Preservation of musical memory in an amnesic professional cellist

Figure 1. Schematics of the three musical memory tasks and corresponding performance of PM and control subjects. Subjects listened to matched pairs of instrumental classical music and had to decide which excerpt sounded more familiar. Pieces were closely matched for musical character and instrumental line-up. White dots, Berlin Philharmonic string players; grey dots, active amateur musicians; error bars indicate s.e.m. Top row: retrograde musical memory. Subjects were presented classical music composed before 2005 (before the onset of PM’s amnesia) paired with classical music composed after 2005 (after the onset of PM’s amnesia). Middle row: retrograde musical memory. Subjects were presented famous and non-famous classical music composed before 2005 and in the same musical period. Bottom row: anterograde musical memory. First, subjects were asked to evaluate the emotional character of musical excerpts composed after 2005. In an incidental memory task 90 minutes later, subjects had to discriminate the previously rated excerpts from matched new excerpts. Preservation of musical memory in an amnesic professional cellist