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0 of 3 found the following review helpful:
gift for a friend Jul 07, 2010
It looked like an interesting book, but I have not read it since it was a gift.
0 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Haven't Received it yet May 23, 2010
I ordered the book about 1 week prior to leaving the SF Bay Area on my way to our summer place in BC, Canada. I chose the vendor because it was in WA and had it sent to a friend in a neighboring town because I wanted to avoid Canadian customs (time consuming). When I got to my friends home it still had not arrived and did not arrive until a few weeks later. It is still sitting there; so, I haven't' seen it. I know the book as I have read part of it, a loaner from a friend, and look forward to receiving it and finishing that read. But the vendor sure did take a long time...I probably won't use it again.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Musicophilia May 10, 2010
This is an interesting book for those who hear music in their ears.The author has many anecdotes and explains the brain, its complexity, and offers some insight into the problem, which apparently falls under Tinnitis. Sometimes the music is pleasant, sometimes not. There isn't much of a solution for the problem, but at least you realize you are not the only one, and are not crazy.
If you suffer from music hallucinations, read this book.It is easy to read.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Amazing book Apr 11, 2010
After reading this books, you feel like wanting to be a neurologist and apply to work with Sacks. He is brillant and the book is a delight to read - as are his other books. I particularly enjoyed "The Anthropologist of Mars". The main theme about the book is music, but don't be fooled, although music is what connects all stories, it is mainly a book about the brain. Even if you are not a big music fan (as I am not) but enjoy learning about the mechanisms of the brain - this is very exciting - specially because it helped me to explain why I am not into music and why different people are touched in different ways by music. I understood why I found some songs interesting and others completely boring, for example.
The Varieties of Musical Experience Apr 07, 2010
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James posits that religion is best understood by studying the testimonies of persons who experience religious feelings at their most intense: not the ordinary religious believers, but the mystics, the exalted, the luminaries, and other "geniuses in the religious line". Similarly, when studying the human propensity to music, Oliver Sacks focusses on the unusual cases: not necessarily the musicians--he doesn't study musical creativity, and some musicians have a very standard sensitivity to music--but the people who experience music differently.
The range and variety of musical experience are indeed phenomenal. There are some people who can scarcely hold a tune in their heads and others who can hear entire symphonies in their minds with a detail and vividness little short of actual perception. The same musical piece will leave one auditor flat and indifferent, while the other may be moved to the highest peak of emotion. Some music lovers cannot have it on as a background when they work; they must attend to music completely or turn it off, for it is too powerful to allow them to focus on other mental activities. For each tone-deaf or melody-impaired person, there is another gifted with absolute pitch who can immediately tell the tone of any note, without either reflection or comparison with an external standard. Some people--a surprizingly large number--"see" color or "taste" or "smell" or "feel" various sensations as they listen to music.
The "wonderful machinery" of musical perception, perhaps because it is so complex and highly developed, is vulnerable to various distortions, excesses, and breakdowns. The power to perceive or imagine music may be impaired with some brain lesions; there are many such forms of amusia. On the other hand, musical imagery may become excessive and uncontrollable, leading to incessant repetition of catchy tunes, or even musical hallucinations. In some people, music can provoke epileptic seizures. There are special neurological hazards, "disorders of skill", that may affect professional musicians. For people suffering from total amusia, music is no longer experienced as music, but as "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating songs", as Nabokov put it.
Some conditions get undiagnosed and underreported, like synesthesia or the association of a different color for each musical tone, because they are not something that bring patients to neurologists. Musical hallucinations may be much more diffuse than previously thought, judging from the vast amount of letters the author received after writing a column on the subject in a magazine. Many people knocked unconscious, upon recovering consciousness, "heard music" they felt coming from external source. Other persons are perpetually tuned to an inner source of music generated in their brain, and have learned to live with this condition. In many cases, being diagnosed with one neurological condition--they usually go with the letter "a": aphasia, amusia, amnesia, etc.--acts as a relief, for the patient is able to put a name on his or her state and comes to realize that others are experiencing the same thing.
Only recently has the medical community begun to realize the great therapeutic potential of music for patients with a variety of neurological conditions. Music cannot make the dead dance to the piper, but it can kickstart a damaged or inhibited motor system into action again. Some people suffering from a loss of spoken language--aphasia--may still be able to sing: not only tunes, but the words of operas, hymns, or songs. For such persons, music therapy can succeed where conventional speech therapy has failed. Some brain-damaged persons--this is the case of "the man who mistook his wife for a hat"--need to recite an inner soundtrack--dressing songs, bathing songs, eating songs--when accomplishing the elementary acts of everyday life.
Oliver Sacks put so many stories in his previous books it is amazing he still have as much left for his essay on Musicophilia. He wrote about the profound effects of music on post-encephalitic patients in Awakenings. Already his prescription for The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was a short and direct: More music! His solution to restore the human subject--the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject--at the center of neurological practice is to concentrate on case stories, narratives and tales. Only then do we have a "who" as well as a "what", a patient in relation to a disease--a real person.
He also puts a lot of himself in his books: his family background comprising a musical father and a tune-deaf mother; his musical tastes bending heavily on the classical but without neglecting the thrill of a Grateful Dead concert; his personal recollection of musical dreams, bouts of amusia, and other medical disorders in which music played a prominent role. I was surprised to see him refer on several occasions to his experience with psychoactive drugs--taking "massive doses" of amphetamines, chloral hydrate and mescaline, apparently for experimental reasons, although the protocols of those experiments are not made clear. But what struck me most was his ability to bring to life, through sense and sensibility, each subject he discusses analytically. As Oliver Sacks puts it, "I have tried to listen to my patients and subjects, to imagine and enter their experiences--it is these which form the core of this book."
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