Imagine that you’re a world-class jazz guitarist. You need brain surgery to deal with near-lethal seizures and crushing headaches. In the process, doctors remove a significant chunk of your temporal lobe. The procedure creates severe retrograde amnesia and you forget how to play the guitar – or even that you play the instrument in the first place and love music.
That’s Pat Martino’s story. The jazz legend passed away last week but measures mightily in the annals of human recovery. His musician father grew despondent that Martino would simply walk past his guitars without interest long after the surgery and be wholly unresponsive to his music being played in the house. Then his dad got particularly crafty. He invited Martino’s friend and former guitar student to their home one day – their guest was unrecognizable to Pat – to practice guitar. The friend played a major seventh when Martino would have once wanted a minor ninth in a particular exercise and, well, that was it. Martino is said to have walked in the room, grabbed the guitar, and began playing the exercise correctly. Talk about a triggering event.
Martino wrote in his 2011 biography, Hear and Now, “As I continued to work out things on the instrument, flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me – shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house,” Martino wrote. “There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s a pleasurable thing to do. And that’s how you remember how to play; you remember the pleasure of it.”
He relearned his guitar virtuosity and returned to the top of the jazz-guitar world seven years after the surgery. It’s quite an ode to persistence, to how the love of family and friends can coax you back from the depths, and to the science of brain elasticity and procedural memory. The Nautilus science website wrote in 2015 that, “Professional musicians and athletes often say they are not conscious of their fingers flying across a fretboard or connecting with a 100-mph fastball. That’s because those actions, due to years of practice and repetition, are so deeply embedded that performers are not aware of them. These ‘sensorimotor skills’ are stored in procedural memory, which resides above the spine in the forebrain’s core. In Martino’s case, the brain structures associated with procedural memory were unaffected by the lobectomy. The memories were dormant, waiting to be reawakened” and recircuited.
The human brain most certainly tops the guitar as the most magnificent instrument of all.
Image courtesy of Downbeat Magazine.