You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This slim book can be read as a moving elegy to a life of achievement and analytic search for the solace of meaning—especially while approaching, in the words of Robert Browning, “the last of life, for which the first was made.”
A foreword by Oliver Sacks neatly summarizes the physical basis for the music experienced involuntarily by Leo Rangell in the years following his second cardiac bypass operation in 1995. Benign auditory hallucinations, commonly associated with impaired vision or hearing, stem from abnormal activity in the brain related to the loss of sensory input. These “release phenomena” reflect a hyperactive state of brain networks emitting random bubbles—in this case, music.
Before the operation, Rangell had been hard of hearing. The added stimulus of diminished blood supply to his brain during the operation pushed his auditory system past some threshold, stimulating it to generate its own musical sounds.
When he began writing this book in 2005, Rangell was ninety-two years old. In 1980 he had had successful open-heart bypass surgery for five obstructed coronary vessels. The result was excellent; he was playing tennis again in a little over two weeks. For years he lived asymptomatically on collateral medication, but by 1995 the same vessels were again almost completely obstructed. He had the second operation and after a few days in which he experienced periods of confusion was ready to leave the hospital within a week. A wire was left in his chest, a reminder that a pacemaker might be necessary in the future.
As early as the first few days in the ICU, he became aware of hearing singing outside his hospital room, even late into the night. The songs and music were still present when he returned safely to his home. When his wife and his son and daughter corrected his perception, it dawned on him: “My God, it's me. They are coming from me. They are in me somewhere. I am singing” (p. 17).
The song, tune, or rhythm would be the first signal of a prevailing mood