His most recent book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, is in a format familiar to readers of Sacks’ work, mixing as it does humane observation of patients with up-to-date neurological diagnosis and explanations of brain function, this time with cases all related to music. A Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, where he moved from London in 1965, Sacks’ bestsellers such as Migraine, An Anthropologist on Mars, and The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat have given a general audience insight into a wide range of neurological conditions such as Tourettes, aphasia, and amnesia in a way that has illuminated the physiological basis of human consciousness and behavior. In a series of books since the 1970s, he has more or less invented a new literary subgenre - neurological anecdotes as a branch of belles lettres.
But then Sacks, who was played by Robin Williams (under the name Malcolm Sayer) in the 1990 film Awakenings, has achieved a degree of public attention that music scholars with aspirations to be public intellectuals can only dream of.
Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.The neurologist Oliver Sacks must be one of the few authors reviewed in musicological journals to have been portrayed in a Hollywood film. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia. Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. But the power of music goes much, much further. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion.
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