Mysterious music from a living organ
Even injured, the brain conducts this uniquely human expression.
By Tom Valeo, Special to the Times
Published October 21, 2007
Oliver Sacks identifies himself as a neurologist, and until recently he spent his days treating brain ailments. In his books, however, Sacks reveals himself as a philosopher of the mind who uses his knowledge about glial cells, neurotransmitters and other aspects of mental machinery to tease out theories about how the brain produces the wondrous thing we call consciousness.
In his most famous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks seized upon an array of brain maladies such as memory loss, Tourette's syndrome and dementia to expose how a healthy brain performs some of its most amazing feats.
In Musicophilia, Sacks focuses exclusively on the brain's ability to produce and respond to rhythm, melody, harmonics and the other elements of music. And once again he demonstrates that this commonplace brain activity is anything but common.
He begins with an account of a physician who was struck by lightning at a picnic. He recovered completely, but he developed an intense desire to listen to piano music, especially works by Chopin, then the desire to play. So he acquired a piano and began to teach himself. He began to hear original melodies in his head, which he transcribed. When he made his performance debut, he earned lavish praise both for his playing and his compositions.
This is just the first of many stories that Sacks tells in his beguiling book. He interviews people who, as they lose their hearing, develop musical hallucinations so vivid that they believe them to be coming from an unseen radio. He attempts to explain what enables "brainworms" to infect our minds and keep playing.
Sacks proposes no overarching theory to account for these curiosities. But he shows that music, like speech, is uniquely human, and that being human results, astonishingly, from simple chemical signals produced by a 3-pound mass of fatty tissue encased in the skull.
Tom Valeo writes about medical and health issues.
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
By Oliver Sacks
Knopf, 400 pages, $26.