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Rebecca Kenaga

Book Review Essay

MUED431: Psychology of Music

A Book Review

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

By Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933. Throughout his life, he studied the

brain, written language, and medicine. After moving to New York City in 1965, he began

writing about his patients, explaining their diagnoses and the effects had on their lives. ​The New

York Times ​described him as the “poet laureate of medicine”. His other books include ​The Man

Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,​ ​Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood​ (his

autobiography), ​Seeing Voices​, and ​Awakenings.​ In 2008, he was honored with the title

Commander of the British Empire because of his impact on the medical field. He passed away in

2015.

Although this is the first time I have read any of Oliver Sacks literature, I was

very surprised to discover that his background is in medicine and the brain and not more rooted

in music. Throughout the book, he describes himself more as a musical lover, prone to getting

hooked on a specific artist, genre, or composer and listening to the same thing until he can

remember it almost completely. To my knowledge, he never describes himself as a musician or

tells any story in which he is producing the music. He has such an extensive musical knowledge

that I found that very hard to believe.


Throughout the preface, Sacks describe various forms of amusia and other changes in the

brain that affect the human relationship to music. The impacts of the damage occurred can

induce musical obsessions, hallucinations, seizures, loss of emotion, excess of emotion, or cause

synesthesia, and affect all demographics of people, musicians or not. Sacks also describes music

therapy, noting that music “may be especially powerful and have great therapeutic potential for

patients with a variety of neurological conditions” (Loc. 107). Some of the patients Sacks as

witnessed as benefiting from music therapy include individuals with Alzheimer’s, different

forms of dementia, cortical syndrome resulting in loss of language or movement ability, loss of

memory, amnesia, frontal-lobe syndromes, intellectual disability, on the Autism spectrum,

Parkinson’s, and more.

According to Sacks, there were no studies or neuroscience and its relationship to music

before the 1980s. The development of new technologies have “allow[ed] us to see the living

brain as people listen to, imagine, and even compose music”. I had noticed in my prior readings

that most studies of music were published fairly recently, speaking to the truth in Sack’s words.

This book is unlike any other I have ever read, the most significant difference being that

it is essentially a journal of case studies of individuals with musical differences. It is divided into

four sections, not including the preface or postscript pages. The four parts are titled “Haunted by

Music”, “A Range of Musicality”, “Memory, Movement, and Music”, and “Emotion, Identity,

and Music”, each divided into stories (case studies) that fit into that larger categories. It has

sixteen pages of citations and even more pages of footnotes, speaking to the vastness of the

information and the sheer numbers of individuals whose stories fill this book.
The firstcase study, titled “A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia” describes Tony

Cicoria, a forty-year old athletic orthopedic surgeon living in upstate New York. Tony was at a

family event when struck by lightning. He died —

“I floated up the stairs — my consciousness came with me.

I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay.

Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light… an enormous

feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points

of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these…

pure thought, pure ecstasy” (p. 4) —

and came back to life. His cardiologist examined him later and thought he must have suffered

from a brief cardiac arrest, but all test results came back fine. Both his cardiologist and

neurologist felt that Cicoria would not suffer from any lasting effects. Soon after, he had an

“‘insatiable desire to listen to piano music’” (p. 4). He had never really learned piano, although

he had a few lessons as a child, and his favorite music was rock music. He soon began to teach

himself piano, and eventually his head was filled with music; it wasn’t a hallucination, but

“‘inspiration’” (p. 5). “His music is ceaseless. ‘It never runs dry,’ he continued. ‘If anything, I

have to turn it off’” (p. 5). He found a music teacher and started composing. Since, he has been

divorced and suffered from a horrendous motorcycle accident, and nothing has affected his

intense love for music.

The most intriguing chapter for me was titled “The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and

Music”. Synesthesia “may involve any of the senses — for example, one person may perceive

letters or days of the week as having their own particular colors; another may feel that every
color has its own peculiar smell, or every music interval its own taste” (p. 177). Many

synesthetes never approach neurologists about their conditions because they consider their

experience “perfectly normal and usual, that everyone experiences fusions of different senses as

they do” (p. 178). One patient of Sacks, a painter with synesthesia, suffered from a head injury

and became colorblind. He had seen color with music throughout his entire life, and after the

injury, he could no longer understand or imagine color nor see color with music. This lead Sacks

to believe synesthesia must be physiological. Another patient, contemporary composer and

pianist Michael Torke, has key synesthesia; for instance, D major is blue. The colors of keys are

similar between letter names. He also has absolute pitch. When Torke sees the colors, they

appear “‘like a screen’” (p. 181) in front of him, but do not affect his vision.

Another patient, an Italian violinist, lost control of his third, fourth, and fifth fingers on

his left hand specifically while playing the violin. He could no longer control pitch with those

fingers — but his fingers acted normally in all other activities. This is known as musicians’

dystonia (p. 289).

I chose to read this book because of the massive amount of recommendations I had

received. The beautiful preface gave me a reason to continue reading, introducing the purpose of

the writing. He questions the human relationship to music, attempting to explain our desire to

listen, “This propensity to music — this “Musicophilia” — shows itself in infancy, is manifest

and central in every culture, and probably goes back to the very beginnings of our species”, “it

lies so deep in human nature that one is tempted to think of it as innate” (Location 59), and

quotes Pinker, “‘As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless… it could

vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be completely unchanged’” (Loc. 68).
I disagreed and felt compelled to challenge some of these assumptions, encouraging my reading.

I was not disappointed. There is an astonishing amount of information in this book, and I will

likely continue rereading it and citing it for the rest of my life.


Works Cited

Sacks, O. ​Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain.​ Vintage, 2008, Kindle.*

*Some pages given in Location numbers.

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