Music on the Mind: A Neurologist’s Take
Oliver Sacks is the master of medical case-study storytelling. His new book is a trove of strange-but-true tales about the mind and music.
Published September 1, 2007
By Adrienne Burke
Academy Contributor
In his 40-plus-year career as a neurologist in New York City, Columbia University Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry Oliver Sacks has arrived at some surprising insights into how the brain perceives and stores music. Sacks, a member of The New York Academy of Sciences (the Academy), spoke with the Academy about his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which will be published by Knopf in October.
You describe in this book some extraordinary cases involving music, starting with one in which a man develops, in mid-life, a passion for piano so intense that he begins studying, composing, and eventually performing concerts.
Tony was an orthopedic surgeon upstate who never had much interest in music. In 1994, when he was on the telephone during a thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning flew out from the phone and hit him in the face and he was flung backwards. He had a cardiac arrest and some strange out-of-body experiences. Amazingly, he survived, and five weeks later, over the course of 48 hours, he had this extraordinary transformation during which he developed an insatiable desire to hear and then play piano music. He had a dream he was performing his own composition, and when he awoke he heard it in his mind. From that moment, he was taken over by music.
What’s the neurological explanation for what happened to Tony?
In brief, I don’t know. I think either as a result of the direct passage of lightning through the body and the brain or the cardiac arrest, there have been some cerebral changes and a certain emotional change. He’s very much more expansive and emotional than he was before. I think he has some sort of hyperactivity going on in the temporal lobes and amygdala, but I’ve yet to confirm it.
You say people experiencing musical hallucinations are relieved to find out they’re not psychotic, that it’s a physiological condition.
People are very relieved to hear that musical hallucinations are not uncommon, not psychotic, and they don’t indicate a brain tumor or anything like that. About three-fourths of the people who get them have fairly advanced deafness. It’s as if when the brain isn’t receiving its usual input, it starts to reach for memories to stimulate itself. Interestingly, it only does this with music. So people with musical hallucinations, on the whole, do not hear voices or noises.
There seems to have been a musical undertone to your neurology career.
Yes, unexpected and not sought, but this has been the case, really going back 40 years or more to the time when I met the deeply Parkinsonian patients whom I later described in Awakenings. They were sometimes so transfixed that they were motionless and couldn’t make a movement, couldn’t utter a syllable, and yet they could be given flow by music, they could sing, they could dance. In things like Parkinson’s, one’s power to initiate flow and one’s sense of flow, time, tempo, and sequence are all affected.
In the chronic disease hospital where I’ve worked for 40 years, I have seen the power of music for people who have had strokes or brain injuries or tumors, who have become aphasic and lost language, at least lost expressive language. Our life is talk. It is an unbearable, almost suicidal deprivation to be unable to speak, and yet most of these patients will find they can sing—and not only sing a tune but sing the words. They realize that language is still there, even if it’s embedded in the lyric of a song.
As a physician, I’ve seen these therapeutic powers…It makes me realize that as neurologists and as neuroscientists, perhaps we haven’t paid enough attention to music.
Also read: Neural Harmony: When Art Meets Neuroscience and What Near-Death and Psychedelic Experiences Reveal about Human Consciousness.
