脑损伤让爱德华·弗雷塔格成为音乐天才

Edward Freytag doesn't remember what happened on that sunny afternoon in July five years ago.

爱德华·弗雷塔格不记得五年前七月那个阳光明媚的下午发生了什么。

But something — a deer, perhaps? — caused him to lose control of his motorcycle on a gentle mountain curve near Murfreesboro, Tenn.

但某样东西——也许是一只鹿？——让他在田纳西州默弗里斯伯勒附近一个平缓的山路弯道上失去了对摩托车的控制。

When one of his riding buddies found him 30 feet away from his bike, on the shoulder of the road, his mouth was packed with grass and dirt.

当他的一位骑友在路边、离摩托车30英尺远的地方发现他时，他的嘴里塞满了草和泥土。

He had fractured 11 bones. His helmet had a finger-size dent on the front-left side, and his brain had been badly bruised.

他骨折了11处。他的头盔左前侧有一个手指大小的凹痕，大脑受到了严重挫伤。

When he woke up in the hospital, he was disoriented, experiencing short-term memory loss and having trouble finding words.

当他在医院醒来时，他神志不清，出现短期记忆丧失，并且找词困难。

But doctors told his wife, Joanna, that the prognosis was good.

但医生告诉他的妻子乔安娜，预后良好。

Edward, a 66-year-old middle school music teacher, would probably make a full recovery in three to six months.

爱德华是一名66岁的初中音乐教师，大概会在三到六个月内完全康复。

As his brain healed over the next six months, however, something remarkable happened, something that would land Edward in the annals of neuroscience case history.

然而，随着他的大脑在接下来的六个月里逐渐愈合，一件非凡的事情发生了——这件事将把爱德华载入神经科学病例史的册页。

His injury transformed him, unleashing a torrent of creative activity. Almost overnight, he became a musical genius.

他的损伤改变了他，释放出一股创作活动的洪流。几乎在一夜之间，他成了音乐天才。

Joanna Freytag still remembers being in her garden when she got the call. It was Marvin, Edward's riding buddy. "I'm so sorry, Joanna," he told her. "I'm so sorry," he said, again and again, until she cut him off: "What's going on? Is he dead?"

乔安娜·弗雷塔格仍然记得当时她正在花园里，接到了那通电话。打电话的是马文，爱德华的骑友。"我很抱歉，乔安娜，"他告诉她。"我很抱歉，"他一遍又一遍地说，直到她打断他："发生了什么？他死了吗？"

When Joanna arrived at the hospital, she heard Edward long before she reached his room. "I could hear him cursing up a storm from a mile away," she recalls. This wasn't like him: Her husband rarely raised his voice and almost never cursed.

当乔安娜赶到医院时，她还没走到他的病房就听到了爱德华的声音。"我老远就能听到他在大肆咒骂，"她回忆道。这不像他：她的丈夫很少提高嗓门，几乎从不骂人。

His behavior grew stranger in the coming days. He insisted that the television was mounted too high on the wall and asked Joanna to lower it. He also refused to get dressed. "It took us about two days to finally make him put some clothes on," she says.

在接下来的几天里，他的行为变得越来越奇怪。他坚持说电视挂在墙上的位置太高，让乔安娜把它放低。他还拒绝穿衣服。"我们花了大约两天时间才终于让他穿上一些衣服，"她说。

To Joanna, Edward seemed like a different person, but the sudden emergence of his inner toddler was exactly what might be expected from an injury affecting the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and self-control.

在乔安娜看来，爱德华像是另一个人，但他内心那个幼儿的突然出现，恰恰是额叶受伤后可能出现的情况——额叶是大脑中负责抑制和自我控制的部位。

Perhaps the most famous case of this kind of injury is that of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who accidentally launched a tamping iron into his head. The three-foot-long metal spike obliterated much of his left frontal lobe and drastically altered his personality, rendering Gage, according to his doctor, "fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom)."

这类损伤最著名的案例也许是菲尼亚斯·盖奇，一位19世纪的铁路工人，他意外地将一根捣固铁棒射入了自己的头部。那根三英尺长的金属尖棒摧毁了他左额叶的大部分，并极大地改变了他的性格，据他的医生说，盖奇变得"反复无常、不敬、有时沉溺于最粗俗的脏话（这并非他以前的习惯）"。

Gage recovered and eventually moved to Chile, where he worked as a stagecoach driver. He seems to have largely reclaimed his personality and executive function before he died from an epileptic seizure, 12 years after his accident. There is no record, however, of his developing any talent like the one that Edward soon discovered.

