Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brainby Oliver Sacks
If you listened to any NPR programming between October and December of last year, no doubt you've heard about the esteemed neuro scientist and popular science writer Oliver Sack's most recent book. Along with Steven Pinker, Sacks is probably the best known science writer around, and each new publication is cause for a minor public media frenzy; add to this the fact that his new book is about music, and the charms to this reviewer become patently clear.
Just as Dawkins's The God Delusion was published at right around the same time as Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, inaugurating the movement of "New Atheism" (or "nu-atheism" if they were a little bit more hip), Musicophilia was released just after the clinical psychologist (and U Oregon alum) Dan Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music. Furthermore, the fine Americanist and folk music scholar (and my old adviser) Anne Dhu McLucas is currently putting the finishing touches on a book that deals extensively with the cognitive aspects of music learning and transmission. In these few fleeting, serendipitous months, the coming together of cognitive science and musicology are all the rage in our popular imagination. Levitin and Sacks gave interviews on NRP, traipsed around the nation giving lectures, and similar pieces of research emerged mushroom-like from the blooming Zeitgeist. With a big interest in this area of study, I naturally went out and read the book soon after its release, which was now close to half a year ago.
Musicophilia is a generously sized book that, in a nutshell, examines all the myriad ways our brains can go haywire in processing musical stimuli. As with Sack's other books, it is essentially a tenuously tied-together string of case studies on musical malfunction. Some of the stories are really amazing: for instance, a man is struck by lightning, has a near-death experience, then awakens to find himself obsessed with piano music. Having never been particularly interested in music his whole life, he becomes so driven by his musical visions that he quits his job as a surgeon to pursue piano playing and composing full time. In another case study, an old woman is haunted by music that will not go away in her mind - sometimes, this interior soundtrack is painfully deafening.
In other remarkable case studies, Sacks reports on the effects of music in speech therapy. For instance, numerous clinical studies indicate that singing can greatly increase the changes of an aphasic person (damage to the language centers of the brain) to relearn how to speak. Words alone are impossible to speak, but if they can be encoded in song, then an aphasic can access their language, and thus their ability to communicate again.
It is also very interesting to note that basically all brains look similar, and you cannot tell the different between Einstein's brain and Bush's just by looking at them. But musicians brains actually look different - according to Sacks, this is the only category of human being with a distinctive brain appearance.
All of these case studies and curios were engaging enough, but at a certain point it all just gets to be too much. Musicophilia is 347 pages of what amounts to a neurological freak show, and as intriguing as the topic and the nascent field are to me, I just couldn't really get into this book. Devoid of any musical context (how music signifies meaning) and frustratingly light on the scientific explanations for the conditions discussed therein, Sack's book struck me as not musical enough for the musician and not scientific enough for the scientist. Of course, this may be precisely why this book was so popular: just how many of us in the general popular are serious musicians and scientists? (The writing staff of Mirth and Matter is another story..) With such light explanations, nothing really sticks with you. Despite the very colorful stories presented in this book, six months later and I can barely remember a single fact that I learned from it. Like the amnesiacs discussed in the book, Musicophilia has disappeared from my mind leaving scarcely a trace.
I encourage anyone who read this one and got a lot out of it to post a comment - I'm genuinely baffled by why it was so popular and really would like to hear your take on it.
2 comments:
I may read it now after your review.
One thing to consider in regards to your closing statement. We all know and love Stockhausen's statement that once we hear a sound we are never the same. Being academics we become fond of our encyclopedic memories that bestow upon us a certain degree of trivial fortitude. I will say this though: you did mention the brain shape phenomena to me once in a conversation, therefore it has obviously stuck with you. Obviously this book isn't written in a fashion conducive to our cranial compilers, yet, like sounds, you are forever changed for just having read it.
Maybe it's like calling home from college. You do so much brain work that results in personal discovery, abstract ideas, and problem solving that you naturally feel accomplished. In this state of excitement you call home to let the family know you're okay and doing something with your life, but when it comes time to brag about your achievements your words fall flat to the floor. Often it's not worth mentioning the things that aren't a raise at work, the dean's list, or a scholarship. That doesn't make it any less important. Maybe in that way your imagination of the topic shifted slightly, you just don't have the concrete topical knowledge to bookmark it in your brain.
Or the reading could have been that tepid. I dunno.
True enough, good point. Perhaps the problem here was just one of expectations - I went into it thinking it would delve a little deeper into cognition and meaning, when to my understanding it came out sounding like a big laundry list of disorders and stories. Interesting material, to be sure: you won't be bored. But I just expected something different, which really is more my fault than Sack's.
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