![]() ![]() The team demurred Oliver’s brain - any brain - is not simply a recording device. I wondered if future neuroscientists might someday be able to identify the song simply by looking at the scans - read the rhythm, tone and pitch in Oliver’s auditory cortex as if it were a form of sheet music. Oliver’s brain had “played” the song back nearly verbatim, as if hitting replay on an iPod located in his frontal lobe. He imagined the song, we scanned again.Ĭomparing the scans, we saw strikingly similar activation in his brain, the major difference being activity in Oliver’s frontal lobe during the imagined experience. Oliver chose “Diversions” by Joseph Horovitz, a piece that he knew well and could play on the piano from memory. First, we would compare brain scans of Oliver listening to music with brain scans of Oliver imagining listening to the same piece. With the help of Joy Hirsch and Hal Hinkle from Columbia University, our team devised two experiments. Could his own brain show us why he was so unique? I asked Oliver if we could put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to watch his brain react to music (one of his dearest loves). Oliver, the author of the memoir “Awakenings” (later made into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro), was so adept at translating the neurological experiences of others into words. Processing My Friend’s Death in the Sound Studio ![]()
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