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Musicophilia

a guidee for music lovers

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Book review on Musicophilia

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Norman M. Weinberger reviews the latest work of Oliver Sacks on music.

Music and the brain are both endlessly fascinating subjects, and as a neuroscientist specialising in auditory learning and memory, I find them especially intriguing. So I had high expectations of Musicophilia, the latest offering from neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks. And I confess to feeling a little guilty reporting that my reactions to the book are mixed.

Sacks himself is the best part of Musicophilia. He richly documents his own life in the book and reveals highly personal experiences. The photograph of him on the cover of the book-which shows him wearing headphones, eyes closed, clearly enchanted as he listens to Alfred Brendel perform Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata-makes a positive impression that is borne out by the contents of the book. Sacks’ voice throughout is steady and erudite but never pontifical. He is neither self-conscious nor self-promoting.

The preface gives a good idea of what the book will deliver. In it, Sacks explains that he wants to convey the insights gleaned from the “enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often bizarre disorders to which these are prone.” He also stresses the importance of “the simple art of observation” and “the richness of the human context.” He wants to combine “observation and description with the latest in technology,” he says, and to imaginatively enter into the experience of his patients and subjects. The reader can see that Sacks, who has been practicing neurology for 40 years, is torn between the “old-fashioned” path of observation and the new-fangled, high-tech approach: He knows that he needs to take heed of the latter, but his heart lies with the former.

The book consists mainly of detailed descriptions of cases, most of them involving patients whom Sacks has seen in his practice. Brief discussions of contemporary neuroscientific reports are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Part, “Haunted by Music,” begins with the strange case of Tony Cicoria, a nonmusical, middle-aged surgeon who was consumed by a love of music after being hit by lightning. He suddenly began to crave listening to piano music, which he had never cared for in the past. He started to play the piano and then to compose music, which arose spontaneously in his mind in a “torrent” of notes. How could this happen? Was the cause psychological? (He had had a near-death experience when the lightning struck him.) Or was it the direct result of a change in the auditory regions of his cerebral cortex? Electroencephalography (EEG) showed his brain waves to be normal in the mid-1990s, just after his trauma and subsequent “conversion” to music. There are now more sensitive tests, but Cicoria, has declined to undergo them; he does not want to delve into the causes of his musicality. What a shame!

Part II, “A Range of Musicality,” covers a wider variety of topics, but unfortunately, some of the chapters offer little or nothing that is new. For example, chapter 13, which is five pages long, merely notes that the blind often has better hearing than the sighted. The most interesting chapters are those that present the strangest cases. Chapter 8 is about “amusia,” an inability to hear sounds like music, and “dysharmonia,” a highly specific impairment of the ability to hear harmony, with the ability to understand melody left intact. Such specific “dissociations” are found throughout the cases Sacks recounts.

To Sacks’s credit, part III, “Memory, Movement and Music,” brings us into the underappreciated realm of music therapy. Chapter 16 explains how “melodic intonation therapy” is being used to help expressive aphasic patients (those unable to express their thoughts verbally following a stroke or other cerebral incident) once again become capable of fluent speech. In chapter 20, Sacks demonstrates the near-miraculous power of music to animate Parkinson’s patients and other people with severe movement disorders, even those who are frozen into odd postures. Scientists cannot yet explain how music achieves this effect

To readers who are unfamiliar with neuroscience and music behavior, Musicophilia may be something of a revelation. But the book will not satisfy those seeking the causes and implications of the phenomena Sacks describes. For one thing, Sacks appears to be more at ease discussing patients than discussing experiments. And he tends to be rather uncritical in accepting scientific findings and theories.

It’s true that the causes of music-brain oddities remain poorly understood. However, Sacks could have done more to draw out some of the implications of the careful observations that he and other neurologists have made and of the treatments that have been successful. For example, he might have noted that the many specific dissociations among components of music comprehension, such as loss of the ability to perceive harmony but not melody, indicate that there is no music center in the brain. Because many people who read the book are likely to believe in the brain localisation of all mental functions, this was a missed educational opportunity.

Another conclusion one could draw is that there seem to be no “cures” for neurological problems involving music. A drug can alleviate a symptom in one patient and aggravate it in another or can have both positive and negative effects in the same patient. Treatments mentioned seem to be almost exclusively antiepileptic medications, which “damp down” the excitability of the brain in general; their effectiveness varies widely.

