Music and the Mind - Anthony Storr

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Satie wrote music designed only to provide a comforting background. This has been succeeded by the kind of ‘wallpaper’ music played in elevators, which soothes some people and provokes fury in others. However, this is an exception and not the kind of listening being discussed at this point. Lullabies may send children to sleep; but we listen to Chopin’s Berceuse or the Wiegenlieder of Brahms and Schubert with rapt attention.

      Arousal manifests itself in various physiological changes, many of which can be measured. The electro-encephalogram shows changes in the amplitude and frequency of the brain waves which it records. During arousal, the electrical resistance of the skin is diminished; the pupil of the eye dilates; the respiratory rate may become either faster or slower, or else become irregular. Blood-pressure tends to rise, as does the heart rate. There is an increase in muscular tone, which may be accompanied by physical restlessness. In general, the changes are those which one would expect in an animal preparing for action; whether it be flight, fight, or mating. They are the same changes recorded by the polygraph or ‘lie detector’ which demonstrates arousal in the form of anxiety, but which, contrary to popular belief, cannot prove guilt or innocence.

      Recordings of muscle ‘action potentials’ on another instrument, the electro-myograph, show marked increases in electrical activity in the leg muscles whilst listening to music, even when the subject has been told not to move. In the concert hall, the physical restlessness induced by arousal is often insufficiently controlled. Some people feel impelled to beat time with their feet or drum with their fingers, thereby disturbing other listeners. There are tracings recording the increase in Herbert von Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort. It is also worth noting that recordings of his pulse-rate whilst piloting and landing a jet aircraft showed much smaller fluctuations than when he was conducting.3 Music is said to soothe the savage breast, but it may also powerfully excite it.

      What seems certain is that there is a closer relation between hearing and emotional arousal than there is between seeing and emotional arousal. Why else would the makers of moving pictures insist on using music? We are so used to hearing music throughout a film that a short period of silence has a shock effect; and movie-makers sometimes use silence as a precursor to some particularly horrific incident. But a love scene in a film is almost inconceivable without music. Even in the days of silent films a pianist had to be hired to intensify and bring out the emotional significance of the different episodes. A friend of mine, visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time, found himself disappointed at his lack of response to this awesome sight. After a while, he realized that he had seen the Grand Canyon many times on the cinema screen and never without music. Because his sight of the real thing lacked such musical accompaniment, his arousal level was less intense than it had been in the cinema.

      Seeing a wounded animal or suffering person who is silent may produce little emotional response in the observer. But once they start to scream, the onlooker is usually powerfully moved. At an emotional level, there is something ‘deeper’ about hearing than seeing; and something about hearing other people which fosters human relationships even more than seeing them. Hence, people who become profoundly deaf often seem to be even more cut off from others than those who are blind. Certainly, they are more likely to become suspicious of their nearest and dearest. Deafness, more than blindness, is apt to provoke paranoid delusions of being disparaged, deceived, and cheated.

      Why is hearing so deeply associated with emotion and with our relationship with our fellow human beings? Is there any connection with the fact that, at the beginning of life, we can hear before we can see? Our first experience of hearing takes place in the womb, long before we leap into the dangerous world and begin to look at it. David Burrows, who teaches music at New York University, writes:

      An unborn child may startle in the womb at the sound of a door slamming shut. The rich warm cacophony of the womb has been recorded: the mother’s heartbeat and breathing are among the earliest indications babies have of the existence of a world beyond their own skin.4

      A dark world is frightening. Nightmares and infantile fears coalesce with rational anxieties when we come home at night through unlit streets. But a silent world is even more terrifying. Is no one there, nothing going on at all? We seldom experience total silence, except in the artificial conditions of those special rooms in psychological laboratories in which darkness is combined with sound-proofing to exclude input to our senses as completely as possible. As Burrows points out, we are dependent on background sound of which we are hardly conscious for our sense of life continuing. A silent world is a dead world. If ‘earliest’ and ‘deepest’ are in fact related, as psychoanalysts have tended to assume, the priority of hearing in the emotional hierarchy is not entirely surprising; but I think it unlikely that this is the whole explanation.

      The details of the physiological responses outlined above need not detain us. We have all experienced them, and we are all aware that the condition of arousal can be exciting or distressing according to its intensity. The important point to recognize in this context is that, with a few exceptions, the physical state of arousal accompanying different emotional states is remarkably similar. Sexual arousal and aggressive arousal have in common fourteen physiological changes. The Kinsey team found that there were only four respects in which the physiology of anger differed from the physiology of sex. Although there are rather more physiological differences between the state of fear and the states of anger and sexual arousal, fear still shares nine of the same items of physiological change with the other two, including increase in pulse-rate, increase in blood-pressure, and increase in muscular tension.5

      It is easy to appreciate that we enjoy becoming sexually aroused; less easy to acknowledge that we like being frightened, and still less easy to accept that we may welcome the excitement of being angry. But many people enjoy the fear induced by ghost stories or horror films; and some will admit that ‘justified’ wrath against an enemy is exhilarating. The fact is that human beings are so constituted that they crave arousal just as much as they crave its opposite, sleep. Whilst we may deliberately and reasonably affirm that we want our morning newspaper to contain no accounts of disasters, there is no doubt that tragedy is stimulating, as the proprietors of the tabloids know only too well.

      One of Freud’s cardinal errors was to suppose that what human beings most wanted was a state of tranquillity following the discharge of all tensions. He treated powerful emotions as an intrusion, whether they were instigated by stimuli from without or caused by instinctual impulses from within. For Freud, the main function of the central nervous system was to see that the tensions caused by such emotions were discharged, either directly or indirectly, as soon as possible. He called this dominating feature of mental life the Nirvana principle. In Freud’s scheme, there is no place for ‘stimulus hunger’; that is, for the need which human beings have to seek out emotional and intellectual stimuli when they are placed in a monotonous environment or when they have been in a state of tranquillity for so long that they have become bored.6

      Freud died in 1939. If he had been alive in the 1950s and 1960s, he would have become aware of research into the effects of shielding human beings from as many incoming stimuli as possible. Although Nirvana-like bliss and relief from tension can sometimes be achieved by exposing people to short periods of voluntary isolation in the sound-proof, light-proof rooms already referred to, longer periods of solitary confinement usually lead to desperate efforts to find something stimulating which will relieve monotony. Human beings suffer from stimulus hunger as well as from stimulus overload; and those who have experienced months or years alone in prison cells find that doing mental arithmetic, recalling or writing poetry, or other mental activities, are absolutely necessary if they are not to sink into apathy or despair.7

      It seems obvious that one reason why people seek to listen to or to participate in music is because music causes arousal, which may be intense at times, but which is seldom unbearably so. When, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mme Verdurin protests at her husband’s suggestion that the pianist shall play a particular sonata in F sharp on the grounds that it will make her ill, we do not believe her, and Proust did not intend us to do so.

      ‘No,

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