盖奇康复后最终搬到了智利，在那里当了一名驿站马车夫。在他事故12年后死于癫痫发作之前，他似乎基本上恢复了自己的性格和执行功能。然而，没有记录显示他发展出了爱德华不久后发现的那种才能。

About two weeks after Edward's crash, Joanna was driving him home after a visit to her mother when Edward reached over and turned on the radio.

爱德华车祸后大约两周，乔安娜从她母亲家探访归来后开车送他回家，这时爱德华伸手打开了收音机。

As music from a jazz quintet played, he started calling out the chords — complex chords, like C minor 9, F 13 sharp-11, G minor 13.

当一支爵士五重奏的音乐响起时，他开始报出和弦——复杂的和弦，比如C小调9、F13升11、G小调13。

"At that moment, I could see it on the paper in front of me," he says. "For some reason, my brain could analyze it ridiculously, stupidly fast."

"那一刻，我能在面前的纸上看到它，"他说。"不知为什么，我的大脑能以荒谬、愚蠢的速度分析它。"

He was seeing sheet music in his mind's eye. In four decades as a professional musician, he had never experienced this before. Nor had he ever been able to notate the music he heard at the moment he was hearing it.

他在脑海中看到了乐谱。在作为职业音乐家的四十年里，他从未有过这种体验。他也从未能在听到音乐的当下就把听到的音乐记谱下来。

Edward had developed what is known as absolute, or perfect, pitch.

爱德华发展出了所谓的绝对音高，或称完美音高。

Strike any key on a piano, and a person with perfect pitch can name the note instantly. Before his injury, Edward couldn't do that. He had a good sense of relative pitch, however, which is the ability to hear the distance between two notes. If you press the C and G keys on a piano, someone with good relative pitch can tell you that the interval between them is a perfect fifth, but they can't tell you the name of either note.

在钢琴上敲任意一个键，有完美音高的人都能立刻说出那个音的名字。受伤前，爱德华做不到这一点。不过，他有很好的相对音高，也就是听出两个音之间距离的能力。如果你按下钢琴上的C键和G键，相对音高好的人能告诉你它们之间的音程是纯五度，但说不出这两个音各自的名字。

"Many trained musicians can name intervals," says Edward's doctor, Rima Abou-Khalil, a speech-language pathologist who would go on to be an author of a paper about him for the journal Neurocase. "But only 1 in 10,000 can pull the correct letter name of a note out of the air."

"许多受过训练的音乐家都能说出音程，"爱德华的医生里玛·阿布-哈利勒说。她是一位言语-语言病理学家，后来成为一篇关于他的论文的作者之一，论文发表在《Neurocase》期刊上。"但只有万分之一的人能凭空说出一个音的正确字母名称。"

Perfect pitch is probably genetic and nearly impossible to learn as an adult. The lucky few who have it — a group that has included Mozart, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Puth — tend to be musical prodigies.

完美音高很可能是遗传的，成年后几乎不可能学会。拥有它的少数幸运者——这个群体包括莫扎特、埃拉·菲茨杰拉德和查理·普斯——往往是音乐神童。

Edward, however, was the first person known to gain perfect pitch from a brain injury. Neuroscientists have considered such a thing to be theoretically possible, but it had never been documented before.

然而，爱德华是已知第一个因脑损伤而获得完美音高的人。神经科学家曾认为这种事在理论上可能，但此前从未被记录过。

Why is perfect pitch so rare? It may be related to how effectively the relevant neural networks are connected. Pitch perception largely takes place in the brain's right hemisphere, while language — and note labeling — primarily resides in the left.

为什么完美音高如此罕见？这可能与相关神经网络连接的有效程度有关。音高感知主要发生在大脑右半球，而语言——以及音名标注——主要位于左半球。

This is perhaps why many people with perfect pitch first experience it as synesthesia, a kind of crosstalk between two senses. Their brains assign particular hues to musical notes, and the assignments are arbitrary.

这也许就是为什么许多有完美音高的人最初是以联觉的形式体验它——一种两种感官之间的"串扰"。他们的大脑给音乐音符赋予特定的色调，而这些赋予是任意的。

"Get two people with perfect pitch together, and they will start arguing about whether a C is red or white," says Diana Deutsch, a neuroscientist who studies — and herself has — absolute pitch, adding in jest, "Obviously, it's red."

"让两个有完美音高的人待在一起，他们会开始争论C是红色还是白色，"戴安娜·多伊奇说。她是一位研究绝对音高的神经科学家，自己也有绝对音高。她还开玩笑地补充道："显然是红色。"

Later, with musical training, many people with perfect pitch start "seeing" notes in their mind's eye, written out as sheet music, she says.

