Music, he says, can act as a “Proustian mnemonic, eliciting emotions and associations that had been long forgotten, giving the patient access once again to mood and memories, thoughts and worlds that had seemingly been completely lost.”Īs he’s done in his earlier books, Dr. Sacks’ view, music can aid aphasics and patients with parkinsonism, and it can help orient and anchor patients with advanced dementia because “musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared.” Indeed, this volume makes a powerful case for the benefits of music therapy.

He writes about the “narrative or mnemonic power of music,” its ability to help a person follow intricate sequences or retain great volumes of information - a power that explains why music can help someone with autism perform procedures he or she might otherwise be incapable of.Ĭredit. He muses upon the unequal distribution of musical gifts among the human population: Che Guevara, he tells us, was “rhythm deaf,” capable of dancing a mambo while an orchestra was playing a tango, whereas Freud and Nabokov seemed incapable of receiving any pleasure from music at all. Sacks writes not just as a doctor and a scientist but also as a humanist with a philosophical and literary bent, and he’s able in these pages to convey both the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the equally profound mysteries of music: an art that is “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” devoid of the power to “represent anything particular or external,” but endowed with the capacity to express powerful, inchoate moods and feelings. A composer with synesthesia sees specific colors when he hears music in different musical keys: G minor, for instance, is not just “yellow” but “ocher” D minor is “like flint, graphite” and F minor is “earthy, ashy.” A virtuosic pianist who for many years bizarrely lost the use of his right hand, finds at the age of 36 that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand have started to curl uncontrollably under his palm when he plays.ĭr. A musical savant with a “phonographic” memory learns the melodies to hundreds of operas, as well as what every instrument plays and what every voice sings. A composer of atonal music starts having musical hallucinations that are “tonal” and “corny”: irritating Christmas songs and lullabies that play endlessly in his head. Sacks focuses on people afflicted with strange musical disorders or powers - “musical misalignments” that affect their professional and daily lives. In books like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” the physician Oliver Sacks has given us some compelling and deeply moving portraits of patients in predicaments so odd, so vexing, so metaphysically curious that they read like something out of a tale by Borges or Calvino.

Oliver sacks book musicophilia