and loudness, changes in frequency and timing, as well as direction lines of a keyboard or fret board, then many concepts of the physical world are already embedded before they are actually studied. These advantages don’t even take into account the personal characteristics of control of eye muscles, fine motor control, coordination of hand eye and ear, habits of perseverance and many other traits which the study of music embeds.
OMMBB - Wow! I think I have a headache. Will I ever be able to play the guitar again? Or will I be so self conscious of my brain activity that I will become paralyzed and not be able to play well?
MAC – Well, considering how well you play now, I don’t think it will make much difference.
OMMBB – Oh, that’s good! No, wait! What did you say? . . . Huh, . . . . Thanks for the interview. I think.
*OMMBB is Gary McCallister