02: A Strangely Familiar Feeling: Musical Seizures

Picture yourself standing at the kitchen counter on a Saturday morning, fixing breakfast. It is a quiet, fall day and there is no one home but you. As you go about pouring cereal into a bowl, a sudden shift in the atmosphere catches your attention; a sensation of eerie familiarity shrouds your mind, not unlike like déjà vu – a feeling that you recognize but cannot explicitly place or put into words. All at once, a violin melody begins to play nearby. Faint at first, the instrumental chords magnify until your ears are ringing with the sound of, what seems to be, a full-blown orchestra sitting at your kitchen table. You wonder, confused, “Where on earth is this music coming from?” before the world goes completely dark, and you wake up in a hospital bed several hours later.

In the vast labyrinth that is the human brain, each region is unique and specialized in function. The temporal lobe is a region that sits on top of your ears; a majority of its function is dedicated to processing auditory information – essentially, it is important for hearing.

Sack’s patients, Jon S. and Hughlings Jackson, both suffered from different forms of temporal lobe seizures. Without warning, the temporal lobe of their brains were rocked with a surge of electrical activity, causing them to either “slump over, convulse” in the case of Mr. S. or in the case of Jackson, remain conscious but in a “superimposed” state, where he experienced heightened sensation (vision, feelings, smells, etc.)[1] Both patients experienced the seizures differently, and Jackson reported that although they were disruptive to his life, he was relatively functional and could still pursue his career as a music teacher. Mr. S. on the other hand would lose consciousness and not recall what had happened or how long he had been affected for.

The most common method of “curing” seizures has typically been cutting the connection between the area where they originate and the rest of the brain. However, in this case, making a lesion in the temporal lobe might not be a viable option. Although the seizures may stop, the patient would almost certainly lose one, if not multiple, sensory perceptions, including the ability to hear and taste. Because of this, the severity of the seizures would dictate whether a trade off between losing the sense of hearing is worth curing seizures.

Temporal lobe seizures are, fortunately, a rare phenomenon and depending on the severity, length, and frequency of each episode they can be manageable. Treatment options (according to hopkinsmedicine.org) include medicinal therapies, drugs such as Tegretol or Carbatrol, dietary restrictions, and even Vagus Nerve Stimulation, a method designed to increase inhibition in the brain’s cortex, decreasing the likelihood of seizures.

[1] Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Print.