Book of the Month Club

I'm adding a new book to the String Theory Media reading list today. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, which came out late last year and which I finally finished, is an amazing and surprising tour of the many ways our minds do and don't apprehend music. Most are tales of amusia, an all-purpose term for an innate or acquired inability to process or "get" music. Some are stories about hyper-musical sensitivities and abilities. A man at the beginning of the book develops a mad passion and skill for music after being struck by lightning. Some people are beset by elaborate, hyper-vivid musical hallucinations. Some find healing power in music. It's a book that indirectly describes how miraculous human musicality is by describing the ways it can go wrong. And in some cases it shows a world of musical appreciation that "normal" minds can't grasp or experience, like the ability to hear notes or chords as colors.

Especially fascinating are the chapters about music as a healing force. We learn of music profoundly easing the torments of dementia, aphasia (inability to speak), depression, and Parkinson's disease. One fairly typical case study involves Rosalie, a Parkinson's patient who spent her days inert physically and emotionally. Curiously she nearly always kept one finger pressing against her glasses. But, Sacks writes, she was a pianist.

As soon as she sat down on the piano bench, her stuck hand came down to the keyboard, and she would play with ease and fluency, her face full of expression and feeling. Music liberated her from her parkinsonism for a time - and not only playing music but imagining it. Rosalie knew all of Chopin by heart, and we had only to say "Opus 49" to see her whole body, posture and expression change, her parkinsonism vanishing as the F-minor Fantasie played itself in her mind. Her EEG, too, would become normal at such times.

This is just one of a hundred remarkable stories from Sacks' long life as one of the world's best known therapists. He's also author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. With Musicophilia he's added another revealing and wondrous book to his list.

Here's a cool "mindmap" inspired by the book. Here's an NPR interview with Sacks.