The temporal lobe is the part of the brain that stores music—not just the lyrics, but the emotional signatures glued to them. It is why you can forget a birthday but remember every word of an old Kishore Kumar classic. It is the lobe that hums even when you don’t. It holds memory, language, rhythm, fear, nostalgia, and the entire soundtrack of your teenage years. If the frontal lobe is the editor and the parietal lobe the director, the temporal lobe is the DJ.
A few months ago, I met a 48-year-old musician named Edwin. He walked into my clinic looking like someone who had stepped straight out of an ’80s album cover: shoulder-length hair, faded denim jacket, sunglasses indoors, and the gentle confidence of a man who had once performed for an audience that paid in applause and samosas. He had the kind of voice that sounded like it had lived inside a recording studio and the kind of laugh that belonged backstage.
“Doctor,” he said, “my family thinks I am behaving strangely.” Musicians say this often, so I kept a straight face. “What kind of strange?” I asked. “My wife says I repeat myself,” he said, “and my daughter says I keep hearing music that isn’t playing.” He paused. “But, to be fair, both of them say that even when nothing is wrong.” His wife, seated next to him, rolled her eyes. “He’s been forgetting conversations,” she said. “And last week, he told a waiter ‘Thank you’… in E flat.”
The MRI clarified the mystery. A sizeable cavernous malformation, a small cluster of fragile blood vessels, sat snugly in the left temporal lobe. If unattended, these vessels could leak and irritate the surrounding tissue. It wasn’t dangerous yet, but it explained his symptoms. The temporal lobe doesn’t like being disturbed. It reacts the way musicians do when someone touches their instruments without permission.
I explained the anatomy. The temporal lobe sits on the side of the brain, behind the ear, and is responsible for processing sound, language, memory, and emotion. A centimetre here can change how you speak. A millimetre there can change how you hear your favourite song. The hippocampus hides within it, storing life’s scenes like an old videotape. The amygdala sits nearby, assigning meaning and emotion to all those scenes. It is a crowded neighbourhood, and one wrong move can shift the tone of who you are. As we discussed surgery, Edwin kept humming ’80s songs under his breath, bits of ‘Take on Me’, ‘Eye of the Tiger’, and, at one point, what sounded suspiciously like ‘Chura Liya Hai Tumne Jo Dil Ko’. The temporal lobe, I realised, had excellent taste.
During surgery, when you gently get into the temporal lobe, the fibres shimmer like stretched guitar strings. The cavernoma sat quietly in the middle, a dark purple berry nestled in a field of pale tissue. Removing it requires patience, steady hands, and the ability to resist humming along to whatever song your patient had stuck in your head the previous day. I removed it in one piece, placed it on the tray, and for a moment, it looked like the world’s most unappetising blueberry.
Edwin woke up beautifully, his speech intact, his memory sharper, his internal jukebox finally silent. When he came for a follow-up two weeks later, he looked different: his hair was tied up, his sunglasses were off, and he looked a little more grounded, a little less like an ’80s rock god. “Doctor,” he said, “for the first time in months, my head is quiet.” His wife added, “And he hasn’t sung in the shower this week.” He shrugged. “I didn’t say I was completely cured!”
The temporal lobe is where memory meets melody, where emotion meets language, where past meets present. It’s the lobe that separates your ex from your current. It is the lobe that reminds us of who we were and helps us make sense of who we are. When something grows there, even something small, life can slip off-key. Remove it, and the music returns.
As he left my clinic, he turned back and said, “Doctor, when can I start singing again?”
I smiled. “Immediately.”
His wife whispered, “Please don’t encourage him.”
And that, I suppose, is the real miracle of the temporal lobe. You can fix the brain, but the marriage remains a song and dance.
The author is consultant neurosurgeon at Wockhardt Hospital, Mumbai.
mazdaturel@gmail.com @mazdaturel