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Upcoming Reviews:
Uncle Tungsten: My Chemical Boyhood. Neurologist Oliver Sacks’ tells the story of his amazing family and how his fascination with chemistry protected him from tragic episodes in his young life.
West’s reviews originally appeared in Book Shelf, her column for San Antonio Woman magazine written from May 2007 through October 2009. Columns are archived on the magazine's website. “Writing Book Shelf," she says, "connects me to what I enjoy most, people and books.” She highlights extraordinary writers, teachers, librarians, store managers, and individuals who foster a love for books, and she reviews her favorites. To discuss the reviews contact her at intrigue101@sbcglobal.net |
Nancy West Reviews…
MUSICOPHELIA by Oliver Sacks
Hardback 2007, paperback, Kindle, Audio, and CDs 2007-2009
ISBN 9781-4000-3353-9
Neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks first wrote about the profound effects of music on patients who contracted sleeping-sickness, encephalitis, in the 1920s epidemic after WWI. Frozen in a decades-long sleep, they were given up as hopeless until 1969 when Sacks gave them the then-new drug L-DOPA which produced an astounding, awakening effect on them. He chronicled their experience in his book, Awakenings, which was made into a film starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.
In Musicophelia, Sacks relates examples of amazing ways our brains interact with another stimulus: music. He begins with the story of a forty-two year old orthopedic surgeon, a fit former college football player. At an outdoor family gathering in upstate New York, he noticed a few storm clouds with rain and thunder off in the distance. He decided to call his mother, and after she had hung up, he was standing a foot from the phone when lightning stuck. Light blazing from the phone struck him in the face and flew him backwards. He lurched forward and saw his body on the ground with people converging around. He saw a women give his body CPR and thought he was dead. He floated upstairs, saw his children and knew they would be all right. Surrounded by a bluish-white light, he saw highlights of his life stream before him, and he felt at peace.
Suddenly back in his body, he was filled with pain. His face and left foot were burned, sites where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body. As a typical doctor, he refused the ambulance, and his family took him home. His cardiologist detected no damage by examination or EKG. He later called his neurologist because he found himself forgetting names of people he knew well. This doctor, after testing him with an EEG and MRI, found nothing amiss.
He returned to work in two weeks with lingering memory problems. His surgical skill was unimpaired. However, he had a newfound insatiable desire to listen to piano music. He had previously listened only to rock music and did not own a piano. Now, enamored by Chopin’s music, he bought recordings, ordered sheet music and longed to play it. A friend loaned him a piano, and he started to teach himself. He had had a few lessons thirty years before.
He started to hear music in his head, the first time in a dream where he was onstage in a tuxedo, playing something he had written. He woke up with the music still in his head and tried to write down what he had played; but he didn’t know how to notate music. When he played Chopin, his own music would take over and he played it instead. His mental music was ceaseless and never ran dry. He turned it off only with effort. From four a.m. when he woke until he went to work, he struggled to learn to play and notate music. As soon as he returned home, he was at the piano all evening.
Within three months after being struck by lightning, he changed from an “easygoing, genial, family man” to a “man inspired, even possessed by music, who scarcely had time for anything else.” He came to feel that the only reason he was allowed to survive was the music…that he had been transformed and given a special gift.
He continued to work as a surgeon, and he hired a music teacher. He frequently traveled to concerts, his heart and mind centered on music, a passion he never lost.
Sacks never met another person like this doctor, but he met others whose lives were dominated by music: people whose brains replaced their hearing loss with music hallucinations…music so real and intense that at first they believed they heard an orchestra playing. One woman’s music stopped only when she was “intellectually engaged,” as in conversation or playing bridge.
Many people who experienced musical hallucinations were either aged or partially deaf, but some were neither. Michael, a seven-year-old boy, “heard music from morning to night…one song after another.” When he was under pressure, the music became louder. “Take it out of my head. Take it away!” he cried.
The boy reminded Sacks of “Robert Jourdain’s story about Tchaikovsky who, as a child, was reportedly found weeping in bed: ‘This music! It is here in my head. Save me from it!’”
When Musicophelia was published in 2007, Michael was twelve. He still heard nonstop music but was better able to cope with it. His brain recorded whatever he heard and he could recall and play it later. He composed music and still had perfect pitch.
People with absolute pitch, Sacks says, can identify any note on a keyboard without looking. Not all musicians have absolute pitch: “Mozart had it, but Wagner and Schumann lacked it.” Musicians who had musical training at an early age are more apt to have absolute pitch. Many people see the same color when they hear a particular tone: hearing G# is always accompanied by seeing blue.
Fifty percent of children born blind or blinded in infancy have absolute pitch. Sacks says that University of Wisconsin scientists argue that “the development of language necessitates the inhibition of absolute pitch.”
Loud noises diminish the range of sounds people can hear, destroying hair cells within the ear that absorb vibrations which produce sound. Sacks says this condition is increasing exponentially as people play I-Pods or other music at too-loud levels. He reports that more than fifteen percent of young people now have significant hearing impairments.
What miracles has Sacks witnessed involving music? People who have lost the ability to speak (aphasia) after suffering a stroke or head injury can, by singing their words, regain their ability to communicate. Sacks found a man who was totally unable to care for himself, but who learned to sing his way through bathing, dressing, and eating.
The author tells of a professor who was about to accuse his student of cheating after she produced his lectures word for word on an exam. “Do you have a photographic memory?” he asked her. She revealed that she could remember anything “as long as she put it to music.”
Sacks says that in preliterate cultures, entire books like The Iliad and The Odyssey could be recited at length because, “like ballads, they had rhythm and rhyme.”
He describes a female patient who had Williams syndrome, “a congenital disorder…which results in a strange mixture of intellectual strengths and deficits…. She had an IQ under 60, but could sing thousands of arias in thirty-five languages from memory.”
Sacks learned about another musical benefit from a fellow physician, a triathlete and competitive cyclist who trained listening to music. The cyclist said that the rhythmical music he chose to hear during one competition elevated his physical performance beyond anything he could otherwise achieve.
“Our auditory systems, our nervous systems,” Sacks points out, “are indeed exquisitely tuned for music.” His neurological knowledge, combined with his compelling research and clear writing make Musicophelia a fascinating book.
Archived Reviews:
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