Musical Epilepsy...
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hear your favorite song all day and all night on your own personal radio...IN YOUR HEAD! The chapter called "Reminiscences" in Oliver Sacks's book, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, discusses a few cases where people have actually experienced musical epilepsy so to speak. One woman, Mrs. O'C, woke up one night to Irish music playing loudly. She figured someone had left a radio on, but she soon discovered that she was the only one hearing the music. When she went to see Dr. Sacks, he had difficulty speaking with her because the music was too loud. Only during the quieter songs could she hear him. After an EEG, it was evident that Mrs. O'C was having temporal lobe seizures and this was causing the 'reminiscence' or 'experiential hallucination'. The sudden onset of songs in the middle of the night was due to a stroke, and as it resolved so did the songs as she experienced less and less music in her head.
Usually when we are told that someone has had a stroke, we expect that the person could be severly hindered in their abilities to communicate and/or function physically. But this woman had the good fortune of being affected in the "musical" part of the brain, the temporal lobes. While sometimes this music could also be dehabilitating in terms of communication, she did not lose any cognitive functions and her motor skills were fine. I would say that she was pretty lucky.
While Mrs. O'C's bouts of music eventually lessened until they disappeared all together, another woman, Mrs. O'M had the same symptoms only they got worse over time. Her songs of choice were church songs, always the same three songs. She was experiencing seizures also in the temporal lobe, and to calm them down, Dr. Sacks put her on anticonvulsants.
One more interesting story is that of Shostakovich, a composer, who was found to have a metallic splinter in his head which pressed against his temporal lobe when he tilted his head to one side. He would hear melodies which were different each time which he would then incorporate into his compositions. The difference between this case and the two women mentioned above, is that while their songs were always the same which is common among epileptic hallucinations, his melodies were always different. This indicates that it must have been a different location on the temporal lobe that was being stimulated in his case. It makes you wonder that if the metal chip was moved over a millimeter, would he be hearing Oh, Susana over and over and over? And would he still be a composer?