Finally, in many of the cases described here the patient with music-brain symptoms is reported to have “normal” EEG results. Although Sacks recognises the existence of new technologies, among them far more sensitive ways to analyze brain waves than the standard neurological EEG test, he does not call for their use. In fact, although he exhibits the greatest compassion for patients, he conveys no sense of urgency about the pursuit of new avenues in the diagnosis and treatment of music-brain disorders. This absence echoes the book’s preface, in which Sacks expresses fear that “the simple art of observation may be lost” if we rely too much on new technologies. He does call for both approaches, though, and we can only hope that the neurological community will respond.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct letter,  A ,  B ,  C  or  D .

Write your answers in boxes  1-4  on your answer sheet.

1.  Why does the writer have a mixed feeling about the book?

A    The guilty feeling made him so.

B    The writer expected it to be better than it was.

C    Sacks failed to include his personal stories in the book.

D    This is the only book written by Sacks. Answer: B

2.     What is the best part of the book?

A    the photo of Sacks listening to music

B    the tone of voice of the book

C    the autobiographical description in the book

D    the description of Sacks’ wealth Answer: C

3.  In the preface, what did Sacks try to achieve?

A    make a herald introduction of the research work and technique applied 

B    give a detailed description of various musical disorders 

C    explain why he needs to do away with the simple observation

D    explain why he needs to do away with the simple observation Answer: A

4. What is disappointing about Tony Cicoria’s case?

A    He refuses to have further tests.

B    He can’t determine the cause of his sudden musicality.

C    He nearly died because of the lightening.

D His brain waves were too normal to show anything. Answer: A

Questions 5-10

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?

In boxes  5-10  on your answer sheet, write

TRUE                if the statement agrees with the views of the writer

FALSE               if the statement contradicts with the views of the writer

NOT GIVEN     if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

5 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    It is difficult to give a well-reputable writer a less than totally favorable review. Answer: YES

6 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata is a good treatment for musical disorders. Answer: NOT GIVEN  

7 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    Sacks believes technological methods is of little importance compared with traditional observation when studying his patients. Answer: NO

8 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    It is difficult to understand why music therapy is undervalued Answer: NOT GIVEN

9 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    Sacks held little skepticism when borrowing other theories and findings in describing reasons and notion for phenomena he depicts in the book. Answer: YES

10 TRUE FALSE NOT GIVEN    Sacks is in a rush to use new testing methods to do treatment for patients. Answer: NO

Questions 11-14

Complete each sentence with the correct ending,  A-F , below.

Write the correct letter,  A-F , in boxes 11-14 on your answer sheet.

11 A B C D E F    The content covered dissociations in understanding between harmony and melody Answer: F

12 A B C D E F    The study of treating musical disorders Answer: B

13 A B C D E F    The EEG scans of Sacks’ patients Answer: A

14 A B C D E F    Sacks believes testing based on new technologies Answer: D

A    show no music-brain disorders.

B    indicates that medication can have varied results.

C    is key for the neurological community to unravel the mysteries.

D    should not be used in isolation.

E    indicate that not everyone can receive a good education.

F    show a misconception that there is a function centre localized in the brain

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Illustration by Dulce Maria Pop-Bonini

Book Review of ‘Musicophilia’ by Oliver Sacks

A book review about the intertwining of music, neuroscience, obsession, and everyday life.

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In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino.

In his latest book, “Musicophilia,” Dr. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers — “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher”; D minor is “like flint, graphite”; and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.

Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings.

He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information — a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of.

And he writes about the power of rhythm to help coordinate and energize basic locomotive movement, a power that explains why music can help push athletes to new levels and why the right sort of music (generally, legato with a well-defined rhythm) can help liberate some parkinsonian patients from “their frozenness.”

Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy. In Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.”

Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.”

As he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks underscores the resilience of the human mind, the capacity of some people to find art in affliction, and to adapt to loss and deprivation. Among the people who appear in this book are children with Williams syndrome, who have low I.Q.’s and extraordinary musical and narrative gifts (one young woman learns to sing operatic arias in more than 30 languages), and elderly dementia patients who develop unexpected musical talents.

