Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition | Oliver Sacks

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition | Oliver Sacks | Symphonic!

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Musicophilia: Tale...

	Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition Oliver Sacks Vintage, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 94 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very informative

As a musician and a teacher, I found this book to be a fascinating read. It's accessible without a lot of twenty-five dollar words found in some medical texts.

Symphonic!

Is this guy saying there are people who want to bone innocent music? That'd be pretty hard; e.g., no friction.

music's neural mechanisms

Whenever my daughter has a tune in her head that she can't shake, she has an interesting solution. "Turn on the radio," she says, "I gotta hear some different music." In effect, she tricks her brain and diverts it from one musical function to another. In this his tenth book, Oliver Sacks, Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University, explores how the brain processes music. As in his other books, Sacks compiles dozens of "clinical anecdotes." These are informal, inherently fascinating, and deeply human case histories of his patients. In addition, he shares at length from letters that he has received, scientific studies, the results of brain imaging techniques, and his own personal experiences.

Rooted in his own deep love for and skill in music, Sacks examines how music impacts "almost every aspect of brain function." If that sounds far-fetched, consider the range of his topics. There's musical imagery, whereby you "listen" to a tune in your mind even though there is no sound. As experience shows, this can be either voluntary or involuntary, sometimes an obsession or even something like a "possession" by the music. A long chapter explores "musical hallucinations." There are forays into amusia, dystimbria, dysharmonia, perfect pitch, and musical savants. He analyzes the relationship of music and blindness, music and color, music and speech, Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, dreams and dementia. Sometimes musicophilia results from a seizure; at other times music induces a seizure.

Sacks's book is an extended case study of the brain-mind relationship. And most mysterious of all is the question whether music even has any meaning. "While [music] is most closely tied to the emotions, music is wholly abstract; it has no formal power of representation whatever. We may go to a play to learn about jealousy, betrayal, vengeance, love -- but music, instrumental music, can tell us nothing about these. Music can have wonderful, formal, quasi-mathematical perfection, and it can have heartbreaking tenderness, poignancy, and beauty. . . But it does not have to have any 'meaning' whatever" (37). Such is the mystery of music, that although it conveys no inherent meaning, no one would question its power.

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Disturbances

Ulysses Grant knew two songs: one was the Yankee Doodle, the other was not. That's my kind of pun. I keep telling my Chinese friends that I do not believe in their tones. Tones are just a trick to fool dumb foreigners like me into thinking that the language is unlearnable.
Nabokov, one of my main heroes, tells us in his memoirs that music, for him, was just an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds.
In other words, I am not left alone with my amusia.
I am happy that my affliction is not quite as bad as Nabokov's (whose son became an opera singer, by the way). I do enjoy listening to music and I love concerts. I just don't hear tones and I was the worse singer in living memory in my high school. Only the Bundeswehr appreciated my talent for marching songs. Reading Sacks shows me that it could have been much worse.
The multitude of possible problems is huge. Sacks gives us dozens of case studies, some studied intensively, some just based on correspondence. Music can be the cause or at least trigger of problems, like in some epileptic attacks, or the consequence of problems, like in some hallucinations. Music can be a problem when it disappears or when it intrudes. Music is used as a therapy for many problems.
The book is a veritable phenomenology of musical problems of the brain.
Which leads me to my mild criticism: after some of the stories, the telling of case after case wears you out. There seems to be no handle for explanations yet. Science seems to have a lot of pieces for the puzzle, but is still quite far away from a comprehensive understanding of our brain and mind.
One chapter with special fascination is the one on synesthesia. Nabokov had it as a child, though not in a version involving music. Sacks tells us, that Nab's mother had it too, which is mentioned in Speak, Memory, and that his wife and son had it as well. Transcending the brain, but still short of explanations.
A case that Sacks is not mentioning, that I 'encountered' in my literary excursions, is Kenzaburo Oe's son, who was born with a brain damage, who grew up as a handicapped child in a loving family, and who developed artistic talents as a composer. (Oe's Rise Up O Young Men recommended as an extended case study.)
Disturbances: Wilhelm Busch, a popular German writer/comedian/cartoonist (Max & Moritz) of the late 19th century had this to say about music: it is often considered disturbing because it is always coming along with noise.

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Complex Treatment of a Complex Phenomenon

It's hard to rate this book, because it aims for both a scientific and a popular auidience. So, it depends into which audience you fall. I fall into the latter, so I found the book lacking. The book really is written for a more scientific audience and the casual reader soon finds himself bogged down in medical terminology, endless footnotes, etc. Reading the whole book was an arduous task for me. Like his other books, Sacks here describes individuals with various pathologies regarding the way their minds respond to music. But the case studies were less interesting than those in his other books. But, I guess there was no other way to write a book like this. So, in many ways, it was educational. In many other ways, boring.

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