Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 381 pp. Laura Muellner
aegis 2008 92
Humanity has been struggling to understand how the brain works for centuries. Dr. Oliver Sacks has contributed to the study of the brain through his analysis of his patients, many of whom have neurological or psychological anomalies. His most recent publication, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, focuses on a variety of aural problems and their possible causes. He approaches serious problems and strange symptoms with compassion, making the reader sympathize with and understand people who have lived very different lives than themselves, with experiences that the reader has never had. In the first section of Musicophilia, Dr. Sacks focuses on normal people, rather than musicians, who hear and appreciate music in unusual ways. He tells the story of a doctor who, after being struck by lightening, develops an insatiable desire to listen to and play piano, though he had previously not enjoyed classical music. Other patients have musical hallucinations; tunes play spontaneously in their heads, both familiar and completely new, that they have little to no control over. This can be very crippling for music lovers, as it destroys their ability to appreciate live music. While Dr. Sacks includes stories of musicians who experience these problems, he speaks of them in the same terms as non-musicians, emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between the groups. In contrast to the opening section, Dr. Sacks spends the second segment of the book speaking of what differentiates both musicians and the extremely amusical from the general public. Dr. Sacks examines the possible reasons for perfect pitch, noting that the phenomenon is much more common among people whose languages rely on pitch for meaning. He also describes a musician who, after an accident, loses her conception of harmony. She could still hear individual melodic lines, but she was unable to understand the combination of sounds without retraining her ear. Many of the patients in this section are Dr. Sacks’s personal friends rather than patients, giving his analyses a different, more intimate feeling than in other sections. Since much of Dr. Sacks’s background deals with abnormal psychology, he includes a description of how music interacts with other psychological disorders. Musical therapy is a growing industry, and the third part gives many examples of how effective it can be. Tourette’s patients can learn to control their spastic motions through jazz drum improvisation. The spasms that Tourette’s patients experience can actually inspire new rhythmic motives, which entire solos can be based around. Such creative outbursts allow them to embrace themselves and their disease in a way that would not otherwise be possible. Aphasia, which affects the ability to understand language, can be treated through song. Patients can be taught words through songs, occasionally regaining language independent of the tunes they originally relearned them through. These applications are addressed in addition to the much more common therapy for motion problems. In the final part of the book, Dr. Sacks discusses how music can shape people’s identities. Brain imaging has shown how people’s strengths can come from weaknesses; when one
