Book Review

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

N Engl J Med 2008; 358:2304-2305May 22, 2008

Article

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
By Oliver Sacks. 381 pp. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. $26. ISBN: 978-1-4000-4081-0

When I was an infant, my father set up a little record player near my crib. He was a man of few words, and his love of music was out of proportion to everything else about him. His ambitions had been curtailed by the Great Depression, and he wanted to make certain that I had a chance at the career he had been denied. I became a pianist, composer, and teacher, and when I heard the story about the record player as an adult, it seemed to account for why I had always thought of music as being somehow more profound than language. In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks points out that this is true not only of people who have had early exposure to music. Being struck by a bolt of lightning could yield the same result.

The idea that music has a special — even privileged — position in the range of human activity is probably as old as recorded thought. Plato and Aristotle understood that the power of music could be insidious, and they warned that it could be exploited to subversive ends. Still earlier, the Chinese had ascribed political significance to specific “fundamental tones.” Philosophical thought in more recent centuries has focused on the narrative aspect of music as the image of temporal experience, represented with an immediacy of which verbal and spatial modes of expression are structurally incapable. In our own time, it has become possible to assert, as Sacks does, that “Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician — but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation.”

Although we may not have come any closer to bridging the conceptual gap between “mind” and “brain” (for which the book's subtitle, “Tales of Music and the Brain,” is yet another alias), the essays in this book indicate that we at least have an increasingly precise estimate of the distance that must be covered — expressed in miles of pathology. For although the book's four sections — “Haunted by Music,” “A Range of Musicality,” “Memory, Movement, and Music,” and “Emotion, Identity, and Music” — suggest a positive delineation of the functions of musical cognition, the methodology is mostly privative. The subjects covered in the book include hallucinations, cochlear amusia, parkinsonism, Williams syndrome, dementia, blindness, and phantom limbs. Readers will learn how music can fill chasms of memory, speech, emotion, and mobility that have been opened by degenerative processes or traumatic events.

Chapter 14, “The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music,” is a more direct and specifically musical approach to the underlying cognitive processes. Of interest here is the idea that the uniquely (and philosophically problematic) self-referential character of music is not achieved by the association of exterior, acoustical phenomena with internal, nonacoustical ones, but by the linkage and collaboration of distinct and primordial areas of mental function. “Synesthesia literally means a fusion of the senses, and it is classically described as a purely sensory phenomenon,” Sacks writes. “But it is becoming clear that there are conceptual forms of synesthesia, too.” Anyone who has experienced the confusion of words and music in the hypnagogic state (between waking and sleeping) will be tantalized by the thought that music is itself a kind of synesthesia, a narrative fusion of the auditory and the temporal, of the intellectual and the emotional, whose subject matter is nothing other than our innermost being.

Inevitably, objections will arise that the author's investigations, and most of the research he references, are strongly oriented toward Western classical music. Although neurology is not the right forum for polemics about snobbery and reverse snobbery, further research into the relationship between music and mental function could shed light on the relationship between music and culture in general, especially in the area of critical thinking. The uniquely Western development of a hierarchical harmonic system based on polyphony and its connection to the experience of conflict and resolution in the social sphere would offer a particularly interesting terrain for this type of study.

Sacks's writing is a known quantity, and although his discussion of the subject matter is not particularly technical, Musicophilia will probably appeal mostly to those who share a strong connection to music or for whom such an interest is itself a matter of curiosity. The book has collateral value as a general introduction to the study of the neurologic underpinnings of music, thanks in part to an exceptionally interesting bibliography.

Marvin Wolfthal
Weston, MA 02493
maw@weichi.com