Brain Damage Saved His Music

Brain Damage Saved His Music

Brian Gallagher

Eight years ago, when neurosurgeon Marcelo Galarza saw images from jazz guitarist Pat Martino’s cerebral MRI, he was astonished. “I couldn’t believe how much of his left temporal lobe had been removed,” he said. Martino had brain surgery in 1980 to remove a tangle of malformed veins and arteries. At the time he was one of the most celebrated guitarists in jazz. Yet few people knew that Martino suffered epileptic seizures, crushing headaches, and depression. Locked in psychiatric wards, he withstood debilitating electroshock therapy.

It wasn’t until 2007 that Martino had an MRI and not until recently that neuroscientists published their analyses of the images. Galarza’s astonishment, like that of medical scientists and music fans, arises from the fact that Martino recovered from surgery with a significant portion of his brain and memory gone, but his guitar skills intact. In a 2014 report in World Neurosurgery, Galarza, of the University Hospital in Murcia, Spain, and colleagues from Europe and the United States, wrote, “To our knowledge, this case study represents the first clinical observation of a patient who exhibited complete recovery from a profound amnesia and regained his previous virtuoso status.”1

Martino has also put on a show for neuroscientists. His case demonstrates neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability, during development and learning, to “optimize the functioning of cerebral networks,” wrote Hugues Duffau, a professor and neurosurgeon at Hôpital Gui de Chauliac at Montpellier University Medical Center in France, who studied Martino’s case. The guitarist’s recovery epitomizes the ability of the brain to improvise—to compensate for malformations or injuries by wiring new connections among brain regions that restore motor, intellectual, and emotional functions. For an encore, say neuroscientists, Martino’s story is about music and how it helped shape his brain in ways that revived his life.

It’s an interesting report. It’s stuff like this that ultimately may reveal new learnings that might change existing paradigms. Yet reading the full report it’s revealed Martino haven’t made a 100 recovery. It’s difficult not to conclude that important aspects of out selfs like memory are brain based somehow. Any thoughts on how such a case favors dualism?

It’s an interesting report. It’s stuff like this that ultimately may reveal new learnings that might change existing paradigms. Yet reading the full report it’s revealed Martino haven’t made a 100 recovery. It’s difficult not to conclude that important aspects of out selfs like memory are brain based somehow. Any thoughts on how such a case favors dualism?

Complete dualism is impossible to consider seriously.

Whatever consciousness is, it either stored, produced or filtered by the brain. Whatever the case, if you damage the brain you also impact on consciousness

Yes I agree - complete dualism is not compatible with the evidence. This idea that the brain ‘filters’ consciousness is also tremendously vague. What exactly is the signal? Which information does it contain?

If I said it was a pattern, which added up... and I gave you a practical example...

A live TV broadcast item of information (pictures & sound), which is watched by millions of people in a single country or state. That broadcast creates a pattern of activation on the viewers brains networks... and this pattern is reinforced (amplified) by these networks, because all the millions of viewers brains networks are activated by the same pattern, at a similar moment in time. And that the later effect of the broadcast on the viewers aggregate behaviour is stronger, the larger the number of people who watch it, and the closer together in time in which it is watched.

I don’t know if that’s true... but I suspect something like it might be the case...

The problem with this analogy is that it doesn’t really account for the ego/self. Unless you mean there’s a seperate signal for each and every being (true dualism). Or perhaps you mean that the single signal contains all the information about each and every being living/ever lived. I don’t think things adds up with the overwhelming evidence showing that brain damage in virtually all non-anecdotal cases correlates with loss of memory/personality. Yes you could argue it’s like noise in old analog radios, but brain damage  changes people. I don’t think a damaged radio suddenly changes the information in the underlying broadcast.

I recently read about people who have recovered from minimal consciousness state after several years. It didn’t give me any confidence that the ‘real’ person still was there in any way.

Thank you for taking your time to write such a length reply to a topic I’m aware already have been debated almist endlessly.

That rat experiment yoo refer to - do you have a link to the original research paper? Even if it’s behind a paywall it’s of interest.

Ok Max_B I read the article and it’s of course interesting. But not as evidental as e.g the case of Patient H.M. who lost the ability to form new long term memories after certain brain structure was removed from his brain. This case also poses a new problem for the transmitter theory as it indicates information needs to be passed both to and from external consciousness.