I still remember it quite clearly. Standing in the middle of Virgin Megastores on Western Road in Brighton. Big chunky black headphones on, listening to ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed on one of the in-store 'listening posts’. Eyes welling up, tears running down my cheeks. The song never affected me like that before or since. No idea why it did then. I remember nothing else about that day. I can’t have been more than about 15.
“When listening to music we are often surprised,” William James, the American pragmatist and psychologist, once said, “at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the heart swelling and lacrymal effusion that unexpectedly catches us at intervals.”
We know the brute mechanism of these watery effusions. The parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system activates the lacrimal gland. Nerve impulses run back and forth on the opthalmic division of the trigeminal cranial nerve. A colourless cocktail of water, mucin, urea, proteins, fats, enzymes, and sugars is secreted by the gland and overflows the tear ducts, simultaneously cleaning dust from the conjunctiva and preventing the cornea from drying out.
But there are tears and then there are tears. Emotional tears, the ones wrung from inner pain and the recognition of tragedy, have even a different chemical composition. There are proteins that are theirs alone. And the precise network of higher brain functions involved in these less obviously functional emissions remains shrouded in mystery.
Read more on music and tears at The Quietus.