Most people seem to have heard of epidemiologists these days. That was what I trained to be, but currently I work for a multinational, analysing and sequencing DNA. I love my work, but I’m never going to get a Nobel prize. I am just one of many, a single drone in an army of scientists. All that I get are instructions to look into this, look into that. That’s how science is—you never get to know the whole picture.
In the spring of 2019, nobody was expecting Covid-19. Life was carrying on the way it always had. I was coming down with a cold that I couldn’t ignore for much longer. I rang my boss.
‘Hey, we can’t have you sneezing in the clean-room,’ he said. ‘Take enough time to recover, and then we’ll think whether it’s safe to take you back.’ He always made the same joke.
I decided to go to the local chemists to get a flu remedy, walking towards what passes for the high street round here, with its betting shops, charity shops and burger bars. That was the time that I first witnessed the strange performance.
A small cluster of people had gathered in front of a busker who was getting ready to start playing. I wandered over and stood at the back. You couldn’t call it a crowd or even an audience. It was just a few people drawn by casual curiosity—the way people will gather round to watch a paramedic treat an accident victim.
The musician was making elaborate preparations. He had hung a large sheet, fixed to some kind of scaffold structure that stood against the wall of the boarded-up building behind him. In the centre stood his saxophone, looking like a crucifix on an altar. It was placed on a stand which, in turn, sat on a low table, and beneath it, on the ground, lay a large, ceremonial embroidered red cloth. I was so absorbed in the spectacle that I forgot about my cold.
It is rather surprising how often psychologists inadvertently come up with poetic terms to describe their discoveries. One such term in neuroscience is, ‘sensory gating’. When a human hears a sound their brain responds rapidly, peaking at around 50 milliseconds (P50). The minute electrical currents generated by that response can be measured and plotted onto a graph. The graph looks like this:
P50 waveform
When the same sound keeps repeating, with a short gap of about half a second between, the height of the P50 peak progressively reduces, resulting in a flattening of the response curve. It is a strangely counter-intuitive concept: the higher the level of sensory gating, the flatter the response curve.
‘Sensory gating’ is a kind of habituation effect. Some writers link this phenomenon to the theory of ‘fight or flight’. The brain, they claim, makes an involuntary response to any sound, evaluating it as a potential threat. When we hear the same sound several times, the curve begins to flatten, and the brain no longer perceives the sound as threatening.
Lower sensory gating
Although the vast majority of people exhibit similar levels of sensory gating, a small minority display reduced levels. Instead of becoming habituated, they respond to repeated instances of the sound with a similar intensity. Schizophrenics are one social group that have particularly low sensory gating. Their elevated anxiety is thought to constantly trigger the ‘fight or flight’ response. There is, however, another group of people who have also been shown to have lower levels of sensory gating: musicians.
I came across all this when, as a psychology technician. I was trying to learn how to implement electroencephalography (EEG) experiments. An ‘auditory response test’ was the simplest EEG experiment that I could try to do.
Improvisation
It was when I tested myself that I received a surprise. It seemed that I had a surprisingly low levels of sensory gating. I began to wonder if this was linked, not to any unacknowledged schizophrenia, but to my practice regime as a musician. Instead of practicing the scales, arpeggios or jazz patterns I should probably do, I often just wear headphones and improvise along to whatever I am hearing. You could call it intensive ‘ear training’, done on a daily basis.
I started to wonder: does improvisation, in particular, develop a specific attentiveness to sound, even to the extent that it can supress sensory gating? Many orchestral musicians play written music and never improvise. Improvisers, by contrast, rely solely on their ability to make an instant response to sound. Classical musicians could counter that they are equally responsive to the details of sound. They might highlight how they modulate their volume, tone, articulation and expression to the requirements of the music. Would sensory gating be lower amongst improvisers than amongst orchestral musicians?
Dancers
I haven’t found any studies that have examined this. I suspect that it might be true, but only a detailed, large-scale experiment could conclude that it was. A study of dancers, musicians and ‘lay people’ comes close. Dancers display the kind of reduced sensory gating that one might expect from improvisers.
Functional Growth
Hercule Poirot boasts about the number of ‘little grey cells’ associated with his powers of deductive reasoning. It is interesting that musicians can make a similar claim for their craft. Professional musicians have enhanced ‘functional’ growth in those areas of the brain associated with listening and dexterity. Did this ‘growth’ develop as a result of practice regimes, or did it precede and condition their musical abilities? I can’t help wondering if we would discover a slightly different distribution of ‘little grey cells’ amongst dedicated improvisers?
What hapens next?
For a time, I contemplated the idea that I might do this research myself: after all, I know so many improvisers. However, time passed and I eventually stopped working as a psychology technician. So, if someone stumbles across this post who would like to discover the answer to these questions, but also has access to the appropriate research equipment, please do let me know. I suspect that volunteers would not be hard to find.
I’ve just written a short story called ‘The Virus’. I won’t give away the plot, but it was influenced by seeing so many surfers at Carcavelos beach. The beach is very close to the small apartment where I live, and I often walk along it. My friend, Bill Young, had lent me a book, called ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’, by Yuval Noah Harrari. Some elements of the story were in response to Harrari’s writing.
