Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
353 pages
Published 2007
Read from September 27 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Ever
since I was 12, I have had music almost constantly stuck in my head. It
began when my father had taken me and fled from Ohio after my brother
had ran away to live with our mother's family. It was a disordered time,
a time of escalation for my father's debilitating paranoia; while I,
having lost my only "friend" and point of stability in the world, was
left trying to cling to fragments of my old life (I resumed writing,
with a persistent idea of showing off my stories to Randy after he "came
back"), Eric was desperately trying to shed effects and belongings and
ties, streamlining (as he thought) his efforts to seek "asylum" for us
in various foreign countries. The car that drew us west lacked a working
radio, and Eric kept hold of only two or three cassettes, one of which
was the Moody Blues' Seventh Sojourn. As autumn chilled the plains and volcanic mesas of western New Mexico, I heard Seventh Sojourn
again and again and again, the only music I knew for months; when Eric
grew sick of the repetition and refused to play the tape, I
reconstructed it note by note, song by song in my head. I could begin
with the opening thrum and drums of "Lost in a Lost World" and replay
the album all the way to the whistling and clapping and synthesizer
blurt that closed out "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)."
From those cramped, crippling days more than half a lifetime ago, I've
rarely known more than a few minutes' peace from the intrusions of
musical earworms.
Whether because of this or just out of general
intellectual curiosity, the subject of music's effect on the brain has
long fascinated me. And since I already like the work of Oliver Sacks,
this book was an obvious choice. Although Sacks is a fluent writer, his
neurological works are, necessarily, oriented for the appreciation of
lay readers. "Tales" is indeed an apt description of Musciophilia's
contents; Sacks describes various patients and correspondents, an
edifyingly broad array of musical pathologies and anomalies, but I came
away from it not feeling that I understood much more than I had before.
Sacks' analysis rarely delves beyond the correlation between certain
neurological abnormalities and musical maladies and prodigies; a line
from the closing paragraph, "Music is part of being human," is just
about all I took away from this book. Granted, anything more involved
would get technical quite rapidly, and the "purpose" of humanity's
musicality is of course the topic of unresolved (perhaps unresolvable)
debate. I can't fault Sacks for his safe, descriptive format, but Musicophilia felt more like a list of neurological curiosities than anything insightful.
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