Miss Stewart, 70, lived on the outskirts of California. In all recent years, nothing special has happened in her measured life. And, perhaps, Miss Stewart's life on earth would have ended so calmly and ended if one night she had not woken up from a small earthquake, as common as rain in these parts.
Finally, the ground stopped shaking, and Stuart tried to sleep. But it was not so: suddenly she heard a melody - in her head, quite loudly, but not deafeningly, the sad song of her youth sounded.
When Stewart was still a girl, her father played the song on the piano. And now an elderly woman sits in bed and listens, unable to sleep. Because the song did not stop, but was repeated over and over again, and, moreover, for many hours. Finally, the woman managed to disconnect. But only when she woke up, she again heard a familiar melody in her head.
Gradually, over the course of several months, the repertoire was enriched, other melodies sounded. The music often started playing when Stewart went to bed or when she was driving. In any case, the "concert" lasted for several hours. Moreover, the sound was always so bright, as if an orchestra was playing nearby.
Of course, the woman began to get bored with these untimely concerts, and after a while she found out that the only way to get rid of the music in her head was to turn on the radio.
At the same time, the melodies in my head had another ominous quality: even the most beloved pieces of music, once sounded “inside”, could not be perceived from ordinary sources, as they were wildly annoying.
After several months of "musical" torture, Stewart decided to go to a doctor with her problem. Oddly enough, the patient's story did not surprise the doctor. He told the woman that she was suffering from a little-known and rare disorder - musical hallucinations - and that she was one of a small but significant number of people who hear music that simply does not exist.
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Most of these sufferers are elderly people. Songs often come from the deepest "archives" of memory. Some have an Italian opera that parents loved to listen to in time immemorial. Others have hymns rumbling, jazz playing, or popular melodies.
Someone gets used to it and even gets pleasure, but there are very few of them. The main mass tries to stop the music: they close windows and doors, stuff cotton wool in their ears or sleep with a pillow on their head. But, of course, none of these techniques help.
Meanwhile, musical hallucinations are far from a new phenomenon: they have invaded people's heads before. For example, the famous composer Robert Schumann hallucinated with music at the end of his life and recorded this fact - he told his descendants that he wrote under the dictation of Schubert's ghost.
However, for a long time, "musical" hallucinations were not recognized by doctors as an independent disorder and therefore they were mainly associated with a whole range of human conditions, including old age, deafness, brain tumors, drug overdose and even organ transplants.
The first large-scale study of musical hallucinations was conducted in a Japanese mental hospital in 1998. It was discovered that 6 out of 3 thousand 678 patients hear music in their heads. This ratio, however, did not reflect the real state of affairs, since all patients had serious mental disorders.
So, Japanese psychiatrists and their few followers have found out that our brain processes music through a unique network of neurons. First, sounds entering the brain activate an area near the ears, called the primary auditory cortex, which begins to process sounds at their most basic level.
The auditory cortex then transmits its own signals to other areas that can recognize more complex features of the music, such as rhythm and melody.
It turned out that this network of neurons in the auditory cortex can start working in a wrong way, without affecting any other areas of the brain.
The English scientist Timothy Griffiths continued to work in this direction. He studied six elderly patients in whom musical hallucinations appeared along with deafness. With the help of tomography, the scientist discovered several areas in the brain that became more active during musical hallucinations. The result of the doctor was puzzling: he saw almost the same thing as in normal people who listen to music.
True, musical hallucinations do not activate the primary auditory cortex, but only use the parts of the brain responsible for converting simple sounds into complex music.
According to the Griffiths hypothesis, the music-processing regions of the brain continually look for patterns in the signals coming from the ears. Because these areas need melody, they amplify certain sounds that are appropriate for the music and minimize extraneous noise.
When no sounds enter the ears, parts of the brain can try to grab onto anything, random impulses and signals, try to create some structure out of them, digging into memories. So a few notes can suddenly turn into a familiar melody.
For most of us, this may end up producing a song that is hard to get out of our heads, as the constant stream of information entering our ears suppresses this music. The deaf, of course, do not have this flow, so they can hear music all the time.
Let's say that Griffiths figured out musical hallucinations among the deaf. But what about hearing people like Miss Stewart?
Aziz and Warner tried to solve this problem. To do this, they analyzed 30 cases of musical hallucinations. The average age of the studied patients was 78 years, while a third of them were deaf. As a result of studies, it turned out that in women, music plays in the head more often than in men. In two thirds of cases, the elderly hear religious music.
However, scientists believe that in the future people will begin to hallucinate with both popular and classical music, that is, the one that they hear constantly today.
Psychiatrists believe that musical hallucinations occur when people are deprived of a sound-rich environment, lose their hearing, or live in isolation.
In this situation, the brain generates random impulses, which it interprets as sounds, then turns to the memory of music for help, and a song arises.