Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
A Book Review
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
tells any story in which he is producing the music. He has such an extensive musical knowledge
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
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
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
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
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’
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
Sacks, O. Musicophilia: tales of music and the brain. Vintage, 2008, Kindle.*