Music and the Brain

A book review of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain By Oliver Sacks

I’m a big fan of Oliver Sacks, having read Awakenings, Anthropologists on Mars, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Hallucinations. I was very excited to finally dig into musicophilia, been a huge music fan. The book has many interesting themes, although I felt it often went too much into the neurology of the conditions, and sometimes it even deviated from the topic of music completely. It also made it sound a bit repetitive taking into account his other books as well, but this is due to my context of having read several, and not specific to this book.

The book covers several patients of Sacks that having music particularity, what he calls “music misalignments”. At its most extremes, he tells cases of people with Williams syndrome who are hyper musical despite being mentally retarded, and people with amusia, who don’t understand the meaning of music at all. He also touches on other cases, my favorite is when a sudden interest in music is born. In one case, a man that was struck by lightning suddenly has an urge to become a pianist. Many of the people in this situation feel some sort of divine calling for music, not simply a change in their interest, but it is felt like a new duty towards God expressed by their music. Among others, you will find stories of people having musical hallucinations, music synesthesia, and more. A lot of the book is also dedicated to cases of people with declining mental faculties, like dementia, in which music seems to bring them to life, when otherwise they seem like an empty soul.

There is no overall narrative to the book, it’s more a collection of interesting cases related to music. I did enjoy the book, but at the same time I had a hard time becoming back to it due to the problems I mentioned in the beginning — sometimes overly neurological, and sometimes repetitive. Some of the cases were even in previous books that I read. Despite this, I still think it’s a wonderful book, and especially if you are lucky enough to dive into Sack’s writing for the first time, you will enjoy the journey through the bizarre world of music and all the absurd neurological cases Sacks has witnessed.

“There are undoubtedly particular areas of the cortex subserving musical intelligence and sensibility, and there can be forms of amusia with damage to these. But the emotional response to music, it would seem, is widespread and probably not only cortical but sub-cortical, so that even in a diffuse cortical disease like Alzheimer’s, music can still be perceived, enjoyed, and responded to. One does not need to have any formal knowledge of music — nor, indeed, to be particularly “musical” — to enjoy music and to respond to it at the deepest levels. Music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed. Its very ubiquity may cause it to be trivialized in daily life: we switch on a radio, switch it off, hum a tune, tap our feet, find the words of an old song going through our minds, and think nothing of it. But to those who are lost in dementia, the situation is different. Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while.”

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Tiago V.F.