15: Reminiscence

In this part of the book, Dr. Sacks discusses the case of Mrs. O’C., an 88 year old patient who complained about hearing music constantly playing in her head, even when her outside environment was completely silent. Mrs. O’C. reported that this music that she spontaneously heard would bring back vivid memories and emotions from a part of her childhood in Ireland of which she had no conscious memory. Considering how Mrs. O’C. had perfect physical health and appeared to be mentally stable, Dr. Sacks presumed that her symptoms must be neurologically inflicted. After administering an EEG, he found a small thrombosis, which is the process of blood clotting, in the patient’s right temporal lobe, causing her to experience epileptic seizures in this area of the brain.

Dr. Sacks refers to the temporal lobes as the “musical lobes”, for they are responsible for a number of functions, some of which are memory and auditory perception. Defects or disruptions in these lobes often lead to patients experiencing musical hallucinations, which cause an emergence of vivid memories, which was exactly the case with Mrs. O’C. The treatment of these epileptic seizures is dependent on their level of severity, and so the patients who experience less severe seizures receive treatment in the form of anti-epileptic or anticonvulsant medication, while those with more severe symptoms may require surgical intervention. Mrs. O’C. benefited from these seizures because she was able to unconsciously recover repressed memories from her childhood before her mother’s death. Although the music and other symptoms initially bothered her, she later saw it as a form of healing, and therefore did not seek medicinal treatment for the seizures, that were rather treatable. Instead, the seizures began to occur less and less frequently in her case.

The patient’s condition and symptoms in this case were quite common, for Dr. Sacks mentions other people who had some form of damage in their temporal lobes and therefore also experienced epileptic seizures and hallucinations. One of the people he mentions is another patient of his who he calls Mrs. O’M. Like Mrs. O’C. she also experienced epileptic seizures resulting in musical hallucinations. Mrs. O’M., on the other hand, did not try to explore the meaning or emotional and personal factors that could have been attributed to the familiar music she was hearing and simply wanted the treatment to make the music and sounds stop. After four years of experiencing these symptoms and thinking she had gone mad, she finally met with Dr. Sacks and expressed to him her wish to stop these epileptic seizures. Dr. Sacks then gave her anticonvulsants to terminate her symptoms and prevent the seizures from occurring.

The fact that Mrs. O’C. refused medicinal treatment, yet her seizures began to diminish on their own, shows just how unique her condition was compared to others with the same illness. She saw it as a blessing that she was recovering old repressed memories from her childhood that she did not know she had, and therefore began to self-heal.