W hen Howard Goodall walked into a low beam at a guesthouse a few years ago, for a while he lost not only his memory but the ability to hear music in his head. It was an experience he admits was "very scary".

But the prolific composer, one of Britain's most visible champions of music through his Channel 4 documentaries, How Music Works (the most recent) and Big Bangs: five discoveries that changed musical history, and his work promoting singing in schools, can find the upside of anything. Attended by a "very brilliant" brain specialist who happened to be a rock musician in her spare time, Goodall took the opportunity to learn about the "compartmentalised" structure of the human brain from the way his musical memory came back "as a blob", a bit like files on a rebooted computer.