Dr. Sacks notes that there are stories in medical literature about people who develop artistic gifts after left-hemisphere strokes, and he suggests that “there may be a variety of inhibitions — psychological, neurological and social — which may, for one reason or another, relax in one’s later years and allow a creativity as surprising to oneself as to others.”

The composer Tobias Picker, who has Tourette’s, tells Dr. Sacks that the syndrome has shaped his imagination: “I live my life controlled by Tourette’s but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy — I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way.”

Dr. Sacks notes that while the composer’s newest piano concerto “is full of turbulent, agitated whirls and twirls” in sections, Mr. Picker is able to write in every mode — “the dreamy and tranquil no less than the violent and stormy” — and can move “from one mood to another with consummate ease.”

Although this book could have benefited from some heavy-duty editing that would have removed repetitions and occasional patches of technical jargon, these lapses are easily overlooked by the reader, so powerful and compassionate are Dr. Sacks’ accounts of his patients’ dilemmas. He has written a book that not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.

MUSICOPHILIA

Tales of music and the brain.

By Oliver Sacks

381 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

In this New York Times bestseller—now revised and expanded for the paperback edition—Dr. Sacks investigates the power of music to move us, to heal and to haunt us.

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Alzheimer's Dementia Music Therapy Parkinson's Tourette's

“Musicophilia is a Chopin mazurka recital of a book, fast, inventive and weirdly beautiful.”

—  The American Scholar

Musicophilia

“Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.” — Oliver Sacks

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 power 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.

📷 Oliver Sacks studying Bach. Photo by Bill Hayes

When Musicophilia was published, Wired Magazine asked Oliver Sacks for a list of his favorite recordings . Add some musical accompaniment to your reading of the book with this special playlist, recreated to include music by some of his favorite composers.

Praise for Musicophilia

“Dr. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent. . . [his] book not only contributes to our understanding of the elusive magic of music but also illuminates the strange workings, and misfirings, of the human mind.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Oliver Sacks turns his formidable attention to music and the brain . . . He doesn’t stint on the science . . . but the underlying authority of Musicophilia lies in the warmth and easy command of the author’s voice.” —Mark Coleman, Los Angeles Times

“His work is luminous, original, and indispensable . . . Musicophilia is a Chopin mazurka recital of a book, fast, inventive and weirdly beautiful . . . Yet what is most awe-inspiring is his observational empathy.” — The American Scholar

“[Sacks] weaves neuroscience through a fascinating personal story, allowing us to think about brain functions and music in a bracing new light . . . Human context is what makes good journalism, medical and otherwise. That’s the art of Sacks’ best essays.” —Kevin Berger, Salon

“[Sacks’s] lifelong love for music infuses the writing . . . Musicophilia shows music can be more powerful (even dangerous) than most of us realize, and that defining it may be crucial to defining who we are.” —Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry.” —Anthony Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review

“This was the book that introduced me to Dr. Sacks. I saw him talking about it on the Daily Show and I was so moved by his compassion for the people he writes about. Now I’ve read them all!”

“This book inspired me to embark on a professional career in music therapy.”

Follow along on social media and engage with Oliver Sacks fans around the world!

Musical Minds is a one-hour NOVA documentary on music therapy, produced by Ryan Murdock. Originally broadcast June, 23 2009 on PBS stations. Based on the 2008 BBC documentary by Alan Yentob and Louise Lockwood. This version has additional footage, including fMRI images of Dr. Sacks’s brain as he listens to music.

Icelandic singer Bjork’s album Biophilia, a multimedia project combining music, nature, and technology was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia.

Related Books

The classic account of survivors of the encephalitic lethargica and their return to the world after decades of “sleep.” This book was the inspiration for the 1990 film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

A contemporary classics hardcover edition of Dr. Sacks’s beloved book, in which he recounts fascinating case histories of patients with neurological disorders. Introduction by Atul Gawande.

Hallucinations

Dr. Sacks’s weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences with hallucinogenics to show how hallucinations have influenced every culture’s folklore and art.

Photo by Bill Hayes

"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

Get in touch The Oliver Sacks Foundation 225 West 83rd Street, Suite 12A, New York, NY 10024, U.S.A [email protected]

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The Oliver Sacks Foundation is a charitable organization. Federal Identification Number (EIN) 46-3652950.

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Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain

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