Did my Brain Injury Make me a Better Songwriter?

Jeff Shattuck is a former ad man, who suffered a brain injury in 2006 and woke up wanting to do nothing but write songs. You can follow his recovery progress and songwriting efforts at www.cerebellumblues.com

You’ve heard this story before: someone gets bonked on the head and wakes up changed in some sort of profound way. For me, the change had to do with songwriting. Here’s how it all went down.

Sometime just after midnight, in early 2006, I fell and suffered a traumatic brain injury. Though I fancied myself a frustrated rock musician at the time, there was nothing rock and roll about my fall: I wasn’t hopped up on pills and booze, I wasn’t leaping from a stack of Marshall’s, I wasn’t trying a new position with a groupie. No, I was taking a pee and simply passed out. When I regained consciousness, I started throwing up and was convinced I had food poisoning. But Catherine, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, asked me a few questions, and because my answers made less sense than usual, she called 911.

During my six-day stay in the hospital, I learned that I had fractured my skull in two places and that a small bone fragment had poked its way into the left side of my cerebellum. Doctors described the injury as a subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying “blood on the brain”, and this was very, very bad news, because blood is toxic to the brain. Yup, the very stuff so essential to keeping us alive kills brain cells dead. They never did figure out why I fainted.

As I got better, I noticed those missing cells in a big way. I had trouble walking, I threw up all the time, I was visited by migraines on a near daily basis, I couldn’t concentrate for more than about 30 minutes, without risking headaches or worse, most foods tasted horrible, I slept probably 15 hours a day. But, when I finally picked up my guitar for the first time after my injury, I found that the instrument simply made more sense to me than it had before my fall. Then came the songs.

Now, my fall did not precipitate my love of songwriting. Long before my head met a tile wall — in fact, way back when I was a teenager — I first tried my hand at writing songs. I wrote some pretty horrible stuff, and though I got better over the years, most of the songs I wrote didn’t impress me or anyone else. More important, all those early songs, and those that followed, felt unfinished. I just could not ever seem to believe I had put something down that was complete.

After my brain injury, I wrote well over 30 songs in less than 12 months. Finished songs. Even — dare I say it? — good songs. What was going on inside my head?

The cerebellum is an old part of the brain, so old it’s called the reptilian brain. It’s located in the back of the head, near the base of the skull and brain stem, and research indicates that it is responsible for a lot of fundamental stuff, but nothing cognitive. Still, though its functions are considered lower, it communicates with the upper brain, and much of what it senses influences cognitive thought, which takes place in the cortex, or top layer of the brain.

Consider the clearly cognitive act of composing music. According the book “This Is Your Brain On Music”, by Daniel J. Levitin, the lower brain digs music in a big way. It distinguishes consonance and dissonance, before the cortex weighs in, and its largest clump, the cerebellum, is “… involved closely with timing…”, which, of course is crucial to music, and closely connected to the parts of the brain responsible for emotion, namely the amygdala, which remembers emotional events, and the frontal lobe, which is involved in planning and impulse control.

So, without going too deep, the area of the brain I mushed is crucial to timing, emotions, distinguishing between consonance and dissonance, planning (no plan, no song, I say!) and control of impulses (think controlled rage for punk rock). Pretty compelling. But wait, there’s more.

Jill Bolte Taylor’s recent book, “My Stroke of Insight”, discusses how her stroke, which took place on the left side of her brain, made her far more conscious of the right side of her brain, the side that is considered “creative”. She describes how losing the left side of her brain took away her ability to form sentences and speak. People would ask her questions and she’d emote, for lack of a better term, her response. I didn’t lose one side of my brain or the other, but after examining me, neurologists at the University of Wisconsin, theorized that I may have screwed up the way my lower brain sends signals to my upper brain.

In other words, in addition to affecting the part of my brain that handles timing, influences emotions, distinguishes between consonance and dissonance, plans stuff and controls impulses, my injury might also have affected the way lower and upper brain gossip.

Unfortunately, and despite cool machines, such as fMRI gizmos, the brain – mine included – remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a skull. And I may never know exactly how my fall changed my gray matter.

But the evidence for some sort of dramatic rewiring is strong: over 30 new songs and counting.

Now, if you’re a songwriter, I know what you’re thinking. Your thinking you’ll up your game by having a good friend hit you in the head with a hammer. Is this a good idea? Probably not. While the upside of my injury has been a flood of songs, the downside has been truly awful: constant dizziness, depression, legs and feet that feel like they are misted with cold water, headaches, job loss, memory problems (not that bad, but, you know, noticeable), and on and on.

What to do instead? I say meditate. While the jury is still out, there is strong evidence that meditation “quiets” the left side of your brain (or rational side, since some folks are opposite the norm), so that you can experience the world through your feeling-driven right side. And while a song, to quote Boston out of context, is certainly “more than a feeling”, feelings are where songs start. And they don’t have to hurt. At least not physically.

Related posts:

1. The despair of infinity. Or how technology can affect your songwriting. (And what to do about it.)
2. 20 Questions With Singer-Songwriter Ari Hest

Enjoyed reading this post?
Get articles sent to you via EMAIL or RSS (what’s RSS?)

Thanks for being part of the conversation at Serve The Song. We have a simple comment policy (with thanks to Tim Ferriss) - critical is fine, but if you’re rude we'll delete your stuff. ’Nuff said.