May/100
Book Summary: “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks
Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Knopf.
Sacks explores the neurology of music and gives examples of patients who have various unusual responses to music. Told in a wonderful, person-focused, story-telling manner, Musicophilia expounds on music as the wonderful back door to our minds. One man gained a sudden appreciation of piano music after being struck by lightning. Some people get seizures from music or hear music in their seizures. Most people experience getting music stuck in their head, but some have more intense musical hallucinations.
Sacks considers musicality and how musicality is actually a number of related skills. Sacks describes various cases of amusia. Interestingly, he points out that ‘forms of rhythm deafness are rarely total, because rhythm is represented widely in the brain’ (p. 99). Sacks describes neurological aspects of absolute pitch, its prevalence and origins. The effect of losing hearing in one ear is considered for two patents’ cases. Sacks relates music to vision, describing the effect that blindness can have on people’s musical abilities and also several cases of music → vision synesthesia.
Sacks tells the story of Clive Wearing, a man with severe amnesia and complete loss of all but the most transient memory. Clive experiences every moment as if he just woke up, except that he still remembers his wife and he can still play music! Music must be remembered differently to other experiences. Sacks describes the interactions between speech and music and how some people can lose the ability to understand or produce speech, but still be able to sing songs with words. Some aphasic people can be taught to speak again with the help of singing. It seems to me that the brain has two complicated systems, one for language and thought, one for music and feeling.
Some people with Tourette syndrome can channel the explosive energy of their ticcing into rhythm. Sacks describes a drum circle of people with Tourette syndrome who tic out of time naturally, but come together in controlled musical expression when they play. Sacks talks about how music therapy can help people regain motion of their limbs. Sacks speculates about the biological importance of music:
The embedding of words, skills or sequences in melody and meter is uniquely human. The usefulness of such ability to recall large amounts of information, especially in a preliterate culture, is surely one reason why musical abilities have flourished in our species. (p. 239)
Speaking of the importance of rhythm particularly, Sacks says:
What enables us, for example, to bind together the sight, sound, smell and emotions aroused by the sight of a jaguar? Such binding in the nervous system is accomplished by rapid, synchronized firing of nerve cells in different parts of the brain. Just as rapid neuronal oscillations bind together different functional parts within the brain and nervous system, so rhythm binds together the individual nervous systems of a human community. (p. 247)
People with parkinsonism struggle to initiate motion and to move in natural time and rhythm, but music and music therapy can sometimes help them to move more naturally. ‘It is music that the parkinsonian needs, for only music, which is rigorous yet spacious, sinuous and alive, can evoke responses that are equally so.’ (p. 258)
Music appears to some people in dreams, frequently in more detail than their waking musical imaginations can afford. On a personal note, I have had dreams with detailed music similar to what Sacks describes. Some people can understand musical structure but do not emotionally appreciate music, while others connect with music emotionally while having amusia otherwise. With regard to the power of music to connect in moments of grief, Sacks says:
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has as unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. (p. 300)
Sacks describes a man who lost all ability to feel emotion in an accident who can sing with apparent emotion, and another man with autism who wrote ‘AUTISM DISAPPEARS’ in Sacks’ notebook while he was singing. Some people with frontotemporal dementia display increased musical or other artistic behaviours. People with Williams syndrome are frequently moved strongly by music and can be articulate and musically talented while being disabled in other ways. Music can cheer up people with dementia, affecting patients’ moods even after the music has stopped.
Peter