Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain » (Reprint)

Awakenings author and famed neurologist Oliver Sacks once described the secret to his signature style: "For me, writing and medicine, writing and science, are not separate: they entail each other."

Revised and Expanded

With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls “musical misalignments.” Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans; and a man whose memory spans only seven seconds-for everything but music.

Illuminating, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable, Musicophilia is Oliver Sacks' latest masterpiece.

The Barnes & Noble Review

When I told my parents that I was pregnant with their first grandchild, my father said, almost sternly, "Well, dear, I do hope you're singing to the baby." I don't know if encouraging an ear for music is an optional stage of fetal development -- it just might be inevitable. The neurologist and essayist Oliver Sacks, in his book of essays entitled Musicophilia, takes on the mysterious internal human drives towards music, often against tough odds. Almost everyone possesses the "neural apparatus" for appreciating music -- Sacks will go on to tell us about some people who, through various neurological accidents, have lost it -- but the sheer human fact of appreciating music at all, he points out, is a very weird thing. "[I]t has no concepts, makes no propositions; it lacks images, symbols, the stuff of language. It has no power of representation. It has no necessary relation to the world."

Preface

Part I: Haunted by Music
1. A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia
2. A Strangely Familiar Feeling: Musical Seizures
3. Fear of Music: Musicogenic Epilepsy
4. Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination
5. Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes
6. Musical Hallucinations

Part II: A Range of Musicality
7. Sense and Sensibility: A Range of Musicality
8. Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia
9. Papa Blows His Nose in G: Absolute Pitch
10. Pitch Imperfect: Cochlear Amusia
11. In Living Stereo: Why We Have Two Ears
12. Two Thousand Operas: Musical Savants
13. An Auditory World: Music and Blindness
14. The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music

Part III: Memory, Movement, and Music
15. In the Moment: Music and Amnesia
16. Speech and Song: Aphasia and Music Therapy
17. Accidental Davening: Dyskinesia and Cantillation
18. Come Together: Music and Tourette’s Syndrome
19. Keeping Time: Rhythm and Movement
20. Kinetic Melody: Parkinson’s Disease and Music Therapy
21. Phantom Fingers: The Case of the One-Armed Pianist
22. Athletes of the Small Muscles: Musician’s Dystonia

Part IV: Emotion, Identity, and Music
23. Awake and Asleep: Musical Dreams
24. Seduction and Indifference
25. Lamentations: Music and Depression
26. The Case of Harry S.: Music and Emotion
27. Irrepressible: Music and the Temporal Lobes
28. A Hypermusical Species: Williams Syndrome
29. Music andIdentity: Dementia and Music Therapy

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index