A professional cellist who lost nearly all of his memory after a virus destroyed parts of his brain has astonished doctors with his remarkable recall of music.
The 71-year-old, known only as PM, had played with a major German orchestra before contracting an infection in 2005 that devastated his brain’s memory centers.
The illness left him with such profound amnesia he could remember almost nothing of his past. The only people he recognized were his brother and a care worker.
“He can hardly remember a thing. He has no memory of any personal or professional events,” said Carsten Finke, a neurologist at Charite University hospital in Berlin. “He is living in the moment, more or less. He has lost his whole life.”
Doctors made their discovery when they tested PM’s ability to recall musical information and found he could identify the scales, rhythms and intervals of pieces they played him. He went on to score normally on a standard test for musical memory.
However, it was later tests that surprised doctors the most, when PM showed he could learn new pieces of music, even though he couldn’t remember simple information, such as the layout of his apartment and what medicines he should take.
Neighbors said the man still played the cello at home, but he refused to play in front of doctors, perhaps because he felt he was no longer any good, Finke said.
PM was struck down by herpesviral encephalitis, which leaves many patients with brain damage even if they receive urgent treatment. The rare infection occurs when the virus — which is responsible for cold sores — travels along nerves that lead to the brain. The condition affects around one in 500,000 people each year.
In PM’s case, the virus wiped out large parts of the brain’s medial temporal lobes, which are important for remembering events and facts. Details of the case were described at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington on Sunday.
Finke decided to investigate PM’s memory for music three years ago after a standard test revealed the musician had very severe amnesia.
Working with career musicians, the doctors created a series of tests to investigate PM’s memory in more detail. In one, well-known pieces of music composed before his illness, such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, were paired with similar sounding pieces composed after 2005. When asked which he knew better, PM named the older scores 93 percent of the time.
In a later test, the cellist recognized 77 percent of pieces he had been played earlier in the day, suggesting he had some capacity to learn new music.
“Given his severe amnesia, it is really astonishing that he could learn new musical material,” Finke said.
The case could help doctors understand how different kinds of memories are stored in the brain.
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