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Music and the brain are both endlessly fascinating subjects, and as a
neuroscientist specialising in auditory learning and memory, I find them
especially intriguing. So I had high expectations of Musicophilia, the
latest offering from neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks. And I
confess to feeling a little guilty reporting that my reactions to the book
are mixed.
Sacks himself is the best part of Musicophilia. He richly documents
his own life in the book and reveals highly personal experiences. The
photograph of him on the cover of the book— which shows him wearing
headphones, eyes closed, clearly enchanted as he listens to
Alfred Brendel perform Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata—makes a positive
impression that is borne out by the contents of the book. Sacks’s
voice throughout is steady and erudite but never pontifical. He is neither
self-conscious nor self-promoting.
The preface gives a good idea of what the book will deliver. In it
Sacks explains that he wants to convey the insights gleaned from the
“enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings
of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often
bizarre disorders to which these are prone ” He also stresses the
importance of “the simple art of observation” and “the richness of the
human context.” He wants to combine “observation and description with
the latest in technology,” he says, and to imaginatively enter into the
experience of his patients and subjects. The reader can see that Sacks, who
has been practicing neurology for 40 years, is torn between the
“old-fashioned” path of observation and the new-fangled, high-tech
approach: He knows that he needs to take heed of the latter, but his heart lies
with the former.
The book consists mainly of detailed descriptions of cases, most of
them involving patients whom Sacks has seen in his practice. Brief
discussions of contemporary neuroscientific reports are sprinkled
liberally throughout the text. Part I, “Haunted by Music,” begins with the
strange case of Tony Cicoria, a nonmusical, middle-aged surgeon who
was consumed by a love of music after being hit by lightning. He
suddenly began to crave listening to piano music, which he had never
cared for in the past. He started to play the piano and then to compose
music, which arose spontaneously in his mind in a “torrent” of notes.
How could this happen? Was the cause psychological? (He had had a
near-death experience when the lightning struck him.) Or was it the
direct result of a change in the auditory regions of his cerebral cortex?
Electro-encephalography (EEG) showed his brain waves to be normal in the
mid-1990s, just after his trauma and subsequent “conversion” to music.
There are now more sensitive tests, but Cicoria has declined to undergo
them; he does not want to delve into the causes of his musicality. What a
shame!
Part II, “A Range of Musicality,” covers a wider variety of topics,
but unfortunately, some of the chapters offer little or nothing that is
new. For example, chapter 13, which is five pages long, merely notes
that the blind often have better hearing than the sighted. The most
interesting chapters are those that present the strangest cases. Chapter 8
is about “amusia,” an inability to hear sounds as music, and “dysharmonia,”
a highly specific impairment of the ability to hear harmony, with the
ability to understand melody left intact. Such specific
“dissociations” are found throughout the cases Sacks recounts.
To Sacks’s credit, part III, “Memory, Movement and Music,” brings us
into the underappreciated realm of music therapy. Chapter 16 explains how
“melodic intonation therapy” is being used to help expressive aphasie
patients (those unable to express their thoughts verbally following a
stroke or other cerebral incident) once again become capable of fluent
speech. In chapter 20, Sacks demonstrates the near-miraculous power of
music to animate Parkinson’s patients and other people with severe
movement disorders, even those who are frozen into odd postures.
Scientists cannot yet explain how music achieves this effect.
To readers who are unfamiliar with neuroscience and music behavior,
Musicophilia may be something of a revelation. But the book will not
satisfy those seeking the causes and implications of the phenomena Sacks
describes. For one thing, Sacks appears to be more at ease dis-cussing
patients than discussing experiments. And he tends to be rather uncritical
in accepting scientific findings and theories.
It’s true that the causes of music-brain oddities remain poorly
understood. However, Sacks could have done more to draw out some of the
implications of the careful observations that he and other
neurologists have made and of the treatments that have been successful.
For example, he might have noted that the many specific dissociations
among components of music comprehension, such as loss of the ability
to perceive harmony but not melody, indicate that there is no music
center in the brain. Because many people who read the book are likely
to believe in the brain localisation of all mental functions, this was
a missed educational opportunity.
Another conclusion one could draw is that there seem to be no “cures”
for neurological problems involving music. A drug can alleviate a symptom
in one patient and aggravate it in another, or can have both positive and
negative effects in the same patient. Treatments mentioned seem to be
almost exclusively antiepileptic medications, which “damp down” the
excitability of the brain in general; their effectiveness varies widely.
Finally, in many of the cases described here the patient with
music-brain symptoms is reported to have “normal” EEG results. Although
Sacks recognizes the existence of new technologies, among them far more
sensitive ways to analyze brain waves than the standard neurological EEG
test, he does not call for their use. In fact, although he exhibits the
greatest com-passion for patients, he conveys no sense of urgency about the
pursuit of new avenues in the diagnosis and treatment of music-brain
disorders. This absence echoes the hook’s preface, in which Sacks
expresses fear that “the simple art of observation may be lost” if we rely
too much on new technologies. He does call for both approaches,
though, and we can only hope that the neuro logical community will
respond.
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