by Peter Berryman
Pzazpp
At the funky little two-room Black Sheep Cafe in Amherst MA a few weeks ago, we were helping our presenter in the performance room set up the sound system and goof with the lighting before our show. The lighting consisted mostly of those hardware store clamp-lights with salad-bowl reflectors, hanging on rafters and pipes above the tables. One bulb was burned out, and I climbed up to borrow a replacement from an unused fixture that was half dangling from a side wall.
I started to unscrew the bulb and pzazpp!, sparks flew, and the entire room was zapped into semi darkness, lit only by the evening light coming through the front picture window. I'm my own worst roadie. A bunch of us bumped and stumbled through the basement jungle for awhile and though we did find a fusebox, it was unlabeled and spooky and impossible to figure out, so we dug up some extension cords with the idea of running in juice from the working half of the cafe.
On With the Show
One way or another, after a good amount of scrambling, the evening worked out delightfully. To top it all off, at the end of the night we had the great pleasure to meet and have a fascinating conversation with Massachusetts songwriter Lorre Wyatt, author of songs sung by Pete Seeger, John McCutcheon, Peter Paul and Mary, and others, who kindly helped us wind cords and haul equipment as he told us his story.
It turns out that three years ago, he had a stroke. As a result, his speech, though perfectly understandable, comes in short, hesitant sentences. I asked him if this had had any effect on his songwriting, and he said yes. Before the stroke, he pictured the songwriting process as his bobbing in a sea of words, and hauling them in with a net. Since the stroke, he feels that he's still floating in a sea of words, but now he's fishing with a line instead of a net, and often his hook has no bait on it.
It's pretty well known these days that the preponderance of language ability is found in the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere is home to such things as emotions, metaphorical thinking, insight, intuition, and also to music (including, surprisingly, both melody and lyrics!). In addition, a recent article in the Wisconsin State Journal quoted a study in the journal Brain which showed that people with a damaged right frontal lobe could not appreciate humor, particularly (and surprisingly) verbal humor. So humor also seems to be mostly a right-brain function.
Clean Your Room, Tra La
Hearing Lorre speak, though haltingly, with wild humor and invention, it was apparent that though his left hemisphere had been affected by this stroke, his right-brain was in fabulous shape. In this light, and remembering that sometimes people with speech impediments lose them while singing, I asked him if he found that he could sing his thoughts more easily than speak them. He said absolutely.
As a matter of fact, he explained that he has made a rule with his adolescent son that when they feel an argument coming on, they both have to sing their side of it. Not only does this make it easier for Lorre to state his position, but also by the time they're into the teeth of the argument, the whole operetta seems so funny that they can't continue seriously. Lorre suggested that if all world leaders were forced to sing their points, there would be global peace.
Broken Broca
As a result of the usual after-gig confusion and flurry, Lorre and I didn't have time to go into a lot of detail about his situation, but I have read that often people who have had strokes and who exhibit this kind of language challenge show a loss of activity in a part of the left hemisphere called Broca's Area. Individuals with Broca's Aphasia often speak in meaningful but short sentences, omitting small words such as "as," "and," and "the."
What Lorre said about his singing to communicate with his son is fascinating in light of a study which I found referred to in various sites on the internet as having been published way back in the December 1966 issue of Neurology. In this study, Dr. Pascal Belin and his associates at the Service Hospitalier Frederic Joliot in France came up with surprising results using "Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT)" to treat people with Broca's Aphasia.
Amazing!
MIT involves speaking in a particular musical way, using two notes (high and low) and two durations (long and short). Scanning the brain while using this musical speech, and using non-musical speech as a comparison, they found that the musical speech reactivated Broca's Area, while normal speech left it inactive! Amazing! This reactivation of Broca's Area apparently not only made communication easier for the subject while using "MIT-loaded" words, but eventually helped hasten the redevelopment of their speech in general.
So the right hemisphere rides to the rescue, in this case using music (actually song) to jump start the stalled left hemisphere. Either hemisphere can to a certain degree perform the work of the other in a pinch. It's like a marriage, where either partner can operate on their own, but things go better when the team is in action, each half working at what they do best.
All Together Now
In retrospect, I had the nagging feeling that there was an overall theme to the evening I couldn't quite put my finger on. Finally it dawned on me that somewhere in my right-brain an analogy had been drawn between my knocking out the power in half of the cafe and stringing in extension cords from the other half to light the room, and the idea of a stroke knocking out one half of the brain and the other half being used to help rekindle it. I only hope that my left-brain has been up to its role of translating these questionable insights into intelligible words for this episode of Whither Zither.
My sincere thanks to Lorre Wyatt for his kindness, help, and contagious good cheer. My hat's off to him for his courage and openness in telling me all about his condition. Meeting and talking with Lorre was inspirational. -----PB