她说，后来，随着音乐训练，许多有完美音高的人开始在心眼中"看到"音符，以乐谱的形式写出来。

Even so, most people have a kind of covert absolute pitch, says Daniel J. Levitin, a neuroscientist and the author of "This Is Your Brain on Music." In a classic study by Levitin, 40 percent of his participants produced the exact right starting pitch for a popular song on their first try.

即便如此，大多数人都有一种隐性的绝对音高，丹尼尔·J·莱维廷说。他是一位神经科学家，也是《这是你的大脑在音乐中》一书的作者。在莱维廷的一项经典研究中，40%的参与者在第一次尝试时就为一首流行歌曲给出了完全正确的起始音高。

"People don't know that the Eagles' 'Hotel California' begins with an F-sharp," he says, "but they have associated the first three words of the song, 'On a dark,' with that note."

"人们不知道老鹰乐队的《加州旅馆》以升F开始，"他说，"但他们把这首歌的前三个词'On a dark'与那个音联系了起来。"

Maybe this shouldn't be surprising, because the frequency of every note we hear is registered directly by the inner ear and brain. Compared with the other senses, hearing is surprisingly mechanical.

也许这不应令人惊讶，因为我们听到的每个音的频率都直接由内耳和大脑登记。与其他感官相比，听觉出奇地机械。

Sound waves set off a chain of vibrations that travel through your ear to specialized hair cells, which convert that mechanical energy directly into an electrical signal. A 440 hertz tone, for example, causes auditory nerve fibers to fire 440 times per second.

声波引发一连串振动，通过耳朵传到专门的毛细胞，毛细胞将这种机械能直接转化为电信号。例如，一个440赫兹的音调会使听神经纤维每秒放电440次。

That means we all have covert perfect pitch. But our brains actively suppress it and instead pass along information about the distance between notes. "Relative pitch is more useful to humans," Levitin says, "so that's what we attend to."

这意味着我们都有隐性的完美音高。但我们的大脑主动抑制它，转而传递关于音与音之间距离的信息。"相对音高对人类更有用，"莱维廷说，"所以那是我们注意的东西。"

This isn't the case for many other animals.

许多其他动物并非如此。

If you transpose a field sparrow's song, moving it down a few notes, the bird will no longer recognize it as its own. Humans, however, have no trouble identifying a familiar song, no matter what key it's played in.

如果你把一只田雀的歌声移调，把它降低几个音，这只鸟将不再把它识别为自己的歌声。然而，人类无论一首熟悉的歌以什么调演奏，都能毫不费力地识别出来。

The human obsession with the contour of a melody rather than the individual notes may be because of the fact that men's and women's voices can differ by nearly an octave, an unusually wide gap in the animal kingdom.

人类执着于旋律的轮廓而非单个音符，可能是因为男声和女声的音高可以相差近一个八度，这在动物界是异常大的差距。

To keep up, you have to hear the pattern, not the pitches.

为了跟上，你必须听到模式，而不是音高。

It's possible that Edward had injured the part of his brain that actively suppressed his recognition of absolute pitch. Then, once free of this limitation, his extensive musical training enabled the visions of sheet music to unfurl in his mind's eye.

有可能爱德华损伤了大脑中主动抑制他对绝对音高识别的那一部分。然后，一旦摆脱了这一限制，他广泛的音乐训练使乐谱的幻象在心眼中展开。

Edward may be the first person to acquire perfect pitch from a brain injury, but it's not uncommon for people with left-frontal trauma to suddenly show new artistic abilities, says Bruce Miller, a neurology professor at the University of California San Francisco.

爱德华可能是第一个因脑损伤而获得完美音高的人，但加州大学旧金山分校神经学教授布鲁斯·米勒说，左额叶创伤后突然表现出新的艺术能力并不罕见。

When it comes to language, the brain's left hemisphere is dominant for most of us. If a left-frontal lobe injury temporarily tamps down your ability to talk, your more visually oriented right hemisphere may take this opportunity to shine. "We have a lot of potential that is often just under the surface, untapped," he says.

就语言而言，我们大多数人的大脑左半球占主导地位。如果左额叶损伤暂时压制了你说话的能力，你更偏重视觉的右半球可能会抓住这个机会大放异彩。"我们有很多潜力往往只是藏在表面之下，未被开发，"他说。

For Edward, this potential emerged in what seemed like a magical musical expression.

对爱德华来说，这种潜力以一种看似神奇的音乐表达形式出现了。

About a month after his accident, he saw an unfamiliar file on his computer's desktop one morning called "Brain Bleed."

事故后大约一个月，一天早上，他在电脑桌面上看到一个不熟悉的文件，名叫"脑出血"。

He assumed that it was something from his hospital stay that he had saved and then forgot about.

