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Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Oliver Sacks
*Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain* is Oliver Sacks at his most beguiling, turning his clinician's eye and storyteller's warmth to the strange places where music and the mind meet. Sacks — the neurologist whose case studies made brain science humane and readable — collects tales of people transformed by music: a man struck by lightning who suddenly craves the piano, patients with amnesia held together by song, others tormented by unstoppable inner tunes or moved by melodies they can no longer name. Published by Knopf in 2007, it is less a single argument than a gallery of wonders, each case opening a window onto how deeply music is wired into us. For anyone curious about the brain, or simply about why music matters so much, it is irresistible.
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The author
Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) was a British-born neurologist and writer who all but invented a genre: the clinical tale that treats the patient as a full human being. Books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat made him one of the most beloved science writers of his time.
The book
Published by Knopf in 2007, Musicophilia is organized into thematic sections — on the sudden onset of musicality, on musical oddities like synesthesia and absolute pitch, and on the ways music interacts with memory, movement, and emotion. Through dozens of case histories Sacks explores both conditions caused by music, such as musical hallucinations, and conditions eased by it, including amnesia and Alzheimer's disease.
How it reads
It reads as a collection of marvels rather than a textbook, each chapter a self-contained story. It was named among the best books of 2007 by The Washington Post, and its central insight — that music is bound up with the deepest workings of the brain — has only gained ground since.
For more context
Readers can go on to Sacks's other case books and to Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain on Music for a more systematic neuroscience of music.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Oliver Sacks
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2007
- ISBN
- 978-1-4000-4081-0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Music
- Location
- Maine