Last night 60 Minutes ran two fascinating stories: One piece was about a drug (propanolol) that could potentially take the emotional pain out of bad memories and the other about a young musical prodigy, Jay Greenberg, who has composed five symphonies by the age of thirteen.
Both stories gave numerous insights into how the human brain works and its potential.
The most interesting thing about the propanolol story was the role that adrenaline (epinephrine) plays in memory:
The story begins with some surprising discoveries about memory. It turns out our memories are sort of like Jello – they take time to solidify in our brains. And while they’re setting, it’s possible to make them stronger or weaker. It all depends on the stress hormone adrenaline.
The man who discovered this is James McGaugh, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine.
McGaugh studies memory in rats, and he invited [Leslie] Stahl to watch the making of a rat memory – in this case how a rat who’s never been in this tank of water before learns how to find a clear plastic platform just below the surface.
“He’ll swim around randomly,” McGaugh explains. The rat cannot see the platform, since his eyes are on the top of his head.
The rat will swim around the edge for a long time, until eventually he ventures out and by chance bumps into the platform. The next day, he’ll find the platform a little bit faster.
But another rat, who had learned where the platform was the day prior, and then received a shot of adrenaline immediately afterwards, today swam instantly to the platform.
Adrenaline actually made this rat’s brain remember better, and McGaugh believes the same thing happens in people. “Suppose I said to you, ‘You know, I’ve watched your programs a lot over the years, and although it pains me to have to tell you this, I think you’re one of worst people I’ve ever seen on … now don’t take it, don’t take it personally,’” McGaugh says.
“So, my stress system would go into overdrive, no question,” Stahl says.
“Even with my telling you that it’s not true, there’s nothing to keep you from blushing, from feeling warm all over,” McGaugh points out. “That’s the adrenaline. And I dare say that you’re gonna remember my having said that long after you’ve forgotten the other details of our discussion here. I guarantee it.”
McGaugh says that’s why we remember important and emotional events in our lives more than regular day-to-day experiences. The next step in his research was to see what would happen when adrenaline was blocked; he started experimenting with propranolol.
“Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it, so that, think of this as being a key, and this is a lock, the hole in the lock is blocked because of propranolol sitting there. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” McGaugh explains.
McGaugh showed Stahl a third rat that had learned where the platform was on the previous day and then received an injection of propranolol. The next day, the rat swam around the edge, as if he had forgotten there ever was a platform out there.
The interesting thing about the composer-prodigy story was that the kid hears complete compositions of music in his head, sometimes more than one at a time, then he writes them down. It’s as if he was born with some pre-programmed knowledge about music.
Jay told [Scott] Pelley he doesn’t know where the music comes from — but that it comes fully written, playing like an orchestra in his head.
“As you hear it playing, can you change it as it goes along? Can you say to yourself, ‘Oh, let’s bring the oboes in here,’ or ‘Let’s bring the string section here?’” Pelley asks.
“No, they seem — they seem to come in by themselves if they need to,” Jay replies. “It’s as if the unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light. You know, I mean, so I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written when it isn’t.”
Jay’s parents are as surprised by his talent as anyone. Neither of them is a professional musician. His father, Robert, is a linguist, a scholar in Slavic languages who lost his sight at the age of 36 to retinitis pigmentosa. His mother, Orna, is an Israeli-born painter.
Michael, Jay’s 10-year-old brother, is not a musical prodigy, but Robert and Orna remember when they figured out that Jay was.
“I think around, two, when he started writing and actually drawing instruments, we knew that he was fascinated with it,” his mother explains.
At the ago of 2, she says, Jay started writing and managed to draw and ask for a cello. “I was surprised, because neither of us have anything to do with string instruments. And I didn’t expect him to know what it was,” Orna says.
“What a cello was?” Pelley asks.
“Right,” she replies.
Orna says there was no cello in the house and that her son had never seen a cello before. But he knew he wanted one.
So his mother brought him to a music store where he was shown a miniature cello. “And he just sat there. He put the cello. And he started playing on it. And I was like, ‘How do you know how to do this?’” Orna remembers.
So what role does memory play in that?