I read that unknown writers, like myself, should try and get something in print before trying to get a novel published. The idea for this story popped into mind, unbidden, and within a day I had written it, although I kept polishing it for longer. I wanted to try and limit myself to 2,000 words, and it exactly tipped the scales at that wordcount.
There is a question, though, which I ask myself. Does playing improvised music develop your ability to intuit form and duration? I feel that it does, but I am interested in the opinion of other musicians. Of course, I have sat through many concerts of improvised music, where countless opportunities to reach a satisfying conclusion were passed over, only to end limply after an excruciatingly long coda on the road to nowhere. Nevertheless, I have been both a participant and an audience member at events which, magically, concluded with jewel-like perfection. Sometimes, concerts have ended abruptly, mid-sentence, guided by a strange collective logic that is impossible to fathom, but which makes absolute sense at the time.
What causes a group of improvisers to stop in complete synchronicity like this? One element, I think, is a sense of what the group expresses in the moments leading up to such an abrupt truncation. It also requires a shared sensibility, not just to duration or form, but to collectively intuiting that an odd fragmented resolution, at that precise moment, provides the more complete musical statement.
I can’t help asking myself, does this sensibility transfer to writing? When I was writing each episode or chapter of ‘Mirror Trick’ I had a similar sense of appropriate duration. This active feeling, however, was much harder to retain throughout the course of a whole book, written over many months. In contrast, the shorter form of ‘The Virus’ felt more like a melody, sustained over several pages, and ending with a twist. It was not like the ‘mid-sentence’ endings that you sometimes hear in free improvisation, but something oblique, with a retrospective logic, closer to the kind of resolution that you find in conventional music.
Of course, you can easily point out that I am comparing ‘apples’ and ‘pears’: that the one is a collective experience and writing, whether it be music or literature, is usually a solitary one. My question is, though, can the sensibility developed and nurtured by group improvisation be transferred and applied in a similar way, when working on one’s own, writing stories?
As a teenager, I was in love with the romance of literature. I adored to write descriptive prose, full of complex similes. Then, around the age of eighteen, I was influenced by the improvisatory style of the Beat writers – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Burroughs. My writing changed. The similes were replaced by rhythmic disjunctions, sudden shifts of register. When I read my texts from this period, I am amazed at their energy and bravura. I couldn’t write like that now, even if I wanted to.
Does anyone write letters anymore? I don’t. Back then, letters were the main vehicle for my writing. Pages and pages of thoughts and ideas. Suddenly people were calling me a ‘wordsmith’. I heard this word used about me over and over again, throughout my life. I would write art project proposals, promotional blurbs for musicians, texts for protest campaigns, and people would complement me on my writing. Yet I had abandoned poetry and I felt that I had nothing to contribute as an author of fiction.
My reading habits had changed too. Instead of reading works by authors who pushed at the boundaries of form, I read a lot of crime books. For a time, it became an addiction, following particular authors until I had read everything that they had written. Aware of the volume of light reading that I was consuming, I felt the need to balance my reading habits. I regulated the amount of crime books that I was reading, interspersing them with works by modern authors and the classics.
What was it that finally brought me to write ‘Mirror Trick’? In part, it was brought about by a huge change in my life. I stopped working – I had been working in a psychology department, providing specialist technical support to students and researchers. At exactly the same time, I moved from London to Lisbon, in Portugal. I started to reassess my previous conviction that I had nothing to contribute, no voice that was really my own. If that was true, why did I play improvised music? If I had no legitimate voice as a writer, why did I dare to venture onto the stage as a musician and perform at every available opportunity? You can’t do that and believe at the same time that you have nothing to say.
So, the barest outline of a plot for Mirror Trick began to suggest itself to me. I could combine my love of crime fiction with the smatterings of knowledge that I had picked up from working with researchers in psychology. As I started to write, I began to realise that the mere fact of being alive has provided me with an inexhaustible canvas of the characters that I have met along the way. It’s not just your own voice, but their voices too, that you are expressing. Then, why not create new, composite characters, blending together bits of one person with bits of another? So obvious – but so oblique and inaccessible – that is, until you try to write.
So, where is my earlier fondness for the Beat writers? Where is the experimentation with literary form? It appears that this occupies a much lower position on my scale of priorities. The crime novel, with its relatively stilted conventions, provides me with sufficient scope to express all manner of ideas. The genre is sufficiently elastic to be able to include tentative experiments with form, subtly introducing stylistic innovation. The only thing that it generally can’t do, is to transcend the expectations of its readers. Above all, this story allowed me to explore my feelings about the country where I no longer live. That country is at the heart of ‘Mirror Trick’ – the characters inhabit its locations, its figures of speech, its weather – it permeates everything, even the experiences of the Polish professor who is the central character of the book.
It is too early to say that I have ‘found my voice’. Time will tell whether that is true. All that I can claim for now, is that I have told a story, and that in doing so I found a way to incorporate a very small portion of the things that constitute who I am.
