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I write this just after another season awash with familiar carols and hymns—what would Christmas be without music? Yet it is worth stopping to reflect that all the well-known music we use to adore the newborn King only comes round once a year. The rest of the time it sits in our brains, dormant until activated by the next round of midwinter festivities.
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We all have music on the brain. And not just in the sense that it is lodged in our memories, but in the sense that we seem to be hard-wired for it. The vast majority of humans have a capacity for music. We can feel it in our bones from our earliest years: we tap to it, dance to it, sway with it, cry with it. On this built-in competence, music's legendary powers depend: music can send armies into battle, get us to buy this or that product, calm us in a traffic jam—and, indeed, direct us to the Almighty.
Quite how music interacts with our brains to achieve these effects is far from clear. Therapists have long recognized that music can, for example, relieve the symptoms of dementia, aphasia, and Parkinson's disease, but the processes involved have remained something of a mystery. However, in recent years, rapid progress has been made in bringing them to light. Most important, sophisticated imaging techniques have enabled neurologists to study brain activity while music is being produced and heard. In his latest book, neurologist Oliver Sacks, perhaps best known for The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, leads us into this rich and complex territory. With almost breathless excitement the dust-jacket declares: "Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why."
Well … not really. Fascinating, readable, and accessible the book may be, but it delivers considerably less than the blurb promises. And, as I shall suggest, this may be no bad thing.
Sacks' method is unusual. For much of the book, he operates via negativa, by showing what happens when the brain misbehaves and misfires, through injury, illness, or congenital disease (he is, after all, Professor of Clinical Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University). In this way, we can learn of the "wonderful machinery" that gives rise to humans' "musicophilia." It is as if we were shadowing Sacks at one of his clinics, except that all the patients suffer from disorders related to the experience of music.
In the book's first section, we are introduced to those who endure musical hallucinations, those ravaged by "brainworms" (melodies you can't get out of your head), and to a surgeon who after being struck by lightning developed an insatiable passion for music. In the second section Sacks addresses the question of musical ability, and we encounter, among other things, "tone deafness" (actually present in only 5 percent of the population), "disharmonia" (harmony deafness), and "distimbria" (timbre deafness). We learn that the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain is distinctly enlarged in trained musicians: "Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician … they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation."
In the section headed "Memory, Movement, and Music," Sacks includes the poignant case of Clive Wearing, a musician stricken in 1985 with severe amnesia. From one minute to the next he does not know who, where, or what he is. Now 69, only two things keep him together: a deep love for his wife and the ability to sing or play any piece of music put in front of him. For Wearing, says Sacks, music is like a rope let down from heaven: "Without performance, the thread is broken, and he is thrown back once again into the abyss." Sacks highlights the strong links between music and bodily movement: only humans can synchronize their body movements with heard rhythm, due to a particular connection between the auditory and the dorsal premotor cortex. He writes of taking an amnesiac to a Grateful Dead concert, and watching this previously inert man begin to shout in time with the crowd. A composer with Tourette's syndrome testifies: "I live my life controlled by Tourette's but use music to control it. I have harnessed its energy—I play with it, manipulate it, trick it, mimic it, taunt it, explore it, exploit it, in every possible way."
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