Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks (Picador)
It is a remarkable fact that if I merely type “the Mission: Impossible theme tune” or “Beethoven’s Fifth”, you will probably start humming to yourself. We take it for granted, but how is it possible? What is going on in our brains? Oliver Sacks, the neurologist author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, here devotes a book to the cognitive miracles of music. “It really is a very odd business,” he muses, “that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.”
Sacks’s deeply warm and sympathetic study is about pathologies of musical response and what they might teach us about the “normal” faculty of music. It reports on fascinating new findings from anatomy — a musician’s brain is easily distinguishable on a scan from those of others; and the passage from ear to brain is not a one-way conduit but works both ways, the brain being able to tune the ears, as it were. But mostly Musicophilia is about the more mysterious, and currently inexplicable, ways in which music affects the brain, for good or ill. And when it affects the brain, it affects the whole person, as Plato knew, seeking to ban some types of music from his Republic for the health of the citizenry. Shakespeare’s Richard II, meanwhile, could have provided an epigraph to Sacks’s book – the King at one point complains:
This music mads me. Let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
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