Sherlock MS and the Case of the Vanished Conductor

You know him. This supposed gentleman in tails, standing somewhere deep inside the brain with a silver baton, commanding everything: Now feel. Now remember. Now concentrate. Now do try to stumble with a little more dignity. A touching notion. Sadly, about as wrong as the claim that one can understand a sonata merely by monitoring the second violin.

And that was where the crime lay. For the brain has too often been treated like a machine. At times it was a library 📚, at others a telephone exchange ☎️, then a computer 💻, then an office with an especially pedantic departmental manager. All charming comparisons. All useful, up to the point at which they begin to lie. For the brain is not merely a cabinet full of compartments, not an apparatus with an on-off switch, and certainly not some provincial office marked Head of Memory, Room 4 on the left. It is far more unruly than that. It is closer to music.

I do not say this merely because I own a violin and treat it better than most people treat their houseplants. I say it because music can do something that the old metaphors do distressingly badly: it explains how a whole emerges from many parts, without any single part explaining everything. A melody is not hidden inside a single note. A waltz does not reside in the third crotchet. And consciousness is no more seated on a single little floor of the cerebrum waving out of the window. 🧐

So the case could only be solved by asking one crucial question: What if thinking is not administration, but performance?

Suddenly everything fell into place. Attention was no longer the command of some internal major, but rather the question of which instruments are currently being brought to the fore. Memory was not a dusty filing system, but a theme that returns, is varied, revised, at times tender, at times distressingly off-key, depending on how neatly the inner ensemble has performed. Emotions are not isolated drawers with labels such as “joy” or “sorrow”, but rather crescendos, dissonances, resolutions, tensions. One does not experience them as little labels. One experiences them as movement. 🎼

And what of consciousness? Ah, that was the most elegant part of the entire affair. Many people dearly want a central switch. Click: conscious. Click: not conscious. I find that sort of simplicity suspiciously vulgar. Far more plausible is the notion that consciousness resembles a successful musical passage: many voices running at once, some coming forward, others receding, and suddenly the whole producing a state that is experienced as unity, although it has arisen from finely tuned polyphony. No single note is the music. But without the interplay, there is nothing at all. ✨

For lay people, this was where the case became especially pleasing. One can put it quite simply: the brain does not work like a lonely chief in an office. It works more like an ensemble at a dress rehearsal. Things are anticipated, adjusted, taken up, corrected, carried onwards. One part comes in, another responds, a third imposes order, and in the best case the result sounds like mental elegance rather than Monday morning.

The lovely thing about music, you see, is that it lives in time. And that is exactly what the brain does as well. A thought is not a brick. It is a process. An expectation. A small internal wager on what will come next. If I begin a phrase on the violin, your ear already anticipates its continuation. If it arrives as hoped, you feel satisfaction. If it arrives differently, you feel surprise, intrigue, sometimes indignation in the case of contemporary music, often with good reason. 😌

That, too, is how the brain works. It lives by prediction. It is, in a sense, constantly listening out for the world’s next note. And when something does not fit, it must reorganise itself. That is not rigid calculation, but rather a kind of permanent inner music-making.

The case became particularly amusing when I considered the matter of polyphony. For human beings are almost never doing just one thing. One hears words, reads faces, senses one’s own body, assesses the situation, remembers something embarrassing from 2014, and simultaneously tries not to walk into a doorframe. A miracle of polyphony. 🎭

Anyone who still believes the brain works like a pocket calculator has probably never tried to be polite, attentive, and witty all at once at a dinner party.

And then the disturbances! Here too, music was by far the better witness. For pathological states often do not resemble a broken spare part, but a disturbance in timing, coordination, or flexibility. At times a rhythm becomes too rigid. At others the coordination no longer fits. Sometimes prediction and reality drift distressingly past one another. That is far closer to a derailed performance than to a simple defect in screw 7b. 🫖

The resolution therefore possessed an almost aristocratic beauty: the conductor we were seeking does not exist at all. At least not as a solitary ruler with a baton. What we call mind arises instead from an ongoing interplay of listening, responding, anticipating, classifying, varying. Within our own heads we are at once audience, performers, and occasionally even composer. An exhausting staffing model, certainly, but one of irresistible elegance.

I placed the violin back in its case, that little black tomb of good taste, and allowed myself a moment of quiet satisfaction. The case was solved. Not the brain as machine. Not the mind as ring binder. But the human being as living score: temporal, polyphonic, sensitive to context, with room for improvisation and the constant risk of falling out of tune within oneself. 🎻🧠

And let us be honest: to understand the brain as chamber music is not merely cleverer. It also has decidedly better manners. 🎻🧠 🕵️‍♂️

Yours, Sherlock MS