The neurologist Oliver Sacks has been publishing books for nearly four decades. He may be best known for "Awakenings," which appeared in 1973 and was made into a 1990 film starring Robin Williams as Sacks. It concerned a group of patients long immobilized by sleeping sickness, then temporarily restored to movement and voice by an experimental drug whose neuro-benefits were short-lived. Balanced between clinical observation and emotional engagement, Sacks found the humanity at the story's heart, and his writing moved the way fiction moves, using scenes and dialogue and character development. "Awakenings" established Sacks's signature approach to reporting from the terrifying edge of human neurological experience. He could see that while brain damage left people radically transformed, it sometimes taught us all about the deeper dimensions of the soul, the spirit, the human will.
"Awakenings" was followed 12 years later by Sacks's first bestseller, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a book of case histories about the often bizarre, harrowing impact of neurological catastrophe. It presented such diverse figures as an aging man with a shattered memory who believed himself to be 20 and the year to be 1945; a woman unable to sense where her body was in space; a distinguished musician who could no longer identify or properly use the everyday objects he saw. Sacks's territory was not simply the strangeness of behavior when brain and mind are ravaged. It was the way such manifestations teach us how the brain and mind work, and what we are capable of enduring, what we can make of an altered life.
Though occasionally publishing books about his own life and travels, such as the 2001 memoir "Uncle Tungsten" or the 1984 account of a serious leg injury that turned him from physician to patient ("A Leg to Stand On"), Sacks continued to publish fascinating volumes of case studies ("Seeing Voices" in 1989 and "An Anthropologist on Mars" in 1995). Now, with "Musicophilia," his 10th book, he brings the case study together with wide-ranging research, interviews, correspondence, philosophical consideration, and personal experience to produce an accessible, compelling study of the human passion for music, a propensity that "lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate."
"We humans," Sacks says, "are a musical species no less than a linguistic one." Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds. As a neurologist, Sacks wonders about the intricate, complex mechanism by which all this happens in the brain, and "Musicophilia" certainly explores the cortical circuits by which music is perceived or created, making use of the latest technological and clinical findings
But the core of this book is what happens when things go wrong, when music triggers seizures or repeats ceaselessly and deafeningly in the mind or is heard as pure noise rather than as music. "Many of the patients or correspondents I describe in this book are conscious of musical misalignments of one sort or another. The 'musical' parts of their brains are not entirely at their service, and may indeed seem to have a will of their own." Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind. "There may be a continuum here between the pathological and the normal," Sacks says. We all, sometime or other, teeter at the border. "This wonderful machinery - perhaps because it is so complex and highly developed - is vulnerable to various distortions, excesses, and breakdowns."
"Musicophilia" also looks at music's miraculously positive impact on damaged brains, as when people rendered otherwise mute by strokes or Alzheimer's can sing lyrics or when others stilled by advanced Parkinson's disease can move in response to music. "It is clear that music, above all else, can kick-start a damaged or inhibited motor system into action again." It can calm the tics and compulsions of people with Tourette's syndrome. It can allow victims of autism or Asperger's syndrome, normally so isolated by their symptoms, to find connection with others or to express otherwise repressed emotions.
Sacks, whose focus is typically on others, here makes frequent reference to his own experience with music. This lends "Musicophilia" a genuine intimacy and charm, as in his account of getting himself down a Norwegian mountain despite "tearing off the quadriceps tendon of my left leg, as well as doing some nerve damage to it," using a rowing motion to glide down the snowy surface to the imagined rhythm of "The Volga Boatmen's Song."
Sacks also refers to or reconnects with numerous patients described in his previous books, Rose R. from "Awakenings" and the autistic scientist Temple Grandin from "An Anthropologist on Mars," considering their familiar stories in light of the role of music. There is a sense of family here, Sacks bringing patients, himself, and his reader together within music's embrace as if we were all before the record player in his living room.
"Awakenings" was followed 12 years later by Sacks's first bestseller, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," a book of case histories about the often bizarre, harrowing impact of neurological catastrophe. It presented such diverse figures as an aging man with a shattered memory who believed himself to be 20 and the year to be 1945; a woman unable to sense where her body was in space; a distinguished musician who could no longer identify or properly use the everyday objects he saw. Sacks's territory was not simply the strangeness of behavior when brain and mind are ravaged. It was the way such manifestations teach us how the brain and mind work, and what we are capable of enduring, what we can make of an altered life.
Though occasionally publishing books about his own life and travels, such as the 2001 memoir "Uncle Tungsten" or the 1984 account of a serious leg injury that turned him from physician to patient ("A Leg to Stand On"), Sacks continued to publish fascinating volumes of case studies ("Seeing Voices" in 1989 and "An Anthropologist on Mars" in 1995). Now, with "Musicophilia," his 10th book, he brings the case study together with wide-ranging research, interviews, correspondence, philosophical consideration, and personal experience to produce an accessible, compelling study of the human passion for music, a propensity that "lies so deep in human nature that one must think of it as innate."
"We humans," Sacks says, "are a musical species no less than a linguistic one." Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds. As a neurologist, Sacks wonders about the intricate, complex mechanism by which all this happens in the brain, and "Musicophilia" certainly explores the cortical circuits by which music is perceived or created, making use of the latest technological and clinical findings
But the core of this book is what happens when things go wrong, when music triggers seizures or repeats ceaselessly and deafeningly in the mind or is heard as pure noise rather than as music. "Many of the patients or correspondents I describe in this book are conscious of musical misalignments of one sort or another. The 'musical' parts of their brains are not entirely at their service, and may indeed seem to have a will of their own." Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind. "There may be a continuum here between the pathological and the normal," Sacks says. We all, sometime or other, teeter at the border. "This wonderful machinery - perhaps because it is so complex and highly developed - is vulnerable to various distortions, excesses, and breakdowns."
"Musicophilia" also looks at music's miraculously positive impact on damaged brains, as when people rendered otherwise mute by strokes or Alzheimer's can sing lyrics or when others stilled by advanced Parkinson's disease can move in response to music. "It is clear that music, above all else, can kick-start a damaged or inhibited motor system into action again." It can calm the tics and compulsions of people with Tourette's syndrome. It can allow victims of autism or Asperger's syndrome, normally so isolated by their symptoms, to find connection with others or to express otherwise repressed emotions.
Sacks, whose focus is typically on others, here makes frequent reference to his own experience with music. This lends "Musicophilia" a genuine intimacy and charm, as in his account of getting himself down a Norwegian mountain despite "tearing off the quadriceps tendon of my left leg, as well as doing some nerve damage to it," using a rowing motion to glide down the snowy surface to the imagined rhythm of "The Volga Boatmen's Song."
Sacks also refers to or reconnects with numerous patients described in his previous books, Rose R. from "Awakenings" and the autistic scientist Temple Grandin from "An Anthropologist on Mars," considering their familiar stories in light of the role of music. There is a sense of family here, Sacks bringing patients, himself, and his reader together within music's embrace as if we were all before the record player in his living room.