am/fm reads: Oliver Sacks "Musicophilia"
I recently finished reading Oliver Sacks' "Musicophilia" (you may recognize Sacks as the author of the book upon which the film "Awakenings" was based, or you may not). It's an interesting exploration of music and the brain, focusing on individual case studies — some of which are post-scripts to essays he's written in earlier works.
He talks about his patients, and how music affects their particular situation: Some have suffered head injuries and find that their taste in music has changed wildly, or that they've developed heretofore undiscovered talents. His encephalitic and autistic patients find a connection with the world through music that they can't achieve through everyday interaction. Others are plagued by musical hallucinations that won't leave them alone.
Written with clinical dispassion, it's not really an uplifting book, but it's not a downer. For anyone with a propensity to adopt medical symptoms as their own, it's mildly dangerous (after spending a worrisome 5 minutes convinced I had an undiscovered case of Williams Syndrome, I realized that though I have a great passion for music, I matched none of the other actual symptoms).
What it is, is kind of a catalog of ways the brain can fail you, and how music can help or hinder in a given situation. And while that take was quite interesting, I was kind of hoping for something more sciencey, like Daniel Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music," which I read earlier this year, where he talks more about how the brain processes music and why we as a species may have evolved to have it as part of our lives.
But I did learn some fun facts, the most fun (and possibly nerdy) of which I'll share after the jump.
We are really good at remembering music. People suffering from Alzheimer's and other memory loss diseases may not even remember, say, what a piano is or that they know how to play it, but when prompted, according to Sacks, can sit down and perform pieces that they used to know.
From a less drastic perspective, nearly everyone uses music as a memory aid at some point. Does "h" come before or after "k"? Did you have to sing the alphabet song to figure it out? Blammo! There you go. Chemistry students may be familiar with Tom Lehrer's Elements song, which names (out of order) all the elements of the periodic table (in his day, in 1959).
It'd be much easier to learn this song (the tune of which is based on Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Major General's Song") than to try to learn all the elements without it.
BTW, since the song has been written, 15 new elements have been discovered, nine of which have names. But that's a subject for a different blog.
—eh