他以为那是住院期间保存的什么东西，然后忘记了。

When he double-clicked the mysterious file, more than 50 pages of scored music appeared. The file listed Edward himself as the composer, but the strange, lurching tune was utterly unfamiliar to him. Even stranger, his wife, only half awake, was humming along. "Did you write this?" he asked her.

当他双击这个神秘文件时，出现了50多页谱好的音乐。文件把爱德华本人列为作曲者，但那奇怪、踉跄的曲调对他来说完全陌生。更奇怪的是，他的妻子半睡半醒地跟着哼唱。"这是你写的吗？"他问她。

"No, you wrote it, dummy," she replied.

"不，是你写的，笨蛋，"她回答。

She explained how every night, Edward rose around 2 a.m., went to his computer without a word and worked on his composition. He had no memory of this, but he liked what he heard now. "It was way more inventive than I usually am," he says. "There are chord structures that I don't even understand, that I had to chart out to figure out."

她解释说，每天晚上，爱德华大约凌晨2点起床，一言不发地走到电脑前，创作他的作品。他对此毫无记忆，但他喜欢现在听到的东西。"这比我平常的作品有创意得多，"他说。"有些和弦结构我甚至都不理解，不得不把它们列出来才能弄清楚。"

The strange composing continued. A second piece, "Previous Knowledge," appeared to him section by section, each morning, over the course of a few months. When it was finished, Edward told Joanna, "I can't wait to see what's next."

奇怪的创作继续着。第二首作品《先前的知识》在几个月的时间里，每天早晨一段一段地出现在他面前。当它完成时，爱德华告诉乔安娜："我迫不及待想看看接下来是什么。"

But nothing came.

但什么也没有来。

As Edward's brain healed, he became more like his old self: finding the right word more quickly, remembering where he left his tools, biting his tongue when necessary. But as his impulsiveness receded, so too did his perfect pitch and his newfound creativity.

随着爱德华的大脑愈合，他变得越来越像原来的自己：更快地找到合适的词，记得把工具放在哪里，必要时管住自己的嘴。但随着他的冲动消退，他的完美音高和新获得的创造力也消退了。

He continued to write music, even retiring as a teacher in 2023 to compose and perform full time. And while he is proud of the nearly a dozen pieces he has written since, none of this music comes close to the wild inventiveness of what he created while his left-frontal lobe was offline.

他继续写音乐，甚至在2023年从教师岗位退休，全职作曲和演出。虽然他为自己此后写的近十几首作品感到自豪，但这些音乐中没有一首能接近他左额叶"离线"时创作的那种狂野的创造力。

"Sometimes, I say to Joanna, 'Can you just sneak behind me and hit me on the head?'"

"有时，我对乔安娜说，'你能不能悄悄走到我身后，敲一下我的头？'"

About a year ago, just shy of Edward's 70th birthday, he got to hear "Brain Bleed," the first work he composed after his accident, played by live musicians for the first time. At the front of a cavernous practice room at Middle Tennessee State University, he watched Igneous Percussion, a classical ensemble, wrestle with the music of his medical catastrophe.

大约一年前，就在爱德华70岁生日前不久，他第一次听到《脑出血》——他事故后创作的第一部作品——由现场音乐家演奏。在中田纳西州立大学一个空旷的排练室前方，他看着古典乐团Igneous Percussion与他的医学灾难之作搏斗。

The piece started like a tightly wound clock: full tilt, midphrase, without hesitation or prelude.

这首曲子开始得像一个上紧发条的钟：全速、从乐句中间开始，毫不犹豫，也没有前奏。

A glockenspiel melody repeated but never resolved, like a question being asked, over and over.

钟琴旋律反复出现却从不解决，像一个被一遍又一遍提出的问题。

Two marimbas added Bach-like countermelodies that unspooled with pleasant predictability — then, out of nowhere, a sour note.

两台马林巴加入了巴赫式的对位旋律，以令人愉快的可预测性展开——然后，不知从何处冒出一个刺耳的音。

This seed of discord spread and multiplied, until the piece tottered on the precipice of chaos.

这颗不和谐的种子扩散、增殖，直到整首曲子摇摇欲坠地悬在混乱的边缘。

Listening intently, Edward tipped onto the balls of his feet, as if he were trying to meet the sound before it reached him. When the final chord rang out — a sharp, glittering cluster, like glass poured into the ear — he was practically incandescent with joy.

爱德华专注地听着，脚尖踮起，仿佛想赶在声音到达之前迎接它。当最后一个和弦响起——一个尖锐、闪耀的音簇，像玻璃倒进耳朵——他几乎因喜悦而发光。

"This is it," he shouted. "This is my brain bleed."

"就是这个，"他喊道。"这就是我的脑出血。"