Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition
Oliver Sacks
Language: English
Pages: 425
ISBN: 1400033535
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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much more limited. I cannot hear an entire orchestra in my head, at least under normal circumstances. What I do have, to some degree, is a pianist’s imagery. With music I know well, such as Chopin’s mazurkas, which I learned by heart sixty years ago and have continued to love ever since, I have only to glance at a score or think of a particular mazurka (an opus number will set me off) and the mazurka will start to play in my mind. I not only “hear” the music, but I “see” my hands on the keyboard
amusia, and they have been able, in many cases, to identify the broad neural correlates of certain types of amusia. They feel that there are two basic categories of musical perception, one involving the recognition of melodies, the other the perception of rhythm or time intervals. Impairments of melody usually go with right-hemisphere lesions, but representation of rhythm is much more widespread and robust and involves not only the left hemisphere, but many subcortical systems in the basal
host, the owner of the piano, was surprised, and said that his piano had just been tuned and that everyone else had found it fine. Puzzled, Jacob returned home and tested his hearing on his electronic synthesizer, which is always exactly in tune. To his dismay, he found the same sharpening in the upper octaves here. He arranged to visit the audiologist he had been seeing for the last six or seven years (because of a hearing loss in the upper ranges). The audiologist was struck, as Jacob himself
Whatever involves a sequence or pattern of action, he does fluently, unhesitatingly.104 But can Clive’s beautiful playing and singing, his masterly conducting, his powers of improvisation be adequately characterized as “skills” or “procedure”? For his playing is infused with intelligence and feeling, with a sensitive attunement to the musical structure, the composer’s style and mind. Can any artistic or creative performance of this caliber be adequately explained by “procedural memory”? Episodic
“If you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest.” Although Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is well known to have been written in response to the ideas of the analytic philosopher G. E. Moore, one must wonder, too, whether the strange matter of his brother’s hand—a phantom, indeed, but real, effectual, and certain—did not also play a part in inciting Wittgenstein’s thinking. 22 Athletes of the Small Muscles: Musician’s Dystonia In 1997 I received a letter from a young