Music and the Brain

Oliver Sacks’ latest book, ‘Musicophilia’, opens with the story of a man who died briefly following an electric shock. Though he had never been the least bit interested before his ‘death’ he soon after became obsessed by, and only by, Romantic piano music. And I mean obsessed – his wife left him and he nearly lost his job because he had no time for anything but Chopin.

Sacks should be available on the National Health. He is learned & compassionate and his amazing books – part science, part story – are full of tales as bizarre as those creatures at the very bottom of the sea (one of Sacks’ earlier books discussed a patient who was given sight after almost a lifetime of blindness and could recognise parts of a cat but could not understand visual information enough to identify an entire cat). ‘Musicophilia’ came out in paperback early this month (I can’t carry hardbacks around all day) and it’s the best thing I’ve read all year. A study of neurology and music, the book explores subjects such as perfect pitch – is it learnt or inherent – and the frankly terrifying phenomenon of musical hallucinations – choirs singing at full volume day and night or, even worse, two notes of a single tune for years on end. It is often by studing the abnormal that neurologists surmise how ‘normal’ works and Sacks observations of a range of weird music-related symptoms are fascinating.

Music is apparently a whole brain activity – there is no single music ‘centre’ – and therefore incredibly complex. Reductionists are puzzled by the lack of ‘use’ for music in evolutionary terms, but one of the joys of Sacks writing is that he accepts that we only know what we know and we should never assume we’ve got the whole picture. The relationship some people have with music is as important any other in their lives and this makes understanding how it ‘works’ an important field of study.