Oliver Sacks 💫

 

One day in New York, Oliver Sacks attends a meeting organized by a drummer with about thirty people with Tourette's syndrome: everyone appears to be gripped by contagious tics, which spread "like waves." Then the drummer begins to play—and as if by magic, the group follows suit with their drums, blending into perfect rhythmic synchrony. This astonishing example is just one particular variant of the prodigy of "neurogamy" that occurs whenever our nervous system "marries" that of those around us through the medium of music. Presenting this and many other cases with his customary ability to empathize, in "Musicophilia" Sacks explores the extraordinary neural robustness of music and its connections with the functions and dysfunctions of the brain. Auditory hallucinations, amusia, disharmony, musicogenic epilepsy: what disruptions in the two-way connection between the senses and the brain cause them? 

As always, the investigation of the anomalous sheds light on opposing phenomena: perfect pitch, phonographic memory, musical intelligence, and above all, the love of music—a love that can flare up suddenly, as in the memorable case of the doctor who, struck by lightning, is assailed by an "insatiable desire to listen to piano music," to play, and even to compose. Thanks to the testimonies of Sacks's patients, we thus find ourselves reconsidering fascinating questions from a new perspective, and we witness the successes of music therapy in formidable testing grounds such as autism, Parkinson's disease, and dementia. From the mysterious musical dreams that inspired Berlioz, Wagner, and Stravinsky, to Nabokov's possible amusia, to the rediscovery of "the enormous, often underestimated, importance of having two ears": each story Sacks gives voice to illuminates one of the many ways in which music, emotion, memory, and identity intertwine, and define us.

Oliver Sacks's "Musicofilia" is back in the Biblioteca Adelphi series. Translated by Isabella Blum.