A 4-Track Mind

The episode opens with Lulu Miller describing the story as a “jaw-dropping portrait” of human ability before Chad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich introduce Bob Milne, a ragtime pianist living in a small Michigan town with his wife, Linda. The Library of Congress has called Milne a national treasure. He began piano lessons because his mother made him take them, though he hated the minor-key Schubert piece assigned for a recital so much that the piece was reportedly played in a major key instead. As an adult, he focused on ragtime, whose left and right hands often carry different rhythms. Milne can perform those independent rhythms while also carrying on a detailed conversation and making jokes. Reporter Jessica Benko explains that neurologist Kerstin Betterman, now at Penn State University, became interested after hearing Milne play. Betterman says that, for most people, the brain systems used for complicated musical performance and conversation interfere with each other. Milne then made a much larger claim: he could hear an entire symphony in his head, with every instrument present, and could focus on one while the others continued. When Betterman asked whether he could handle three pieces simultaneously, he said he thought so; when challenged about four, he initially called four symphonies at once “absolute cacophony.” The hosts regard the claim as nearly impossible and decide that it needs a behavioral test.

Betterman recruited Peter Paray, the former conductor of the Winston-Salem Symphony, as a comparison subject. She gave both men recordings of four very different works—symphonies by Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn—and asked them to memorize them after only a couple of days. In an MRI scanner, they had to replay the recordings exactly in their minds: the same instruments, entrances, tempo, and musical details, without any sound actually playing. At an arbitrary moment, researchers told each man to stop and identify the exact note or phrase playing in his imagined performance. Paray, the highly accomplished conductor, could accurately track one symphony at a time, coming within roughly a second of the recording. Milne did the same, landing within a note or two. The harder test began with both men imagining one piece, then adding a second after 10–15 seconds, followed by a third and fourth. Paray could not maintain even the first piece; he described the task as overwhelming and became confused. Milne, however, continued all four in parallel. When Betterman asked where he was in each symphony, he described the musical passages and was exactly on the right note in every one. The pieces did not merge into noise for him: he experienced each as a separate, controllable performance.

When Krulwich asks how Milne could accomplish the feat, Benko offers two possible explanations. The first concerns emotion. Milne does not experience keys as abstract musical labels; he has a distinct emotional association with every key on the piano. He describes C major as bland—“like eating water soup”—while D major makes him want to dance. Because emotion can deepen experience and strengthen memories, Benko suggests that Milne may not be laboriously calculating the location of four pieces. He may instead be inhabiting them through separate, deeply encoded emotional impressions. Milne’s own description supports that idea. He says that, when several symphonies are running, he does not have to concentrate hard on tracking each one. He is already inside the music and can feel each piece “one feeling at a time.” This is presented as a hypothesis rather than a scientific explanation: Betterman and the reporters can demonstrate that Milne tracks the music, but they cannot fully explain why his brain can do what the conductor’s brain cannot. The hosts emphasize that the ability is not merely a matter of ordinary musical expertise, since even an experienced conductor failed when asked to maintain two simultaneous works.

The second proposed explanation involves Milne’s visual and spatial imagination. He often closes his eyes to focus, and when asked what he sees while hearing two symphonies, he describes two orchestras sitting side by side as silhouettes. A brownish area resembles the floor or the deep brown of a violin, and a blue semicircle appears behind the players. He can assign one work to the left and another to the right—for example, Brahms’s Second Symphony on the left and Beethoven’s “Emperor” on the right—and selectively turn either one up. Milne says he can speed a piece up, jump backward, change it into another key, and move forward to a particular passage. His mental image is more like a three-dimensional film than a static picture: he can fly above an orchestra, zoom in on individual instruments, and hear an instrument become louder or softer depending on where he places himself. He describes seeing the violas’ brown-orange color, the folds in the players’ tuxedo shirts, and even the motion and sound of a bow across the strings. Recorded music is therefore disappointing to him; he cannot stand CDs because they are a diminished version of the vivid orchestras he can generate internally.

The hosts ask what Milne does with such unusual abilities and whether they have made him wealthy. Benko says no: ragtime is not especially popular in the United States, and Milne generally performs for small groups at historical societies, churches, and similar venues. He plays about 250 shows a year. He and Linda travel in a small motorhome converted from a 15-passenger airport bus, complete with a hot shower, bathroom, and bed. When Linda cannot accompany him, he travels alone and sleeps in Walmart parking lots. Milne is also composing an opera. He writes much of it in his head while driving, then stops at a McDonald’s to transfer the music onto paper. The episode closes with the hosts trying to honor his ability by speaking and thanking people simultaneously, echoing the way Milne can separate concurrent musical lines. The final portrait is not of a celebrity exploiting a superpower, but of a working musician whose remarkable inner experience is mostly expressed through touring, playing ragtime, composing, and living on the road.