For the Love of Music

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - Oliver Sacks
Originally published in hardcover in 2007 - Knopf

Click me!

This is my first Oliver Sacks - I always meant to read the Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat but alas never got around to it.


I love Mr. Sacks' delightful anecdotal storytelling and his intellect that makes fresh and accessible the study of the brain. It *almost* makes the issues dealt with in the book pleasant.


In a nutshell, this book is about the power of music, backed by many accounts from the medical perspective of the interaction between music and the brain. It's hard to tell without a lot of background knowledge on mr sacks and his previous works, but it seems as if in part this book is a culmination of much of his previous works and observations.


A peripheral discussion that continued to dance through my head while reading this book is what is the "best" music to listen to? I kind of got the impression that classical music was most close to the primal drummings of the soul, but perhaps not. I mean mr sacks is an older fellow, and much of his observations were of patients from his earlier days practising, so is it fair to assume that classical music had a more august position in those days and was thus more clearly regarded as the truest form of music? Would any music do, any beat and rhythm that strikes a cord with the individual?


I came away from this book wanting to listen to less podcasts and more music. I came away yet again regretting that I've never tried to play an instrument in my life.  Ultimately, though, I came away with much more reverance for the power of music, more convinced that music just might be the surest and most direct path to self and the soul.


Amazon description - Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat.  But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does—humans are a musical species.


Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people—from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds—for everything but music.


Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.


Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.