It is a testament to the complexity of the brain that despite decades of research we still have relatively little understanding of why so many of us enjoy music so deeply and revel in its ability to alter our moods, trigger memories and even change our lives.
That is just fine with me as someone who has never heard a kind of music that he didn’t like.
Regular readers of my blog (the cats, my next door neighbor’s cats, my faithful brother and that sweet woman from England who keeps seeing UFOs) know that I adore music.
Music is pretty much a full-time companion. It wakes me up in the morning and relaxes me in the evening. It helps me celebrate good times and weather bad times. It makes me move my body in fun and interesting ways when the Dear Friend & Conscience and I are at a concert or roll up the living room rug on a Saturday night and boogie. And I can say without equivocation that it does strange and wondrous things to my mind.
Yet for all of the music that I have absorbed since I first heard “Pop Goes the Weasel” played on a jack in the box, I don’t have a clue as to how and why it does those things to my mind.
Oliver Sacks has many clues and they are on display in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, a fascinating if uneven book.
Sacks, a groundbreaking neurologist and prolific medical writer, presents a pastiche of medical case studies ranging from the amazing tale of a man struck by lightning who subsequently develops a passion and talent for the concert piano to less fortunate souls who have violently disruptive musical hallucinations or less intrusive “ear wigs,” songs that play in a continuing loop in their minds. These “musical misalignments,” as Sacks calls them, are seldom fully treatable, let alone understood.
Even less understood are why some people, myself included, find such joy and even rapture in music while others – Sacks cites Che Guevara, who was rhythm-deaf, and Sigmund Freud and Vladimir Nabokov, brilliant men who didn’t get even the least bit of pleasure from music – as representative of large segments of the population.
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