[The Pathography and Art of Beethoven]

The musician Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from hearing impairment and abdominal pain beginning in his mid-twenties. Lead intoxication can cause both of neural symptoms and digestive disorders. Lead was often present in poor-quality wines at that period, and thus Beethoven could have ingested a large amount of lead through daily wine consumption. His auditory processing disorder was merely a deficit in the lower level bottom-up processing of musical sounds or voice inputs, and probably did not affect higher level top-down processing, such as the representation of auditory imagery and composition.