There’s a memorable scene in the Beach Boys film Love & Mercy, where the band are on a plane and Brian Wilson has a panic attack. Later on, Brian is back at home, recounting the experience to his brothers, and he says: “Before it happened, there was music in my head – like always – and then threatening voices started.” As a psychologist who specialises in musical memory, those two little words – “like always” – really stood out for me.

It tells us that Brian Wilson had music going through his head almost continuously. Of course, many of us are able to activate a musical memory when required – for instance, if I asked you whether the third note in Happy Birthday was higher or lower than the fourth, you would probably be able to summon up the tune – but to have it playing constantly like that is rare: one survey we did suggests that less than 5% of people experience it.

What music was going through Brian’s mind? We don’t know. It may have been re-runs of old 1940s and 50s songs, or it may have been fragments of all sorts of different tunes. But it’s possible to theorise that, if someone experiences this constant musical background, they might become more adept at playing around with those sounds – hearing links between them and thinking about how they fit together. You can actually see this creative process happening in another scene where Brian is sat on the bonnet of his car staring at the sky and a musical backdrop appears for him to play around with.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trying to match the sound in his head … Brian Wilson behind the desk in Love & Mercy

There’s a growing body of literature that focuses on this idea of mental practice in music and how important it might be to those who can harness it. Some music teachers will emphasise the importance of working with musical imagery as a partner to actually practicing in real life. That’s why, for instance, you might sometimes see someone reading sheet music on public transport.

So why would Brian have this music constantly playing in the first place? In terms of nature, there are lots of things we still don’t know. A great musician will display finer-grained auditory skills and higher memory capacity, but we still don’t know whether that was the case when they were a six-month-old foetus and their auditory system started functioning. What we do know is that even if there is an innate gift involved, you still have to put a lot of hard work in. You still need exposure to a large range of music in order to widen your mental back catalogue, and you still need to practise accessing it regularly and working with it. It’s like a runner who is gifted with great leg muscles – you still need to train in order to beat Usain Bolt. The riff from Good Vibrations might have been stuck in Brian’s head – as he tells Mike Love when he’s in the famous sandbox, playing piano – but what makes him a creative genius is that he knew what to do with that riff. He had learned to use the tools in his memory to build on it, think about it in sound and try on different extemporisations of that riff as if it was a suit and tie combination.

There are other scenes in the film that point to Brian’s incredible musical ability. I loved the studio scenes, when he’s got hairpins on the piano to get the exact timbre he wants. That speaks to the incredible fidelity of his musical imagery. When we’ve conducted research into earworms, we’ve found that some people are able to experience them with incredible clarity. They might get a Bob Marley track stuck in their head and recognise it as the 1968 recording because they can hear a slight cold in Marley’s voice and there’s someone shouting in the crowd at a particular point. It’s this level of fidelity that makes Brian so precise about achieving the sound in his head. At one point one of his musicians says “Hey Brian, I think you might have screwed up here. You’ve got Lyle playing in D and the rest of us are in A major.” “Yeah that’s right,” he replies. “How does that work? Two bass lines and two different keys?” she asks, to which Brian replies: “It works in my head”. That’s because he can already hear it. It’s the same way that Beethoven could lose his hearing but still be able to compose his ninth symphony. And the same way a conductor such as Arturo Toscanini would be able to scan two hours of music in a minute and be able to reassure a bassoonist in his orchestra that the broken key on their instrument wouldn’t matter as that particular note didn’t appear in the performance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch ‘The Music of Memory’: Victoria Williamson’s TED talk.



Psychology can go some way to explaining why musicians are able to make great music – but what about understanding why this music connects with listeners? What’s important to remember in terms of Pet Sounds - which the film focuses on – is that a lot of people didn’t appreciate it at the time. Mike Love and Brian’s father in particular struggled to take what Brian was doing on board. The believed in following the Beach Boys formula, and you can see why they felt justified in thinking this way: Pet Sounds didn’t sell well at the time in the US, certainly not compared to previous Beach Boys albums.

Why was this? It’s important to see listeners as sitting on a continuum, all with varying levels of musical sophistication. Those towards the end, who are highly musically sophisticated, will be constantly seeking out the new. Brian is up there, and when he was writing this more complex music it would be appealing largely to the small minority on that corner of the continuum. But as the pop catalogue expanded to become more complex in terms of key structure and rhythmic complexity – to reflect the influence of what people like Brian were doing – the music would gradually be more likely to appeal to people in the middle of the continuum too. People’s musical memories would have changed in a way that they were more able to recognise what he was doing; to feel familiar with it and to appreciate it. It tells us that Brian Wilson was the very definition of being ahead of the curve.